Category Archives: tools and technology

Seeing Search Boxes

By IRIS Posted on by

We’ve all heard that single search boxes are the only way to go when it comes to building search interfaces. We’ve probably also seen students who will bypass all relevant information or links on a page and zero in on whatever looks like a search box. But I never put these two pieces of knowledge together before. Not, that is, until just this morning as I was driving in to work. This morning I had a revelation:

Every page with a search box is a “single search box” page.

We may gripe about clutter. We may grouse about having not enough guidance surrounding our search boxes. It doesn’t matter. For people who are primed to search, they will only see the search box anyway. The other stuff may as well not be there. (For those of you getting hot under the collar like I would be if I were reading this right now? Hang on, I’ve got something for you in a minute.)

Here’s my Parable With Two Screenshots. We have several lists of electronic resources on our library’s website, each of which has a “Search” and “Browse” function at the top.

We’ve gently corrected students who started entering their topic keywords into the “search” box, but haven’t been able to get rid of the box entirely. “Oh those kids,” we thought. “Desperately seeking search boxes again.”

Then last week I had a professor call me in consternation that the library systems were telling her there was nothing on her topic. Turns out… she had entered her topic terms into that search box.

Ok, ok, so that one’s legitimately confusing. We’ve realized that while the existence of the box is out of our control, the wording next to it isn’t. Soon it’ll say something more like “find a database.” Still, this is only the first half of the parable, and probably not the most relevant half at that. It’s mostly relevant in that its proximity to the second half made everything come together in my head. And so, on to the second half…

For the past two weeks, I’ve also had students from a lit class coming to see me, all of whom want “something, anything from the last ten years written about [insert famous theme] and [insert famous piece of literature here].” Granted, searching for themes is hard. Even something standard like “performative identity” requires thinking up all kinds of synonyms (body, fashion, display, etc). But what struck me is that as soon as I set the date limiter on MLA International Bibliography, each student gasped in shock and surprise. This limiter is not hidden. It is three lines, or 1 inch, below the search boxes. And yet it had been totally invisible to my students as they focused all their energies on those tantalizing search boxes.

So now back to my revelation (and those of you who’ve been thinking “But we simply can’t do away with advanced search pages! Single search boxes aren’t always the way to go!!” can tune back in now). Here’s what I now think: We can feel free to have advanced search pages on any interface that we think functions better with all of those options laid out. It doesn’t matter. People who only want a single search box will only see that search box anyway. People who want the options will see and appreciate the options. Everybody happy.

Dear Facebook: Leave Me Alone

By IRIS Posted on by

My friends know that I have a complicated relationship with Facebook. Simply put: I hate it, but I can’t leave. The interface never made sense to me, the multiple audiences made participation hard for me, the quizzes cluttered everything up, college friends flaunted their perfect lives in my face (without meaning to, but it still hurt), and Hasbro took away Scrabulous, which was really the only redeeming feature of Facebook. So why can’t I leave? My local friends assume I’ll know what they’ve posted when we meet on the weekend.

I’d finally figured out a balance that worked for me: I put my local friends and my family members on a list of their own, dragged that list to the top of my list of lists, and now when I open Facebook, they’re all I see. But then Facebook started messing with privacy settings again. For a more full story, check this out: Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. But here are the four things I did this morning in my battle to coexist with Facebook:

  • Overwrote and then deleted some parts of the newly designated set of “publicly available information” (this includes your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of). I overwrote what I could because I wanted to actually change the cached information in Facebook’s database, and then I deleted it because a) I don’t want to give that information away, and b) it was now bogus anyway.
  • Clicked “edit profile” and then the little “edit” icon next to my Friends list and unchecked the box that says “show my friends on my profile” because that seems to be the only way to keep my friends lists out of the hands of apps and random passers by.
  • Went to Facebook > Settings > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What Your Friends Can Share About You and unchecked everything. I don’t like the idea that having a friend who answers quizzes on Facebook means that the quiz creators can gain access to a lot of my information.
  • For good measure, took the opportunity to go through all the other privacy settings and make sure they still reflected my wishes.

Is this overly paranoid of me? Probably. (Tinfoil hats help keep warmth in, remember, and it’s pretty incredibly cold out right now.) The thing is, I’m not invested enough in Facebook to feel like the privacy trade-off is worth it for me. I’m there so I can keep up with my local friends. Full stop. I’m already making concessions by making myself available to the students who want to friend me there and by grudgingly admitting that I like the rolodex function it plays. But I feel zero motivation to give up more than I can help to Facebook and its third party developers. They can kindly leave me alone, please.

Hashtag Contexts

By IRIS Posted on by

I wouldn’t have expected a thing like a hashtag in Twitter or FriendFeed to become a rhetorical device as well as a functional one, but that’s exactly what I see happening. (For those of you that just asked “Hashtag? What now?” here’s a nice summary of how it works on Twitter.)

Looking back, I can see now that hashtags not only allowed people to gather together categories of posts, but they also gave a kind of short-hand context to those posts. A brief post like “Mediocre at best” reads differently if it’s tagged “#IL2009” or “#ProjectRunway.” The first sounds like a conference attendee who’s underwhelmed by a session. The second sounds like a critique of a fashion design on a reality TV show. Totally different contexts lead to totally different readings.

And as it turns out, short-hand contexts are pretty useful rhetorical things online, particularly in asynchronous conversations or when you’re only allowed a few words at a time. Lately the amateur anthropologist in me has been fascinated by the ways I’ve seen hashtags used not so much to allow people to gather posts together but instead to imply a category or topic that in turn supply a context for the preceding post. They let posters signal “I’m joking” or “here’s how I want you to interpret my post” without ruining the moment with a dry pronouncements of intent.

