userslib.com

The new bad usability calendar is out for 2009.

http://www.badusability.com/

Hakia is a health related semantic search engine that also verifies results and groups the types of resources (credible results, web, user generated, images, etc).

Hakia recently announced that they will now be soliciting help from librarians to make recommendations for credible web sites.
From hakia’s h CLUB page:

hakia is the first search engine to integrate librarians’ collective knowledge of credible Web sites into search results to guide searchers.

As the first commenter on the Mashable blog post points out, there is no evidence that they are paying for the librarian contributions. The commenter finds this “very condescending” because Librarians should be paid for their contributions.

A friend recently asked me for my favorite color picker tool so I thought I’d go ahead and compile them here plus some sites I use for color inspiration. Want more? Check out my delicious collection of webcolor links.

• Adobe’s Kuler Browse color pallets or make your own from flickr photos!
  
• Kris’s Color Stripes This blog is completely dedicated to making color palettes out of beautiful photographs and is great for anyone seeking inspiration or eye candy.
• Color Blender This tool that lets you set a color and it suggests complementary colors to fill out your palette.
• Color Jack I just discovered this one and I think it’s super. Choose a point on the color wheel and it will show you different color combinations (complementary, analogous, etc.) to go with it.



• The Daily Slurp Enter a couple of colors to view a showcase of other websites sporting those colors.

School has been in session for a couple of weeks so please pardon my tardiness.

Beloit College regularly publishes an extensive list of tidbits about incoming 1st year college students.

Here are some of the (techy) highlights:

The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.

• Students entering college for the first time this fall were generally born in 1990.
• GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
• Electronic filing of tax returns has always been an option.
• WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.
• Caller ID has always been available on phones.
• Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born.
• The Hubble Space Telescope has always been eavesdropping on the heavens.

See the entire Beloit College Mindset List

Georgia Russell’s amazing The Library Series

[ link | via decor8 ]

Noriko Ambe Cutting Book Series

[ link ]

Jen Khoshbin’s Book Project series

[ link | via poppytalk ]

Su Blackwell’s Book Cut Sculpture

[ link | via decor8 ]

Laura Cahill’s Book Vases

[ link | via boingboing ]

I’m in the middle of reading Cameron Moll’s Mobile Web Design book and the first couple of chapters do a fantastic job of putting mobile use in context. One of the citations lead me to Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users (Jan 2008). Here are some highlights from that blog post (though I highly recommend reading all of it):

“Real Networks reported in 2007 that 25% of all mobile phone users around the world access the internet on their phones. That is a staggering 825 million people already.”

“63% of all people who access the internet do so from their phones at least part of the time”

“…projected that to be 2.4 billion active users of SMS texting at the end of 2007″ “So one in three people on the planet already uses SMS text messaging.” compared to “800 million active users of email”

And then there’s this little nugget from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Best Application UIs of 2008:

“Although dedicated mobile apps are not yet good enough to win in their own right, it was striking how many of this year’s winners have a mobile component. Mobile is definitively the trend to watch for next year, and any application owner should think hard about whether and how to add mobile features in 2009.”

Continuing my recent mobile trend I thought I’d look at some library catalogs that offer mobile interfaces. here’s a collection of screen shots of a few library catalogs that offer mobile interfaces (as seen on the iphone).

Click the images below or just go to my flickr Library Catalog Mobile Interfaces set

University of Virginia Libraries

VIRGO Catalog

UVa uses the Usablenet Transcoder service. The service is a “server-based tool that generates a customizable “text-only” view of your content, instantly…[to] display your current content in the best possible textual format to be accessed by disabled visitors and PDAs and cell phones users.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that mobile needs and accessibility needs are identical. Every page contains full site navigation which requires the mobile user to scroll down 2-3 screen lengths every time a new page loads before they can get to the content. Also problematic is that the search results page doesn’t include the item title (!) and the item record view is unnecessarily cluttered with tons of information. The transcoder site says it’s customizable so maybe with some more effort this could be a viable technique.

