Siva Vaidhyanathan who is one of the contributors to his great blog Sivacracy recently pulled out some comments I’d written about Google’s strong move into the world of [formerly] library content. If you haven’t read his book The Anarchist in the Library I strongly suggest you do so.
Month: June 2005
Library Journal Redesign
Library Journal’s redesign is up and available. I can’t say I’m too impressed, though I am a tough customer. Here is my bulleted list of critique following my first 15 minutes on the LJ site
- no rss feeds
- search delivers a segmented results set, subscriber-only pages come up first, then pages available to anyone, lower on the screen. This doesn’t seem like a sure-fire way to get more subscribers, just to alienate non-subscribers [example]
- searching in the “reviews” section leads to a subcribe page for anyone not logged in as a subscriber
- URLs are still long and unclean [example]
- no 404 page [example]
- fixed width columns make site hard to read at large text sizes and require a lot of scrolling
- empty content areas [example]
- ads are giant and blinky, this may be necessary in today’s tough times but blinky ads, banner ads, text ads, and parent company ads and logos make the home page a mishmash of colors and sizes making it very hard to figure out where the important content is
- Search our reviews section is non-functional. Search boxes are available, but all searches redirect to the LJ home page [example]
- The privacy policy and terms of use pages seem broken on at least some sub-pages [example]
Some of these critiques are just bugs that I’m sure will be fixed fairly quickly and are standard in brand new sites. Others have more to do with the actual structure of the site and what it’s set up to do. Library Journal has always had good printable templates and pretty great writing. However, a web site that has almost thirty sections and forty topics [accessible via pulldown menus] really could benefit from an information architect, or some groupings more like the site map, which is my favorite page on the site so far. Does it validate? No. Is it accessible? No. Since LJ is a business and not a library, they can take the risk of losing the business of people who can’t use or understand their site. Public libraries aren’t so fortunate, and this site is not a great example of a 2005 web site of an otherwise pretty nice looking magazine.
Gorman & Google cage match
Michael Gorman has some bad points and some good points in this Chronicle of Higher Education interview about Google. Good points: serious scholarship is about deep knowledge which is harder to get through Google in its current incarnation, than through print. Bad points: most library users are not scholars, really inappropriate hip-hop metaphor, inability to see the future usefulness of short scannable interlinked bits of knowledge for many day-to-day applications. Gorman is, in some ways, a librarian’s librarian, but he sure doesn’t come across as the public’s librarian. Some discussion on LISNews. This is my favorite excerpt from there.
I’m reminded of a quote in The Name of the Rose, something like “Brother Salvatore is guilty…. of confusing the love of poverty with the hatred of wealth.” I’m becoming more and more convinced that Gorman is confusing the love of accurate searching with the hatred of digital forms of information.
how the library is not like a bookstore, part eleventyteen
I enjoy the Stay Free! blog a lot. Today Carrie has a blurb that includes information from a New York Times story about big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble determining display space by how much they get paid by the publisher. I had always sort of cited this as something I knew, but I was never sure how I knew it. Carries adds this tidbit with request for authoritative citation, anyone know?
In fact, a label rep once told me that Tower makes more money from selling in-store display space and other co-promotions than from selling CDs themselves. I find that a little hard to believe, but if anyone has real, compelling numbers on this, I’d be glad to share them.
late to the book meme bandwagon
I’m late to this meme but I always think it’s important to not only stress our librarian skills with computers, and our facility with people, but also the fact that many of us read, a lot, an awful lot. So with that in mind:
Total number of books I’ve owned: My books are spread out over three houses and two states. While I try to get rid of books I’m done reading, I don’t always do this. I also have some encyclopedia/dictionary sets [is the OED 20 volume set one book, or 20? do bound periodicals count?] that I feel like I need for reference purposes. My ballpark estimate is somewhere between 500 and a thousand, but I haven’t visited a lot of them lately.
Last book I bought: We went to the five college book sale in Hanover and I came home with a bagful of books for about $8. One of them was called How to Shit in the Woods. One was a nature guide to trees. One was Moving Mars. One was a John Grisham somethingorother. I find that with good libraries and a strong network of book-loaning friends and family, I almost never have to buy books. I can’t remember the last full price book I bought, I think it’s been years.
Last book I read: As if this writing it’s The Secret Life of Bees. By the end of the day it will probably be American Gods. This page is the final arbiter.
Last book I finished: I’m not sure why this is different than the above question, there are very very few books that I read but do not finish. The last book I didn’t finish was a book about the Slow Food movement, I think it may have lost something in translation.
Five books that mean a lot to me: this is a static respresentation of a shifting list
The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers [librarian love story written for smart people]
Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder [Tom West is my dad]
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin [my intro to magical realism]
Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book by Shel Silverstein [an early book I enjoyed when I may have been too young to fully appreciate it, with some delightful subversive humor]
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins [whimsical and poetic, gave me the strength to go on and get out of high school and the wretched suburbs and live the way I wanted to live. I use some parts of this book in my technology instruction to this day]
Five people I’d like to see do this as well: Greg, Dawn, Kate, Peter and Maryellen, Cathy