My previous post about the research guide (It’s Alive!) raised the subject of redesigning my subject guide to improve its usefullness to users. Being a data- and statistics-oriented person, I noted the small dataset I had on the Guide’s use as a starting point for the design discussion.

One comment proved prescient: the one about people using a known path to reach a particular online destination. I rearranged the boxes on the page (why does the phrase ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’ come to mind…?), and moved the Dictionary widget down into the wider central column. As a result, the boxes in the left column moved up.

Wouldn’t you know, I got an email yesterday from a user asking me where Reference USA had gone! This is, of course, good news: it means that at least one person is using the site regularly enough to notice when it changes.

Moving along, my suspicion is that there is too much stuff on this guide, and I expect I will at the very least move several items off the front page onto a secondary page. More radically, I think I will remove entries that might be (or already are) included on other guides, and instead direct folks to those other guides. Links for news or business are top contenders for this.

After a long dark hiatus, I guess I’ll try using this blog as a place to consider the research guide I agreed to adopt.

That guide (guides.ccclib.org/general) is meant to focus on “General Research”–a term that doesn’t convey to me a lot of detailed meaning. It is broad enough that I could take it in a number of divergent directions.

Those who originally created it focused on electronic data resources–databases, sources of raw statistical data, etc.–that are available on the library’s website.

My initial modifications reflect my academic background.

• I added links to online resources and tools to help find and organize information. Gathering and organizing information means more than just searching Google.
• I added links to pages that discuss how to construct online searches that will achieve the searcher’s intended results. I think that most users can benefit from having access to this kind of information.
• I added links to pages on research methods. Although they are specialized, I think they can be useful to students who have to write research papers in high school and college.

I have since examined the use statistics for the guide, and I have found that overwhelmingly, users have selected only a few items on my guide. Of the 800 or so views of the initial page, about 60% clicked on a link they found there. The remaining viewers just went away again.

Of the secondary click,the breakdown for links with more than 10 clicks was this:

What I am trying to decide is whether this dataset offers any insight on the direction to take the guide. It makes sense that a lot of people go to General Onefile and Opposing Viewpoints, and of course I’ll keep those.

But what about all those links with one or two clicks? Should they go, or can the users be induced to click these links as well if the pages were built differently?

What does it mean that the National Weather Service ranks so highly? Should I add local weather and events as a topic of “research”?

I welcome comments.

Okay, so this last Assignment shall be done. I decided to examine the To do Lists out there, which is kind of ironic, since I am notorious for not being a To Do List type of person. I tend to keep all the things I need to do crammed in my head, and if I begin to lose track of things, I take it to be a sign that I’m trying to do too many things. I guess that’s why I am not a mover and shaker in the world.

But the whole online To Do list sounds like it might be a useful technology. I examined all three of the recommended online To Do sites. Each has a slightly different take on the concept.

WorkHack takes the barest of bones approach; you directly create a list (without any login), and link directly to that list to access it later. The interface is extremely basic, and the site itself looks kind of slapped together. You create a new list by entering a Captcha phrase and add items to your list. The items can be assigned one of three different levels which get red, yellow or green text. You can reorder items on the list directly. Each item has a button to allow you to mark an item done, and once it is pushed, that item is removed from the list. Frankly, WorkHack didn’t appeal to me. If I am going to work with to do lists (I know, big “if”), I think I’d want to have a couple of them going and visible to me at once (and yes, I can figure out how I might do that with WorkHack). I think I’d also want to be able to see what I’d already finished. So, I think I’ll skip the WorkHack thing for my nonexistent to do lists.

ToDoIst has more features in it. You have a login, for starters. And once you’re logged in, you have a full array of tools to create and arrange lists and their parts. You can create multiple named lists. You can arrange your lists in hierarchies. And once you check off an item, you can retrieve it later to see what you’ve finished. They claim to integrate with calendar and email software, which (if I were a To Do List Kind of Person [TDLKoP]) I imagine would be useful, since what good is a to do list if it doesn’t get right in your face and tell you what you’ve got to do?

TaDaList is the last site, and is similar to ToDoIst. You have a login, and list options similar to ToDoIst. Ostensibly, one nice feature here is the ability to add a list as an RSS feed to another site, although for some reason it wouldn’t work for me. You can also email a list to yourself or others.

Either of these last two would be my choice, although neither had exactly the configuration I imagine I might want to use, if I were a TDLKoP. I also recall that both Yahoo and Gmail have Calendaring/Note taking options, which might serve a user’s needs without resorting to yet another set of sites and logins.

Oh yeah, and since I just received an email from ZoHoPlanner telling me that I need to fertilize my lawn tomorrow, I guess I must have tried out ZoHo’s to do list feature.

Although the technology is fun, I found this week’s task less than thrilling. Every big commercial news and sporting site puts out videos all the time, and you can get a feed of the funniest new videos on YouTube, so I don’t really see a great need to spend a lot of time tracking the stuff down. Furthermore, the quality of these things is often abysmal, and I find myself rubbing my eyes or trying to clean my already clean glasses so I can see the action more clearly.

Certainly, it is gratifying to see so many people in the world trying their creative skills out, but most are not very interesting. As proof of this, I offer my very own YouTube video, freshly uploaded today. It’s just something I threw together in the last few minutes of my lunch hour today (not company time!) just to see whether it could be done. The default “Subtitle Text Here” seemed somehow appropriate.

