userslib.com

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

Do you do web development as part of your job? If yes, then take this survey:
http://alistapart.com/articles/survey2008

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

Last year’s survey sparked some interesting conversations about the disproportionate percentage of women in the field (only 16.1% took the survey).

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!

Yahoo recently released a great set of design stencils based on their design patterns. Even if you aren’t an interface designer, you might find these helpful for planning out your web form or site navigation. Omnigraffle is my tool of choice but they also have Visio and other image formats. If you’re in the market for more of the same – also try Graffletopia.

Announcement from my department:

“[BLT] Blog for Library Technology” — http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/blt/ — is the new Library Information Technology blog from the University of Michigan Library. We’ll talk about technological innovations we’re developing in the U-M library. Want to learn about developments in the Google book-scanning project (MBooks) at U-M? Find out more about MTagger? Keep up with our MLibrary Labs experimental and test tools? This is the place to do it. And, of course, we welcome your comments on any and all of it.

Recent entries include:

- Full-Text MBook Searches from the Library Catalog
- MLibrary Labs Project Summary
- What to do with Books in Copyright
- MTagger Update
- University of Chicago Integrating MBooks in Catalog using OAI
- What is MBooks?

Visit [BLT] at http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/blt/

Some great web site coding advice from the Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper)