Librarian profile pages: Our progress on implementing Librarian profile pages has been delayed for months due to technical issues with the McGill Profile system. We have started discussions with the McGill Web Services team about implementing our own profile functionality in order to move forward with this project. Initial discussions have been fruitful, and I expect that we will be able to start moving forward with the implementation soon.

Room booking: We will be piloting a new system for handling room bookings that will be much easier to use, requiring less support and assistance from staff. We plan on rolling the service out to branches as quickly as possible.

Digital exhibits and collections: We have several digital collection and exhibit sites in various stages of process (Chapbooks, Gwillim, Interacting with Print, Colgate, Islamic Studies 60th Anniversary) that will be launching over the coming months. In addition, we are in the process of planning several projects relating to our digital collections, and we’ll share details here as soon as these plans are finalized.

Intranet: We have completed our review of different technical solutions, and will be going forward with implementing our Intranet as a Drupal-based web site. This site will be hosted and managed by the Library (i.e. it won’t be part of the WMS), which will give us more control over the features and functionality we can implement. The Intranet will be used to publish information such as policies, procedures, reports, etc for Library staff.

Extranet: We are also setting up an Extranet, an online space where people or groups inside the Library can collaborate and share files with people outside the Library. The Extranet will use McGill’s CenterStage platform to provide this functionality.

In addition, over the course of the spring and summer we are planning on making significant improvements to the Library web site. These changes will impact many people, and so we will be reaching out and working closely with various stakeholders (including the E-Search committee, content owners, library staff, and end-users) to identify requirements and ensure that the site will continue to meet their needs. Our plan is to have any major changes in place by the middle of August.

Home page: We will be revisiting the design of the home page to provide a simplified search experience and better access to tools for finding articles, journals and other resources. We also want to improve access to the resources within our subject areas, changes that will start on the home page and continue down through the subject landing pages to the subject guides themselves. Links to commonly-used pages as well as information about news and events going on at the Library will continue be featured on home page.

Site organization: We will be revisiting the organization of the site to make it more intuitive, less complicated, and easier to use. We will start by working with the various content owners within the Library to ensure that their content is relevant and well-presented. We will then look at the best way to label and organize the content from the perspective of our users. We will also be making use of some of the new navigational tools provided by the WMS to make our menus simpler and easier to use.

Branch pages: Branch pages will be redesigned to provide a cleaner layout and to make it easier for users to locate key information about branches. We also want to provide an easy and quick way for branches to get announcements out to users, and we’ll be working that into the branch pages as well.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me (edward.bilodeau@mcgill.ca).

Here at the McGill Library, Library Council was only recently (i.e. in the last few years) reinstated, which means that we are still in the process of figuring out the nuts and bolts of how it will work and the role it will play in the Library. This means that a fair amount of time in these meetings is consumed discussing process, procedures, rules of order, etc. Quite frankly, this kind of thing drives me crazy, not because I don’t think it is important (although I don’t think it is as important as some others feel it is), but mostly because discussing these things ad nauseum in large groups violates one of my guiding principles, and that is the value of abstraction. In this case, there are other people who have more experience, knowledge, and interest in drafting these policies and procedures, and I trust them to be able to put together a draft for the rest of us to review, comment on, and move forward for adoption. I am entirely comfortable abstracting the entire process and letting it run under the guidance of others.

My point here isn’t to get into the tangle of issues that have brought about the current state of our Library Council, but rather to point out that for the most part, I usually feel that the 1.5 hours per month I spend in Library Council is not the best use of my time.

But sometimes great things can happen. Back in October, we passed a motion in support of open access. Then yesterday, we passed a motion in support of Dale Askey, a librarian from McMaster who is being sued by a publisher for having criticized the quality of their publications on his blog.

In the grand scheme of things, passing motions alone will not change the world. But being able to make even these small things happen at the Library is important, if only because they point to the fact that we are starting to have a mechanism by which librarians can come together, discuss issues, and then decide upon a collective course of action.

So it is these small things that remind me that maybe after all having to spend 1.5 hours each month trying to make Library Council work is worth it after all. After all, if we can achieve these things in our current state, just imagine what we’ll be able to accomplish once we get past the start-up phase and start to tackle some of the bigger challenges we face!

We currently have a staff blog that is running on a WordPress installation administered by central IT. The blog is private, meaning that you have to login and be authenticate as a member of the Library staff to be able to access the blog.

The requirement to keep the information private makes it harder to share the information and get it out to everyone who needs to see it. RSS is essentially useless, since you can’t authenticate with popular newsreaders such as Google Reader. Yes, there is a proposed workaround with Internet Explorer and Outlook that on paper seems to allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed that requires authentication, but in my experience, the setup process is very cumbersome and doesn’t really work anyway.

