2.0 and the Library

I think that all too often librarians believe that the more web 2.0 applications evolve and are used the more marginalized library organizational structure will become. I think that web 2.0 developers are unaware of the insights and knowledge that the field of library science has accumulated over the years regarding the organization, dissemination, use, and categorization of information. Librarians need to take the responsibility upon themselves to be proactive teachers and communicators regarding the skills and insights they have in this area. At the same time they can not be adverse to modifying organizational philosophy and standards based on the implementation and effective use of web 2.0 technologies. I believe that some of the great challenges surrounding moving to a more seamless information sharing type of environment can be worked out by the librarians who are great thinkers in the philosophy and study of information organization. Lets take some time to accept that these technologies are here to stay and take the opportunity we have to add valuable input and ideas for how this web 2.0 can work to better serve society.

Technology: not so bad after all

As we come to the end of the semester I would like to in an un-organized quasi-list fashion go through what I have learned about emerging computer web technologies and I do think that this class was a real help to me. I now feel MUCH more comfortable in this ever changing environment and more than that, I am interested to continue to improve my knowledge in these areas and stay up with new advancements. Its kind of like now that I am aware all this is going on, I have to keep up. So lets see what I can list that have learned about or used this semester that I either had not attempted before or did not realize the value and possible library related applications of:

Of course Wikis, Blogging, Technocrati, Del.icio.us, widgets, flash, rss aggregators, Process maps, page organization, bubbleshare, tutorials, pod casting, photo share, music share, webcasts, page design, usability testing, PMBOK, API (still a little confused here), and how could I leave out bligits.

When I signed up for this class I did not know what to expect, but I was frustrated that there was all this buzz about web 2.0 applications and the term was just as elusive as it was frustrating. Now I still feel it is a bit elusive, but that does not frustrate me any more and I readily accept the fact that new technology will always be emerging and there will always be something new and exciting to learn. I think this will make me a better librarian and I can tell it already has.
Thanks to my classmates for all the neat things you shared in class and thanks to Dr. Ball for taking the plunge with all this technology and helping us all along.

Web Reserach: a collaborative solution

As team members located in separate offices, we had a challenge of conducting a large amount of research on the web and did not have the luxury of time to be duplicating each other's work. At first we tried to set up work stations in the central office and designate time in the afternoons to come over and work on the project; but this proved infeasible because of the workloads of team members. Secondly, we tried having the project manager send out a document with designated areas for team members to work on, and team members would send the updates to the project manager at the end of the day. Although this solution seemed fine at the outset, it proved to be terribly inefficient. Why? Even with predesignated areas of the document to work on, team members were duplicating each other's work left and right. The problem was that the web pages being researched had bits and pieces of information that pertained to several different sections of the document. As a result, the same link was being saved multiple times in the master document and this was creating an organizational problem. After experiencing these issues for several days, one of the team members suggested looking into trying out collaborative link sharing on the web to update the links. The project manager was open to trying this out and the team got together and mapped out the tagging conventions and organizational structure of how the links would be listed and the site was subscribed to. As team members began adding tagged links in and got used to working with the software, the benefits of using this program for our particular tasks was immediately evident. As long as team members were on the same page with tagging conventions and categorization, it worked great. If a team member came across a link that was relevant to the project, they would proceed by initiating the tagging process. If the page had already been tagged, the team member could see this immediately. The team member would then review the tags and place a tag for the particular information piece that was important to their section on the master document and update the page. This helped move the project on more quickly and efficiently and the project manager liked the fact that she could update from anywhere, including while travelling or sitting at home on the couch!

