Category: ‘puters

Towards the Digital Aquifer: introducing the Common Information Environment

Today the assistant director and I puzzled over the monthly web stats from our site trying to discern patterns and deduce meaning. I’m good with stats, but bad with ones that have been post-processed with tools I’m not super-knowledgeable about. As with many web tricks, I prefer to check the raw log files to answer questions like “Why are 2% of our hits going to the 404 page?” and “Are we just seeing an increase in hits because we finally made the library web site the home page on all library’s computers?” I encourage you to extract meaning from your web site statistics. Karen Coombs over at Library Web Chic has laid out some intro pointers on what to look for when you look at your logs.

Hey what a surprise, when we do user-centered design of our web tools, users like using them! Please read: What words and where? Applying usability testing techniques to name a new live reference service. many of the lessons they learned are applicable to any library web site.

Walt Crawford’s lates Cites & Insights is out and has a fascinating several page discussion of “backchannel communication” going on at conferences, speaker panels, etc. Based on one blog posting and comments and expanded from there, Crawford discusses the recent [in our sphere anyhow] trend of laptop-enabled audience members not only being online during a speaker but communicating via chat or IRC with other attendees, comparing notes and discussing the talk in progress in a more formalized way. This was built into BloggerConII, you can read the transcripts from the librarianesque session if you’d like. I definitely do this during Council meetings sometimes, and yet when there’s a speaker at a conference, I often take special care to be at least one person in the audience who is paying attention, nodding and smiling at the right places, “getting it.” I will always remember the guy from RUSA who did this for me during a difficult right-after-lunch talk in an overhot conference room with bad acoustics when I was struggling to hold people’s attention; it was a kindness

State of Florida considers legislation to require filters on all public library computers, since 46% of FL’s public libraries don’t take Erate money and so aren’t mandated to filter by CIPA. [thanks dsdlc]