To get around this, every Monday I manually compose and send out an email digest of new posts to the staff blog. Here again, the need for privacy gets in the way. I always include direct links to articles in my email message. However, when a user clicks on the link they are prompted to login, at which point they are taken to the home page and not the blog post they were interested in.

Before I start to dig into this problem, I though I would ask for advice/pointers from other folks who have tackled this problem to narrow down my field of research. Have you implemented internal blogs and how have you addressed the RSS/authentication issue?

So: Why now?

Distance education isn’t new.

The Internet isn’t new.

The Web isn’t new.

E-learning isn’t new.

Open learning isn’t new.

This is a time of extreme financial crisis for most institutions of higher education, so there should be no crazy money available for ego projects.

And yet, we have major universities investing millions of dollars in initiatives to make their teaching and learning experience, supposedly one of their key value offerings, available to anyone for free.

Why now?

I have some ideas to potential answers to this question, but for now I think I will just let this question stand as-is.

I don’t think there is a simple answer to this question, nor do I believe that the answers are the same at every university.

I do feel very strongly, though, that anyone who cares at all about the teaching and learning that goes on in higher education needs to think about this question in their own context. They need to not only pay attention to what is happening at their college or university, but get involved in the discussions and decision-making that is happening.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe there is a tremendous amount of potential in MOOCs to do good in the world, and this renewed, wide-spread interest in teaching and learning has if anything the potential to provide the impetus for a much-needed review and revision of how teaching and learning takes place in higher education.

However, we owe it to ourselves and to our institutions to question the fundamentals of these initiatives and make sure that the priorities are in line with our goals and values.

Here were my take away points from the meeting:

• Access to analytics is very important to everyone, since aside from comments, usage statistics are the primary means of giving you a measure of how successful your blogging efforts are. We should be able to deliver this quite soon.
• Comments need to be opened up to non-McGill users, including support for anonymous users. We also need to ability to specify that some kinds of comments (for example, comments from McGill users) appear on the site without moderation. Start from a position of trust and work out from there. We need to make sure we have automated spam detection in place, and do a few walk-throughs to make sure that the commenting and comment moderation process is as easy to use as possible. But given that we’re running WordPress, I don’t see any problems with making this happen. My main concern will be helping bloggers to develop their comment moderating skills.
• Bloggers need to be able to post their own audio and video content to their blog. Right now people can embed YouTube videos, but need a way to get their own media content on the web. This is mostly a space issue, but we’re hoping to be making headway on that shortly as part of our server environment upgrade that we’re working on.
• Bloggers want to be able to control as much of their blog’s settings as possible. This is not unexpected, and we will be opening up control as much as we can with the exception of the visual design of the blogs as well as admin-level options that if opened risk creating support headaches for my team.
• The redesign of the visual template is less important that I expected. Well, less important than the issues I’ve listed above. This does make some sense, though, since of the items listed here the visual design of the blog is probably the element that has the least amount of impact on a person’s ability to blog effectively.

We also spent some time talking about how we could go about promoting the Library blogs and generated a lot of good ideas for me to consider. We have developed a RSS feed widget that people will be able to use to display recent posts from their blogs off pages on the Library’s main web site, making it easier for our community to discover the Library’s blogs. We’re just waiting for McGill IT to complete their review of our code so that it can be moved into production. I’ll be sure to share the news here once these widgets start to appear on our site!

Overall it was a good meeting, although I was slightly disappointed by the low turnout. That, along with a few comments that were made, make me wonder if maybe I need to reconsider how I should support our librarian bloggers. Maybe I’m trying to do too much, when really they just want me to provide the blogging platform and get out of the way? While I don’t think that is the best approach, I can’t ignore that my users most likely have a very different perspective on what kind of support they need, and I have to give that serious consideration if I want to make the most of the resources we allocate to this.

slides: Using a community of practice to support librarian bloggers in an academic library (.pdf)

Here’s the abstract of my talk:

Using a community of practice to support librarian bloggers in an academic library

Weblogs are an established technology that provides librarians with a powerful communication tool for reaching out to their user communities. While the technology may be readily available and easy to use, it is often challenging for librarians to move past the initial launch of their weblog and develop it into a sustainable means of communication. Librarians need to not only learn how to blog in a professional context, what content to produce, and how to use it to support or replace other activities. They need to learn how to use their blogs to engage with patrons and to become effective participants in their professional and academic blogging communities.

Communities of practice provide a social learning context that allows librarians to share their experiences and work together to develop their understanding and skills to become more effective bloggers. The community of practice also becomes a resource for other librarians interested in this practice, a form of organizational memory that persists beyond the involvement of any individual librarian.

