Tag ILS

user experience vs buyer experience

Wise words from 37 signals. Please read the following paragraph but replace “enterprise software” with “integrated library systems” or “databases”

The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users.

What would it be like to invite community members into the ILS or database buying/renting process? This idea might scare most decision makers and for good reason. I bet citizens/students would ask some great questions like “What’s with all of those boxes?”

Of course the situation with library software is complicated by the fact that it is meant for use by librarians *and* normal people. Too bad that one interface for both groups leads more often to the worst of both worlds rather than the best. I’d like to see two separate interfaces on many of these products. Which would we librarians end up using more often?

social OPAC roundup

Speaking of social OPACs, I came across MIT Libraries’ The Virtual Browsery (Beta) via del.icio.us/jaydatema. It appears to be another OPAC/WordPress mashup, but not yet with as many records as the WPopac from Plymouth State’s Lamson Library.

Other social OPACs include Hennepin County Library’s catalog which allows for patron reviews, having reviews from Amazon.com load in the record, and RSS feeds for the reviews. Towards the beginning of the year John Blyberg showed everyone the AADL’s virtual card catalog. There’s also PennTags, which allows students to bookmark records in the Penn Library catalog, as well as PDFs, and websites. Am I missing any others?

I’m happy to see the project from MIT Libraries and hope more projects pop up. Due to ILS limitations it takes some serious coding to make anything like this happen, and since coding isn’t part of LIS programs, only libraries with enough resources to have coders on staff can approach these projects.

reference librarian start page

Last month Tim Lauer at his site Education/Technology posted an interesting bit titled Inward / Outward Aggregating about personalized homepages (e.g. netvibes, google ig). In his post he takes the concept of the personal start page, collecting hand selected data from disparate sources (generally via RSS feeds) and displaying them in a useful format, and thinks of it as applied to being a school’s principal. He’d like to see “…content such as my school’s average daily attendance; a daily listing of absent and tardy students; GPS routing information for our school busses…” when he opens his browser. This resonated with me, and I’m interested to hear what pieces of information Reference, Readers’ Advisory and Circulation staff would like to see on their homepage. My job would be facilitated if I could see:

  • the day, week, and month’s most requested book, locally and system wide
  • the meeting room schedule for the day and week
  • important news from the library, community and the world
  • reference queries that have come in via email

Library web folk could benefit from a start page to monitor their web presence, bringing in:

  • web stats, highlighting pages that are popular
  • pages that have bad links
  • conversations going on about the library (blog searches, flickr comments, del.icio.us tags)

These things aren’t entirely impossible to aggregate. The most unrealistic thing for me, the ILS stuff, would be really simple if there was vendor support for XML.

more on SELU’s SMS reference program

update, 20 october: fixed link to the SELU Library, thanks rob!

So it turns out that South Eastern Louisiana University Library’s SMS Reference program was covered way earlier in the year by tame the web and teaching librarian.

At any rate, this afternoon I phoned JB Hill who is their head of Reference. He was kind enough to speak to me for over 20 minutes about the program. Things I learned:

bq. -They are indeed using Altarama’s product, mentioned last year here in a post titled RefSMS.

bq. -Even though the server by which this operates is Down Under, and ever though the number to text is international, there isn’t an additional fee for texters beyond the price of a text. However, not all cell phone providers handle international texts. Hill stated that the fact that some people can’t text internationally, and the fact that some people would be unlikely to text internationally (for fear of additional costs) are barriers to entry for this service. Clearly the fact that one must have a cell phone is another barrier, but that’s slightly different.

bq. -Response to the program has been decent, but not yet stellar. This makes sense, considering that they’re quite ahead of the curve with this.

bq. -The variety of questions they are getting are different from other forms of digital reference. Namely, they are getting ready reference type questions. Hill surmises that these must come from students who have their phone on them, but no connectivity with which to consult Google. Their browser-based chat questions are generally more sophistacted than ready reference.

bq. -Altarama transforms emails to text messages (and vice versa) and has a neat function which optomizes text for delivery via SMS. It scans messages for words like “for” and “to” and automagically transforms them to “4″ and “2.”

JB and I agreed that texting makes great sense in the ILS, for things like overdue and hold notices. Oh, one more thing, they have an appointment-based reference service, and would like to use text messages as reminders for students. He’ll be talking about their program at the next Virtual Reference Desk Conference in San Francisco.^1^ If you’re going, check it out and give us a report.

As cell phones merge with wireless devices that do VoIP, I wonder if texting will be outmoded by a richer, more powerful IMming. Many phones presently have, for instance, AIM on them, but many people prefer texting because it is less expensive than using data transfer. But will people still want to be limited to 160 characters if cost is no concern?

