A Bloy and his Blog

I went hiking at Natural Bridge State Park yesterday.

read the rest of: Fallen leaves

Internet Librarian always sounded like a real interesting conference, and I’m fortunate to be able to attend this year’s edition. The conference for me began with one of the preconference workshops, Web Manager’s Academy; Redesign 2.0. The session featured four librarians presenting several informative talks throughout the day. The two presentations I found the most useful were “User Experiences” which covered engaging website users and enhancing their experience, and “Usability Research” which included things like preference testing, affinity mapping, and task-based testing.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: preconference

Rather than blog about every session I attended at Internet Librarian, I’m just going to just focus on the ones I thought were the most interesting.

Designing the Digital Experience
presented by David Lee King.

David told us that basically this is a 30 minute, presentation version of his book by the same name (which I had heard about before and was why I wanted to attend this session).

There are three paths to the experience:

Structure – Create an experience by making the website easier to use. A well designed experience should stay out of the users’ way. You should focus on developing parts of your site that users visit often. Don’t spend too much time on things users only do once a year. Look at your website with a critical eye, think about what would make people stumble. Figure out goals from there, don’t forget the “don’t make them think” philosophy.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: day one

2.0 Learning and 1.8 Users: Bridging the Gap
presented by Rudy Leon (SUNY Potsdam) and Colleen Harris (Univ. of Tennessee, Chattanooga)

The speakers began this session by talking about myths of the millenial generation.

• They are skilled online searchers
• Are at ease with new gadgets
• Are always connected
• Are effective multitaskers

But as recent news reports and studies have shown, these are not true. Millennials do use the technology, but in a simplified way. In general they are unaware of how powerful the tools they are using can be.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: day two

Crafting the User-Centered Library
presented by Cliff Landis

Why use emerging tech?

• It’s not enough to shove your bad services (such as our crappy OPACs) into new things.
• Don’t do it because everyone else is.
• For outreach.
• We don’t need things designed FOR the user, we need things designed BY the user.

Planning - it takes too long. Too man hoops to jump through, eventually good ideas can just fade away.

The committee approach – can take any good idea and destroy it. Exploits the negative aspects. To many times people ask “what if…” Cliff then showed us a funny YouTube video, Association Professionals Through the Ages, that illustrates how good ideas can be destroyed in such a manner.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: day three

While I was in Monterey, California for the conference, I took a few vacation days to see the sights.

My favorite day off was when I rented a bicycle, and rode all day long on the Monterey Bay Coastal Bike Trail.

read the rest of: Biking the Monterey Peninsula

I took so many photographs while biking the Monterey Peninsula, it was hard to pare them down to fit in a single post, so this is part two. Take a look at the first part if you haven’t already done so.

read the rest of: More biking photos from Monterey

I took these pictures at the Monterey Bay Aquarium a couple of weeks ago.

read the rest of: Jellyfish

On the morning of my last full day at Monterey, I got up early to watch the sunrise.

read the rest of: Monterey sunrise

Thanks to Muzzle of Bees, I discovered a recording of the excellent Ryan Adams & The Cardinals show I attended about six weeks ago. Here’s one of my favorite songs from that night, “Easy Plateau.”

This is an outstanding recording, available in lossless FLAC format, released by the Cardinals themselves. The entire show is posted in the audio section of the Internet Archive: Ryan Adams Live at Overture Hall on 2008-10-05.

What a great souvenir of a great concert. A must for all Ryan Adams fans.