Web research: a collaborative dilemma

The past few weeks we have been working on a particular project which has required myself and a few other team members from separate offices working on separate servers to conduct research on the web. For the purpose of the job we have also been asked to save the the links to relevant pages that we find and place those links in a categorized document. Well, we began to talk about how we were going to update this document with each team member working from different offices and off of different servers. Some of the questions being asked by team members were: How would we divide up the work? How would we keep from duplicating looking for information that had already been linked in. How could we keep up with the progress of the different team members with out asking for regular e-mail updates. We threw around the idea of having IT set up a few extra work stations at the central office so team members could come over in the afternoons to work on the project. We actually tried this for a few days, but it just proved to be to difficult. The schedules and workloads of team members did not make it easy to just pick up in the afternoons and leave your work environment for a different office where you could not monitor e-mail or be available for the countless last minute tasks that arise in the profession. We then looked at having the project manager e-mail out the research document and each person would work on their designated part of the document from their office and e-mail their updates to the project manager at the end of the day. At the onset of this strategy, it looked like e-mailing updated documents to the project manager would work okay, but as it turned out the nature of the research made this method terribly inefficient and although we were assigned different sections of the document to work on we were still duplicating each others work left and right.... To find out why we were duplicating each others work what we decided to do, tune in to the next post.

Usability Testing

One of the assignments we are in the process of completing for our Library Systems class is a combined usability test for our Wiki page. Although originally there was some confusion as to how each member of the team was to contribute to the design of the test, it looks like they are beginning to come together quite well. Before working on this usability test, I had not had the opportunity to create a test for a technology system and it was a good learning experience. I think that four things in particular were of benefit in learning about usability testing:
Class lecture: Obviously Dr. Ball has been around several thousand usability tests of technology systems and her experience tells us that librarians have a rich history in the world of usability testing and we can use what we have learned over the years to be leaders in this area.
The textbook: The textbook had recent examples of usability tests designed for Library Web pages and it was helpful to read further about the theory applied and get to see some examples of different tests for different types of library sites. Of course it was helpful to work through the book and gain a better understanding of the thought process that goes into usability testing.
Doing your own test: Making up your own test, although it is not as realistic in terms of a finished product in the business environment, I thought it was a great starting point because it allowed the individual to work through some of the challenges before coming together with ideas for the group.
Group effort: This is the most rewarding part of putting the test together because, each member has good insight and ideas to add, and collectively a library systems team can create a pretty good usability test for a library site.

Shareware

One of the major themes in my library systems class this semester is using technology to enhance collaboration. In class we have talked about this as it relates to some of the Web 2.0 capabilities such as Wiki, Blogs and RSS. For me it seems that between work and school, I am getting to experience the whole realm of collaborating via technology.

Now that our company has split in two, we have gone to an e-version of our quality control process in order to allow people working on the same project in the two offices to complete their work without having to drive the paper work back and forth. In order to do this, file sharing software has been set up and a central file is created for each job where each member of the team logs in to access their particular file for work. In order to maintain the integrity of the original work file, each member has been instructed to use a converted version imaging file and make changes to that. At the end of the process the project owner incorporates the changes to the original document.

We have been using this system for about a month now and it is going okay, but as with any new technology implementation, not without glitches. For example, there is an e-routing form attached to each project where the individual who completes a given task then sends the form to the next person on the list notifying them that they can begin their particular function. Several times, this routing system has failed and the progress of the job essentially gets lost in cyberspace. This proved to be stressful the other week when we realized two large jobs that were due ASAP had been lost in the routing process for over a week and had not been touched.

I think what I am learning through my class and work this fall is collaborative technology can be a good service, but the people involved need to maintain a good control over the systems being used or strange things can happen.

Wiki Org

The past week our class wiki project team has been more involved in building the structure for our project wiki. This is my first experience with putting a wiki page together and it has been a good learning experience to go through this process. I must say that I am pleased that some aspects of our page are beginning to come together as it seemed for a while that we were at a standstill in terms of actually getting something "down on paper" ...... so to speak.

One of the challenges we have encountered as a team is that we are setting up a page for separate schools within a large university. These schools' needs are so vastly different and the information required to fill these needs comes in different quantities and forms. It has become a nice challenge to meet the information request from the schools and at the same time produce a wiki page that is straightforward and uniform to a point. I think these are good challenges to deal with in a class environment because the work force is becoming the same way and librarians are confronting these issues in almost every type of library environment.

Going back to the wiki we are working on -- it seems that more often than not when working with technology, the small un-anticipated glitches throw me for a loop. I was putting the categories in my page the other day and had them set uniformly for each school I was working with. Although I had the same category names for each school, I needed a separate page within each school for each category. The wiki code looked at the category names and linked each school to the same page if the category was named the same. Anyway, stuff you don't anticipate.