This presentation will demonstrate the use of a community of practice to support the launch of a new blogging platform at the McGill Library. An overview of the initial conceptualization and planning of the CoP will be provided, followed by a discussion of how the community came together and evolved as members gained experience as librarian bloggers. Potential applications of communities of practice to other aspects of academic librarianship will also be discussed.

Communities of practice are not something I have talked about here before, but I can guarantee you that you’ll be hearing more from me in the coming months on CoPs and their relevance to IT, librarianship, and academia in general.

This month:

Upgrades to server environment: Since earlier this year, we’ve been planning a series of improvements to our server environment in order to meet a few goals:

• Get rid of all locally hosted servers (i.e. no more servers on the floor in the corner of the office) so that everything is either a hosted box or a VM taken care of by McGill IT.
• Move all servers over to a common LAMP configuration (which means a few version upgrades as well as the switching of a Windows 2003 server over to Linux. And of course we need to inventory, test, and update all sites on all affected servers to ensure that nothing breaks when we upgrade the stack).
• Ensuring that all servers have sufficient processing power and memory, as well as enough disk space for ~ 6 months of growth)
• Set up a proper backend production server to run critical developer tools (git, mantis)
• Defining system administration tasks and responsibilities for developers. We don’t have a dedicated sys admin, so we need to make sure the work is scoped and recognized as part of what our developers regular work.

We recently got the go ahead to purchase the additional servers and resources we need make this happen, so this month we’re starting to plan out the work and get started. It will likely take us several months to complete all the changes that come out from this, but it is great to finally start on the work!

Intranet. We’re starting implementation of Library Intranet using the CenterStage application provided by McGill IT. It will probably take the rest of the month for us to familiarize ourselves with CenterStage. In December we’ll work with the various departments to get them on board, so that in the new year we’ll be ready to use new Library Intranet to share news and information internally within the Library.

Updates to news listing on home page. A few small changes to make it easier for people to find the Follow the library page that shows all our feeds. We also want to have a cleaner presentation of events and news with an eye to eventually having these listing automatically generated from the Channels system. (We’re waiting for McGill IT fix some bugs in Channels before we can do this… until then, we’re stuck manually adding these links to the Library’s home page).

Librarian profiles. We’re continuing to work on having the Librarian profile pages implements on our site. This was supposed to happen last month, but we’ve run into delays getting the feature activated on our site. We’ve been assured by McGill IT that it will be available soon. Once it is, we’ll be asking Librarians for feedback on the kind of information they would like to be able to include on their profile pages. From there we’ll be activating the pages with the basic profile information in place and then turning things over to the Librarians so that they can add and maintain their profile data as they see fit.

Web analytics. Our site editors need access to web analytics, which traditionally have been made available by someone LTS either generating canned reports on a regular basis and/or running adhoc reports as required. We need to get away from this and give people direct access to the analytics themselves, so we’re going to work with McGill’s Office of Communications and External Relations (who administers the university’s Google Analytics account) to figure out how we can make this happen.

Content review. There haven’t been any significant changes to the information architecture of /library since we started working on the WMS/Drupal migration over a year ago. Now that the core migration work is winding down, we can start to look at reviewing the content on our site. This month we’re starting a review of the About and Computers and Equipment sections of the web site.

Documentation. We’re updating the user documentation (known internally as the Site Editor Guide) with information on editing workshops, file management, and a few other small tweaks. We’re also integrating the information on roles and responsibilities so that the Site Editor Guide become the one definitive source of information for site our editors.

Metadata updates. The Library environment is always changing, so like most months we’re allocating part of our time to update the metadata that runs the dynamic floorplans (i.e. the maps available from the Classic Catalogue that show you where an item can be found) as well as the Computer Finder (which shows you where you can find free computer workstations across all Library branches).

McGill Yearbooks. Although the site launched last year, we’ve been continuing to digitize, OCR, cleanup, and publish yearbooks to the site. This month we’re adding the Clan Macdonald yearbooks for MacDonald campus 1931-50. We’ve also got almost 100 years of Old McGill yearbooks now all the way up to 1990. Worth checking out if you haven’t already!

Blog launch. For the past year or so we’ve been part of a team working on migrating one of the Library publications over to a blog format. Things are almost ready to so, so this month we’ll be working with the editors to have a soft launch of a new blog, with a ore formal launch hopefully soon after.

Updates to Library Blogs. Blogs are an important tool for the Library and librarians to communicate with their various audiences. To help support that, we’re making some long overdue changes to our Library Blogs platform. We’ll be opening up comments to everyone (right now only McGill users can comment), as well as bloggers direct access to access to analytics so that they can track how their blogs are being used. We’re also starting work on a visual refresh for the header of the common template. Finally, we’ll be meeting with the Library’s bloggers to find out what features/changes they would like to see added to our blogging platform.

