| Buy, Hack or Build |
[Nov. 15th, 2005|09:58 am] |
After a horrendous morning which involved pre-dawn alarms followed by a gigantic rock on 495 and a flat tire- making me an hour late to pick up a conference speaker (more on that later) - I FINALLY made it the fall NEASIST program, Buy, Hack or Build: Optimizing your systems for your users and your sanity.
The first speaker is Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development at User Interface Engineering. He's speaking on 'Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us'. He's now defining hacking as 'design on the fly' which I love for it's simplicity. As part of this program committee it's been my job to advocate for this program - I've found it surprisingly difficult to tell them. Even sophisticated users think 'hacking' is bad - it's actually appropriately yankee. It's innovative. It's about being bold enough to break the rules. Viva la resistance! Interesting = Google.com doesn't validate (filing that tidbit away). Actually, looks like all the 'four horsemen', Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and MSN are full of hacks. New term: Social Hacks (whoo hoo). Example: "did you mean ____?" or "customers who bought this also bought"
RSS feeds as 'pull model' where email is a 'push model'. I wonder what kind of reader he uses?
www.housingmaps.com as an example. Built with Google Maps and Craigslist. It takes real estate listings from craigslist and maps them in Google - SO NEAT. I want to make this. The developer made it in his own time, without permission from either = remixing = Web2.0. Google publishes a guide to hacking maps. Between that and the fact that craiglist is rss makes it easy. WHY oh WHY is this not possible to do something like this for finding books in stacks? I wonder if I should replace our sort of bloated and confusing directions page with a link to google directions... hmmm...
Okay, now we're getting down to it - TAGGING! Amazon just added tagging last week!? Didn't know that. This is DEFINATELY a place that libraries should be. btw, I couldn't find the tagging in Amazon? He is showing bookmarklets which I think I've been misunderstanding - it looks like a bit of javascript that makes posting to things like del.icio.us even better... I must look into this.
In conclusion: folksonomies, blogs, wikis all 'provide tools to discover, recommend, share, and promote word of mouth... We're doing what we did offline, online.' This is SO library! We need to be here - this is WHAT we do, essentially... we facilitate communication and learning. Why aren't we being more proactive?
Final conclusion: Sharing knowledge is empowering, simply bestowing knowledge is enslaving. |
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| Part Two: Buy, Hack or Build |
[Nov. 15th, 2005|11:31 am] |
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Second speaker is Pete Bell, co-founder of Endeca Solutions, covering faceted browsing/searching. Good quote at the top of a slide showing companies: 'for profit' libraries. Meaning that they can teach us lots, they're doing the same work and they're doing it better in a lot of ways. An interesting observation: both the morning presenters, while not librarians, but are here, presenting to mostly librarians about library-related stuff - they have NO concept of how current library catalogs work. BOTH have referred to card catalogs - Yes, they mean cards. Someone in the crowd made a great point that librarians are no good at communicating the level of sophistication of the systems they do use - I would say that's because they're tools, built on outdated algorithms that they were trained on. In the end, they don't explain it because they don't understand it - they only understand how it as a tool, not as something they built. He shows the browse function at Barnes and Noble Browse. Truth be told, I had trouble following, and if I do, users will... he's moving on now, though, I'll try harder. Ooops, nope, he lost me. I never even got the URL... Wait, fight breaking out. One person saying that current OPACs are good enough. |
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| Part Three - Buy, Hack, or Build |
[Nov. 15th, 2005|01:41 pm] |
New Hampshire's own Casey Bisson presents last: OPAC Hacks. This is our big draw. He's done really nice interface integration of his website and Plymouth's online catalog.
Catalogs are 'so Web1.0'; they exist in a world were everything is disconnected. Apache, PHP, and mySQL are the core of his hacks. The library's presence inside the portal (myPlymouth) is very similar to the website outside the portal. Wanted to make it appear the catalog is just another part of the website. Catalog usage is dropping while database usage rises. Casey's talking about AADL, the current darlings of OPAC integration. Our users already have epectations, login to all yahoo's tools ONCE and from one place, we just have to meet those expectations. And we're STILL just meeting them, not exceeding... most of us are not doing that. This is 'identity management.' 'We're separating the way you display information from how you store information.' Okay, OPAC Hacks - no need to access the OPAC, just pull out the data and present it the way you want. New books up and give them context by provided subject (LCSH) from there. Man, he had a cool, search suggest... as the patron types into a search box, suggestions are made that are LCSH headings. It was being tested so it's not up, must get the URL.
Good presentation, a stupefying amount of information and ideas... I wish I were as smart as Casey. I miss Tim. |
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