My claim to YouTube fame demonstrates why some of us are librarians.

I’m a week behind on the writing, so, let’s catch up.

On the Ning social networking assignment, I did steps 1-4, 6 (and this is 7) of the assignment, but I didn’t do 5, 8 or 9. I skipped 5 (add a message to a forum) because a) I do this all the time on other forums, and b) the original message is over a year old, making it old news in my book. I don’t know whether there are official Emily Post guidelines on how late you can add comments to an existing thread, but my personal limit ranges from a week (on high-traffic forums) to two months (on slower ones).

With regard to point a above, I have been a member of a number of “social networks” for a while now, mostly related to tech stuff [like Filemaker Forums (www.fmforums.com) or Mac OS X Hints (forums.macosxhints.com)], but I also am a member of the biggies, MySpace and Facebook. I joined MySpace and Facebook back when they were taking off, so I could see what all our middle and high schoolers were so worked up about. My MySpace account languishes; I do use my Facebook account more.

Compared to all of these other networking opportunities, Ning just doesn’t do much for me. Most of the groups I found were really new and had very little traffic. To me, the best part about social networks is that people discuss issues and share knowledge and experience (that would be the “social” in social networking). As I saw it, Ning didn’t have a lot of that yet. Since that buzz it what a good social network needs for me, I didn’t get all that excited by this realm. Furthermore, I didn’t find any networks that interested me. For example, a search for “library cataloging” brought up a bunch of networks for specific libraries (like Hearst Library in South Dakota). I also got things like Library IT, which purports to be “putting together a resource of online tools for library patrons.” None of these would be helpful for me if I were actually interested in a social network on library cataloging.

One thing I really didn’t like about Ning was the fact that each network required an additional sign up and log in. I would figure that my initial login would at least streamline the process a little. Furthermore, some of the networks don’t show you any substantive content before you join, so it’s tough to tell whether you really want to join. It’s frustrating to sign up for a network only to find once you’re in that there are three members total, and the whole thing is in the planning stages. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a lot of these networks are set up by unscrupulous types who are after email addresses for their MLM empires.

Well. Blog I am, I do. I did the RSS Feed thing, but without using BlogLines, since I am by nature a Maverick™. Instead, I embedded my feedlines directly here in my WordPress Sunfish62 Fiefdom©. You can see one or two of them feed-thingies dangling down there off the lower right hand column, below the Meebo widget (if it’s still there; I may remove THAT, since it annoyingly refreshes regularly and eats up bandwidth).

I certainly dig the idea of feeds, and hope to find ways to leverage everyone else’s hard work to make it look like I am making my own web content on a regular basis.

According to the assignment, we “need to compose a blog entry discussing and expounding upon the virtues of, or questioning how, a tool such as the MeeboMe Widget may be used by a library.”

Huh. Discussing. Expounding. Here goes…

I am sure that someone will figure out some way to utilize this tool in a library context—no doubt involving some sort of “we can be available for instant reference” purposes. NRS.

Personally, I have my doubts. I suspect that as IM is utilized right now, implementing it at an institutional level would result in a high ratio of chaff to wheat. I worry that the novelty of IMing the reference librarian with the equivalent of “Is your refrigerator running? Well you better go get it!” (Iz UR fridge running? Ubetr getit!), would render the service less than productive. Perhaps once the hullaballoo blew over, one might have meaningful exchanges.

Similarly, one might use IM to take care of tasks that we currently use the phone or email for, such as shelf checks or similar tasks.

The problem with all of these ideas is that the technologies we currently use for these tasks are pretty effective and IM doesn’t really add to the mix, AFAICS. But I am happy to give it a shot and be shown how wrong I am.

One benefit of this week’s task is that I got to check out (and use) some of those nifty IM acronyms that are all the rage these days (a list can be had here).

Hey, another 2.0 task I had a head start on! As luck would have it, I had me a Google account already, and even had a couple of Google documents rattling around in c-space. I consider this one a simple enough example.

EDIT: And I’ll now go an extra yard or two. I was just reading about Zoho, and here’s a document created there.

After further examination of the two, I think I prefer Zoho. Both platforms offer basic document features (based on underlying HTML), but Zoho’s includes more. There are more layout options here; you can put text and pictures into frames and move these frames around the screen in ways that Google Docs doesn’t seem to allow. Mind you, I crashed out Firefox four times when I was using this feature, so you have to be careful.

The real reason I like Zoho, though, are the other features that they have, including a wiki platform, a database platform, and something they call Zoho Creator, which looks like it’s another db app. This last one has a bunch of cool templates that you can use to set up applications like a To Do manager, a Bug Tracker, a Project Manager, and even a Dating manager.

Hey, if the Beijing Olympics can come up with an official cheer:

Way to Go!

I think 10T10W should have one as well! Maybe something that’s based on Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac?

Well, truth be told, I already had del.icio.us set up, so there you have it. The WordPress widget for del.icio.us is set up to show only Library-tagged links.

I like the way that del.icio.us includes terms that others have used as well as your own. That’s much easier than trolling through LCSH for appropriate subject headings…

Again now, for the literalists.