Ongoing operational support: Of course, we also have to manage and handle the regular flow of support requests that we get, and the numerous minor fixes and changes that come out of that.

Ambitious, I know, but I think you have to be if you are going to move things forward!

Questions and comments are always welcome, and will be easier I know once we get the commenting on these blogs open to everyone! In the meantime, you can always email me at edward.bilodeau@mcgill.ca.

(To be clear, the variety of ebook that I’m referring to here is where the book is accessed through a web site, and not downloaded to a reader. Many (most?) of the ebooks we have available through the Library fit into this category.)

ebrary’s web UI makes it very difficult to size and manipulate the actual page. There was a link to download something called the ebrary reader which I’m assuming provides a better UI, but its a Java app (Java? Really?) so that’s not going to happen.

Books 24×7 requires a password over an above our network IP authentication which is a real PITA if you are a first time user. Thankfully, I already had an account and my browser remembered my auth info, so one click and I was in. Books 24×7 doesn’t display the actual page, but sets the image and text all in the same basic HTML. This would be fine if the quality was inline with Instapaper, etc, but it isn’t. And of course I can’t read the content using Instapaper, so reading is painful. Possible, but painful.

In both cases, you could say that technically the information from the book was available online. But to call it an ebook is misleading, as the experience of actually interacting the information is to poor, so much less that using a book.

And I’m not talking about “this doesn’t feel or smell like a book” sentiment. There are aspects to reading a book, to reading a printed page, that people have adapted to the web. Printed or online, the information should easy to navigate, easy to read, and these two platforms are neither.

As librarians, we should expect and demand more.

p.s. Don’t even get me started about trying to link to a chapter or page in the book. Impossibilium!

The image on the left is the page rendered in Chrome/Win7. The quality of the text rendering is horrible. The heavy aliasing smudges the characters and fills in the negative space, most noticably in the menu bar. The quote text in the middle of the page looks like it was set in some serif version of a Ransom font.

The image on the right is the same page rendered in Safari/iOS. Better, and while there is still to my eye too much aliasing on the type, the text is easier to read than with the Chrome/Win7 version. At least the page doesn’t look broken.

I think I need to spend more time trying to see if there are ways to do web fonts properly. I know that the team here at McGill responsible for our web management system made a special effort to improve the quality of the web fonts used, and the improvement was noticeable (although I’m still not entirely satisfied). Is the problem inherent with web fonts, with the way browsers render web fonts, or with the way they are implemented?

My guess is that the problem is that web fonts look best on Mac OS / iOS, that most web designers are using Macs, and are not bothering to ensure that the technology works on other platforms. This is one of the greatest sins a web designer can make, and reeks of the browser-specific designs of the 1990′s.

As an admirer of fine typography, I want web fonts to work, but it is clear that we are a long way off. I would encourage designers to think carefully before using web fonts in their projects, if only to preserve the readability and overall aesthetic appeal of the Web.

This is just one investigation, and a preliminary one at that. The figures, though, suggest a clear linear trend: the loss of just over 10% of the resources shared via social media each year, even when archiving is taken into account, or around 0.02% of this content lost every day.

Stories along these lines seem to surface at least once a year and seem to me to almost be accepted as truth. Curious, I decided to follow through to the original paper (you can tell I have a lot of things I should be doing when I start to check sources).

The news item is accurate in that the research is studying the decay of the web, or more accurately, the URI/URLs used to identify and link to pieces of information on the web.

However, just because URL may no longer be valid does not mean that the information no longer exists. It may simply have moved to another URL. Is this bad practice as far as web architecture goes? Yes. It is maintaining URL persistence always the highest priority for web development projects. No.

(I am certainly guilty personally and professionally of not making URL persistence a high priority for many of my web projects and sites. Something for me to work on.)

While URL persistence is a desirable goal, it isn’t necessary for the web to exist or for us to use it effectively. Web authors are constantly updating their links, and our search tools are constantly updating their indexes, and for the most part if the information still exists, we’re able to find it regardless of whether its URL has changed.

Now there is information that is disappearing from the web, some of it in huge chunks as hosting services shut down and web sites go offline. That IMHO is a far more important issue than link rot. It would be interesting to see some studies that look into that phenomenon. Thankfully we have the Internet Archive (currently offline as I write this!) and groups like the Archive Team who are working to preserve that information.

To say that the web is decaying it true, but it doesn’t provide a full or accurate picture of what is happening. There is as much if not more growth than decay. The content and structures of the web are being added to and modified continually. That the web is usable at all suggests that it is for the most part stable. Given the choice, I think we should focus our efforts on creating, improving, and preserving content, and issues with the structure will work themselves out.