University of Richmond Libraries

UR LibMobile: Catalog

Richmond also uses a service that creates the mobile interface: Google mobile optimizer but this one works much better than Usablenet transcoder. I appreciate that the buttons and fields are big enough to easily click without zooming. The search results gives all the most important bits of information including availability and location. The main negative is that it unnecessarily retains a lot of the extra functionality of the regular catalog (like refining searches, saving to bookbag, etc) that makes scanning more difficult. These features might be nice to have via a mobile device, but they are definitely nonessential and would need to be redesigned and incorporated into the mobile environment.

Ball State

www.bsu.edu/libraries/MOPAC

The search page is good because it just offers a few basic search options. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working very well because I tried many searches (usability, web, science, engineering) and none of them produced any results. Finally, a search for keyword=english produced many results. Unfortunately (again), there is no search results list and you have to scroll through each item one by one. Even if the search was performing correctly, you’d be lucky if the item you wanted was in the first 10 results!

Nashville Public Library

waldo.library.nashville.org/airpac/jsp/airpacIndex.jsp

Nashville Public Library uses airpac (from Innovative Interfaces). This seems to be a popular option because I found that quite a few other libraries use it as well.

The search interface is nice and simple. The search results page is almost too simple and only gives very limited information (title & year). Overall, not too many complaints for this one… it’s just a little lackluster.

NCSU Libraries

www.lib.ncsu.edu/m/

MobiLIB is NCSU’s home grown mobile application and is (not too surprisingly) the best of the bunch. It’s obvious that they’ve put a good deal of thought and time into their product. The search is simple and I especially appreciate the option to restrict to items currently available because if you’re standing in the stacks looking something up on your phone, your likely to only want things currently available! The search results page is also very nice in that the items are formatted to aid reading and scanning and it gives the most important information (title, location, availability, and call number). Unlike the other interfaces, the only time I had to zoom in to read the text was on the item record page because of the item’s long title.

I’ve been taking photos of objects in the library for years now… so when I saw Walking Paper’s lovely library-ish iphone wallpaper post – I was inspired to make group of my own.

Most of these were taken in the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library, Preservation and Conservation lab, and the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library.

All have been formatted specifically for the iphone (320×480) but they’ll probably work for other mobile devices too. Click to get full version.

Besides actual mobile versions of websites, there are also ways to improve interaction through mobile-friendly features. One way is to allow users to text or email a book’s information from the library catalog to their mobile phone. Not only does this create a better user experience, it also cuts down on unnecessary printing of catalog record pages.

Georgia Tech Library (vufind)

Tri College Libraries

Morris Library at Southern Illinois University

Ryerson University

WorldCat.org

Plymouth State University Library Catalog (Scriblio)

See also – my flickr set of Library OPACs & Mobile-Friendly Features

Ok, so I just got an iPhone (yay me!) and now I’m totally obsessed with mobile interface design. I’ve been looking at a variety of mobile interfaces so I thought I’d share some here.

I started with libraries that offer mobile versions of their library website. I’m also collecting Mobile OPACs, databases and non-library interfaces – so I’ll share those another time. Thanks to Superpatron for gathering a list of mobile versions of library web sites that I used as my starting point.

I’ve noticed that many of the mobile versions of library websites are basically lists of links (a few allow searching) that have no applied style. This seems to work most of the time. However, on the iPhone at least, some were a little difficult to use. Most of the interfaces required that I zoom in to read, click links, enter a search, etc. Ideally a mobile interface should actually be designed specifically for mobile devices… and when possible, designed specifically for various types of mobile devices. Now, as a quick disclaimer, I’ve only looked at these on the iPhone so they may function and look completely different on other devices.

My favorite interface I found was from the Yale Medical Library because it has obviously been designed with the specific needs of the mobile user in mind. I didn’t have to zoom, the search box and each link is styled to be easily clickable and it fit my screen perfectly.

Here are screen shots of more or less all the ones I’ve found so far (I found a few more but they were fairly identical to another one I already had). Let me know if there are others I missed!