September 1, 2008 – 8:53 pm
One year ago this week I began working outside of MPOW’s office. Space was getting cramped and I volunteered to give up my office and telecommute. I still go into the office a couple time a week, but I just find a table, put down my laptop and work from that spot. The other days I work either from home, a library, Panera, or anywhere else I can get online and get stuff done.
Web working isn’t for everyone, but it’s definitely for me. Having my entire office in my bag and online in “the cloud” has given me a lot of flexibility and freedom. The staff in our office have embraced it as well. Everyone is connected via instant messaging which means they can see when I’m available and reach me whenever they need something.
Over the past year, I’ve had to adjust some of the ways I work and and develop some new habits. I now avoid paper unless it’s completely necessary, schedule tasks based on where I am on a particular day, and rely more heavily on free/online software. Zen Habits recently posted 12 New Rules of Working You Should Embrace Today and I can definitely relate to most of them. Rule #4 focuses on working outside the office, but I think many of the rules apply to web working in one way or another.
August 17, 2008 – 11:01 pm
About a year ago, I wrote about reCAPTCHA and thought it was an interesting alternative to the eye-crossing patterns and letters that many web sites use. I said “I’m not yet convinced it will work, but it’s an interesting idea.” Since then, I’ve come across reCAPTCHA on a number of sites and I really like it. It’s easy to use and it’s nice knowing that I’m helping convert scanned works to text.
One thing I’ve wondered, however, is just how accurate reCAPTCHA is. I just read a post over at ars technica that answers that question.
The researchers tested the system using a random sampling of 250 New York Times articles from different eras where the identity of every word was confirmed by two independent transcription experts. Each OCR software program managed about 84 percent accuracy but, when their results were combined with the reCAPTCHA system, the overall accuracy shot up to 99.1 percent. That’s actually within the bounds of professional transcription services that use two independent experts to generate copies that are then examined by a third party.
Very cool! Looks like a win-win situation for all.
August 12, 2008 – 3:49 pm
There, I said it. For years I’ve been preaching to libraries that they need to make their websites mobile friendly. I recently came to the conclusion, however, that it’s now too late.
At MPOW, we purchased an iPod Touch to play around with. I’m not an Apple fan in the least, but the browser on the Touch and iPhone beats anything else on a mobile device. I’ve can effortlessly navigate and read almost every site I visit. There’s no need to search for a “mobile-optimized” version of a site, turn off styles, or make any other alterations.
I know that not everyone has an iPhone, but we’re starting to see lots of other gadgets and software that strive to achieve the same experience that Apple provides. The next couple of years will yield phones and media devices that put the full web experience in your pocket. And that is why libraries have missed the mobile web. We are moving away from the need for mobile versions of our websites, catalogs, and databases. Most libraries have never catered to mobile users and soon there will be little need to do so. The trend is slow now, but is accelerating.
So should you create a mobile version of your library’s website if you haven’t already done so? I think it largely depends on your type of users. Students are more likely to make use of the web on the go. So school and academic libraries need to pay extra attention to mobile access. My general recommendation, however, would be not to worry about making your entire website available to mobiles users. Unless you have the knowledge and resources to build a site that gracefully adapts on its own for mobiles devices, just create a basic page with important links and information for mobile users and link to that page from your main website. Put the link near the top of you home page so mobile users can find it easily.
It makes me a little sad to say that mobile websites will soon be obsolete. I like the idea of having simplified versions of web pages. There are fringe benefits to a mobile-optimized page as well such as speed and accessibility. However, it’s nice that evolving gadgets are making more library resources available to users on the go.
Digital Rights Management continues to slowly die. Sony just announced that it’s ebook reader will soon support the popular .epub book format. Up until now, users had to purchase titles from the Sony store. Now other booksellers will be able to provide titles for Sony’s device. Perhaps library content will be an option.
O’Reilly has begun selling DRM-free ebooks. So far only 12 titles are available, but they are planning to slowly roll out more. You can also purchase both the PDF and the print verison together.
That’s all well and good, but I did say slowly and painfully, didn’t I? Yahoo! just announced that it is killing its music store at the end of September. That means the DRM keys will be gone and any music purchased from Yahoo’s store will no longer play on your computer. They recommend burning the music to CDs before that date to get around the dead DRM. As DRM continues to slowly die, we can expect to see more orphaned digital content.
Recently I had a chance to speak at one of our member institutions about collaborating with social tools. Slides from the talk are now available. Many of the staff spent their lunch break learning how social tools can be used to collaborate with others.
I could tell that many in the room were seeing these tools for the first time. I’m always amused by people’s reactions when they first learn about sites like Twitter and Second Life. It’s not easy to explain the concepts and usefulness in a short amount of time. By focusing on collaboration, however, I was able to give some quick examples of how tools like micro-blogs, wikis, and IM can be used.
