Edtechkat

Library Journal has a really easy to read article, Web Design Matters: Ten features that should be on every library site .

The features are:

1 Promotion

2 Segmentation

3 Visual Cues

4 Inspiring Photos

5 Search Boxes

6 Mobile-Friendly Pages - see their example: http://www.lions-online.org/mobile/

7 Feedback

8 Redundancy

9 Analytics

10 An Easy Way To Ask for Help

Here’s where I’m going during my travels in March and April.

I’ll be posting to my @libsmatter Twitter account as I go.

The very, very generous VALA, who are sponsoring my travel scholarship to look at Alternative Discovery Layers and Open Source Software, have asked me to prepare an original paper for the VALA Conference 2010 - Connections.Content.Conversations. I’ll be looking at what the systems studied do technically and whether organisations that implement them have anything in common that makes them early adopters - “how come you did this, but the library down the road didn’t?”. Some original material that needs to be in the conference paper won’t be tweeted or posted here.

I’ll also be researching material for a Masters of Information Management at Curtin University. My thesis is tentatively titled: Taking matters into our own hands: Influencing factors and concerning factors for libraries that developed Open Source Library Application Software between 1999 and 2009.

I’ll be presenting a plenary session at Library Camp East on 26 March and be part of a panel session about Unconferences at Computers in Libraries on 31 March. I’m really excited to finish my trip by speaking at the U Game U Learn symposium at Delft in the Netherlands on 23 April. I’ll be asking “What kind of better than free is your library?”.

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Here’s a map of where I’m going - it will probably not show up in my RSS feed -

View Larger Map

UTS today launched their beta version of an Endeca interface to their III catalogue, UTS Library Catalogue Beta .

Results and screens look very clean to me after an initial play. The prompts that appear as you type in the search term would be a bit distracting, but very useful I think.

They are the first to do this in Australia, and what is particularly interesting is that this is a commercial product is not designed specifically for libraries, but for all sorts of datasets.

Project Information Literacy from the University of Washington has just issued its 18 page  mid-project report, based on discussion groups help October - December 2008 on seven U.S. campuses with 86 college students. The research was sponsored by Proquest.  Abstract below.

They also had some interesting findings on the students’ use of libraries pp11-12.

Abstract: A report of preliminary findings and analysis from student discussion groups held

on 7 U.S. campuses in Fall 2008, as part of Project Information Literacy. Qualitative data from

discussions with higher education students across the country suggest that conducting research is

particularly challenging. Students’ greatest challenges are related to their perceived inability to find

desired materials. Students seek “contexts” as part of the research process. A preliminary typology

of the research contexts is developed and introduced. Finding contexts for “backgrounding”

topics and for figuring out how to traverse complex information landscapes may be the most difficult

part of the research process. Our findings also suggest that students create effective methods

for conducting research by using traditional methods, such as libraries, and self-taught, creative

workarounds, such as “presearch” and Wikipedia, in different ways.

Today I’m attending the Library 2.0 Masterclass and site visit in Melbourne. I’m sending out updates via CoverItLive and on my Twitter stream using @libsmatter . I will be liveblogging the first half of the day about marketing and innovation.

The second half of the day is a visit to the Yarra Plenty library.

CoverITLive Liveblog: Helene Blowers Library 2.0 Masterclass Day 2

I’m attending the Library 2.0 Masterclass and site visit in Melbourne. I’m sending out updates via CoverItLive and on my Twitter stream using @libsmatter

Library 2.0 Masterclass. Helene Blowers. Melbourne