^1^Looks like there is a decent amount of content about IM at this conference, which of course warms my heart. As does the session titled, ““Hurry! Hurry! r u dum? *#%@!”… Assessing the Extent of Inappropriate Use of AskColorado” because I swear I’ve helped that person on MyWebLibrian.

more on SELU’s SMS reference program

update, 20 october: fixed link to the SELU Library, thanks rob!

So it turns out that South Eastern Louisiana University Library’s SMS Reference program was covered way earlier in the year by tame the web and teaching librarian.

At any rate, this afternoon I phoned JB Hill who is their head of Reference. He was kind enough to speak to me for over 20 minutes about the program. Things I learned:

bq. -They are indeed using Altarama’s product, mentioned last year here in a post titled RefSMS.

bq. -Even though the server by which this operates is Down Under, and ever though the number to text is international, there isn’t an additional fee for texters beyond the price of a text. However, not all cell phone providers handle international texts. Hill stated that the fact that some people can’t text internationally, and the fact that some people would be unlikely to text internationally (for fear of additional costs) are barriers to entry for this service. Clearly the fact that one must have a cell phone is another barrier, but that’s slightly different.

bq. -Response to the program has been decent, but not yet stellar. This makes sense, considering that they’re quite ahead of the curve with this.

bq. -The variety of questions they are getting are different from other forms of digital reference. Namely, they are getting ready reference type questions. Hill surmises that these must come from students who have their phone on them, but no connectivity with which to consult Google. Their browser-based chat questions are generally more sophistacted than ready reference.

bq. -Altarama transforms emails to text messages (and vice versa) and has a neat function which optomizes text for delivery via SMS. It scans messages for words like “for” and “to” and automagically transforms them to “4″ and “2.”

JB and I agreed that texting makes great sense in the ILS, for things like overdue and hold notices. Oh, one more thing, they have an appointment-based reference service, and would like to use text messages as reminders for students. He’ll be talking about their program at the next Virtual Reference Desk Conference in San Francisco.^1^ If you’re going, check it out and give us a report.

As cell phones merge with wireless devices that do VoIP, I wonder if texting will be outmoded by a richer, more powerful IMming. Many phones presently have, for instance, AIM on them, but many people prefer texting because it is less expensive than using data transfer. But will people still want to be limited to 160 characters if cost is no concern?

^1^Looks like there is a decent amount of content about IM at this conference, which of course warms my heart. As does the session titled, ““Hurry! Hurry! r u dum? *#%@!”… Assessing the Extent of Inappropriate Use of AskColorado” because I swear I’ve helped that person on MyWebLibrian.

rss hub-bub

By now you’ve surely seen Jenny’s post regarding SIRSI integrating RSS into their Rooms product (note: not their ILS). And surely you’ve read Sarah’s link to it and Michael’s challenge (which I second here) as well.

I don’t mean to just provide you another link to her post, but I would like to reprint a comment left on that post*:

I work for yet another library automation company. I’ve propsed [sic] a few different RSS ideas to others I work with and the general response I get is “where are the customers who want this?” which is a very important question to answer when working in an agile development environment.

So I ask you, where do I find customers (librarians) who want this?

Brad ClarkeHe has a point that is sometimes difficult to remember. There are still many, many people that aren’t familiar with RSS. Ask your neighbor what “Really Simple Syndication” is. 98% of you will come back having received strange looks, and maybe 1% of you (likely less) will have the correct answer.**

I’m afraid that we won’t get RSS into our OPACs until the vendors know that Joe and Jane Public are using it. Best case scenario is that vendors listen to our pleas, ask us what we want from RSS in our ILS and build it. We get to display feeds of searches as HTML on our websites and no longer have to type in titles for our “What’s New at the Library” lists. We educate our patrons about a developing technology*** with which they’re not familiar (helping them and giving us TechCred in the process). We help them create feeds about topics they fancy, and for their overdue notices as well.

But what if RSS does take off in a major way? Don’t you think that it is going to be ruined? If not by some new fangled spam, then it’ll be by the abundant adverts and few full-content feeds. It could be rendered as painful to use as email. In 20 years, Steven’s daughter will be running around telling people that “RSS is a dead technology” just like what he loves to say about email (partially because he believes it and partially, I think, because he likes to get a rise out of those who hear it).

*If you operate solely in RSS land you could have missed it. I would have if I hadn’t gone to her site to get this permalink.

**The missing 1%? You’ll come back with a black eye.

***PubLibs walk the fine line between pushing new technologies on their patrons, and guiding them through technologies they might benefit from learning about.

updated to fix my bad HTML