For example, I’d have had no idea what a friend was talking about if he’d just said, “Remember that part in Star Wars where the characters are running from the troopers in Mos Eisley, and they scramble on board the Millennium Falcon and then have to wait several hours for the weather to improve before they can blast off? Yeah, me neither” (from stevelawson on friendfeed). But then he added “#nasaisharshingmyfuture,” to let us know that he’s talking about the way that modern day space travel isn’t living up to the promise of science fiction. Context. There are no other posts with that hashtag, so it’s certainly not serving a gathering function, but it implies a category, implies that there could be many more examples of this particular phenomenon, and therefore builds a whole imaginary context for the original statement.

Fascinating.

Like any rhetorical device, though, it’s a skill that needs developing. Some of the people I follow seem to be really good at it. I, on the other hand, could really use some practice.

Report from SirsiDynix on Open Source ILS Platforms Leaked… Oops

By IRIS Posted on by

Stephen Abram has lived a bit of a charmed life. He’s somehow managed to be the Vendor That Everyone Kind Of Thinks Has Our Best Interests At Heart Even If He Is A Vendor. Meanwhile, he’s also headed up the Special Library Association. Meanwhile, he’s also been a sought-after voice in the library community. And did I mention he’s done all this while being a vendor? No small feat.

There’ve been some bumps along the way, to be sure (I’m lookin’ at you, SLA realignment name change drama), but for the most part he’s managed to keep people from looking too closely at his vendor status.

And then he authored a report on open source ILS platforms.

From WikiLeaks:

This document was released only to a select number of existing customers of the company SirsiDynix, a proprietary library automation software vendor. According to our source it has not been released more broadly specifically because of the misinformation about open source software and possible libel per se against certain competitors contained therein.

SirsiDynix is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with one of the largest public libraries in the U.S. (Queens Borough, NY) and this document does illustrate the less-than-ethical nature of this company.

The source states that the document should be leaked so that everyone can see to what extent SirsiDynix will attempt to spread falsehoods and smear open source and the proponents of open source.

I’m sure that others far better versed in these matters will write cogent and thoughtful responses to the document itself. I know of an effort underway to mark up the report and respond with some actual research to back up the counter-claims. With all of this serious thinking going on, I think I’ll just play court jester and point out my four favorite bits of the report.

  1. The ubiquitous Asian woman who appears on every page and on the cover sheet, and always next to Abram’s name, making it seem like maybe that’s what he looks like.
  2. The totally information-less charts that appear on page 4 straight out of the “If there’s a chart for it that makes it fact” school of rhetoric.
  3. “Proprietary software has more features. Period. Proprietary software is much more user-friendly” (p. 6).
  4. “Rogue programming teams may decide to create a better version, while exclaiming ‘Damn the torpedoes’” (p. 6). (I just love the “damn the torpedoes” phrase.)

Dear Stephen, we’ve seen your infomercial colors now. Next time you write such a report, please cite some sources. What you have here wouldn’t last 5 minutes on Wikipedia.

Low-Key Cooperative Continual Professional Development

By IRIS Posted on by

A few years ago, my library decided to start a cooperative blog where we’d alert each other to developments in the wider world of librarianship, highlight interesting things we’d learned, and generally help each other keep up. There was enthusiasm, there was drive, there was an interesting blog… and then it died.

As far as I can tell, it died for three reasons: some people weren’t comfortable writing posts for it, people who rely on RSS to read blogs couldn’t deal with a blog that was locked down and therefore had no RSS option (one of those people was me me… no matter how useful, the site was dead to me without RSS), and everyone found they couldn’t get in the habit of clicking that bookmark and logging in to see if anything new had been posted recently.

Meanwhile, each of us continued to keep up with our own corners of the profession, some through email lists, some through professional journals, some through online social networks and blogs, and most through some combination of the three. But we all missed out on the richness that can come from hearing about things that affect our own worlds but originate in another person’s, and we all went back to been less and less aware of what interests and inspires our colleagues.

So this year we’re learning from the mistakes of our past effort and trying again, this time with more flexibility. I’ve set up a portal (still very much in progress) for those of us that really want a “home base” to check. There’s also a bookmarklet that will let people send annotated screenshots of web pages directly to my email account (using ToRead) for people who like that method of marking what they find, a Delicious tag for people who already use Delicious, and a general invitation to email me or pop in and tell me about interesting things that have come up.

So hopefully the collection piece will give people enough options that they don’t have to either conform or not participate. Hopefully there’s at least one option that will fit into each person’s existing habits, and people who are interested in experimenting with new-to-them options can do so without feeling locked into those options for all time.

Meanwhile, I’ll take whatever comes up and write a periodic blog post that glosses the things we’ve found (and behind the scenes, I’m going to see about getting password protected web-pub space on the college network so that I can link from the wide open blog to locked down documents that we aren’t comfortable sharing beyond ourselves). People can either subscribe to this newsletter via RSS or email, depending on their newsletter-reading preferences and workflow. It’ll also get fed into the portal for the “home base” folks. Just to round out our options, we’ll have low-key, face-to-face, brown bag lunch sessions once or twice a term for people who really prefer to discuss rather than read.

So hopefully the dissemination piece will also have enough options that people can work this seamlessly into their existing information-gathering processes.

The biggest challenge, then, will be striking the right balance between having a broad range of topics in each post/newsletter without overwhelming people with too many things that aren’t applicable to them. The idea is to have this be fun and interesting, not irrelevant and overwhelming. Wish me luck!