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Opt-in to activity data
I was intrigued to read David Weinberger’s blog post ‘Protecting library privacy with a hard opt-in’ in it he suggests that there is a case to be made for asking users to explicitly opt-in to...
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Semantic web technologies and digital library search
I just remembered to put up my slides onto slideshare from a talk I gave to a group of students about the work that we’ve been doing around linked data, particularly in relation to the STELLAR project....
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Publication
One of the different elements of working in an academic library as opposed to a public library is that writing an article to be published in a proper ‘academic’ journal becomes more likely. It becomes...
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Reflections…
OK, so it’s the time of year to reflect back on the last year and look forward to the new year. Blogging I’ve definitely blogged less (24 posts in 2013 compared with 37 in 2012 and 50 in 2011), [mind...
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How far should we go with ‘full library discovery’?
It was Lorcan Dempsey who I believe coined the term, ‘Full library discovery’ in a blog post last year. As a stage beyond ‘full collection discovery’, ‘full library discovery’ added in results drawn...
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The other side of responsive, personalised websites
Most of the time my interest is about making sure that users of websites can get access to an appropriate version of the website, or that the site works on a variety of different devices. But as...
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Thinking about iBeacon in a library context
iBeacon is an interesting piece of location-based Apple technology and I started wondering about how useful it might be in a library context. Essentially (as this article from the Guardian describes)...
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Buttons on a touch screen
Great though touch-screens on tablets and smartphones are, one of the drawbacks with them that I’ve found is that the experience of typing on them isn’t a particularly nice experience. It’s all too...
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Feedback, usability, guerilla testing and UX
I’m always looking to find out about the tools and techniques that people are using to improve their websites, and particularly how they go about testing the user experience (or UX) to make sure that...
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Tools to help with managing tasks: Trello
We’ve been using Trello (http://trello.com) as a tool to help us manage the lists of tasks in the digital library/digital archive project that we’ve been running. After looking at some of our existing...
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The six ages of library search
For a little while I’ve been trying to find some ways of characterising the different generations or ages of library ‘search’ systems. By library ‘search’ I’ve been thinking in terms of tools to find...
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Discovery or delivery
Catching up this week with some of the things from last week’s UKSG conference so I’ve been viewing some of the presentations that have been put up on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/UKSGLIVE...
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Researching student needs of library search
For a few months now we’ve been running a project to look at student needs from library search. The idea behind the research is that we know that students find library search tools to be difficult...
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Discovery usage data
I picked up over the weekend via the No Shelf Required blog that EBSCO Discovery usage data is now being added into Plum Analytics. EBSCO’s press release talks about providing “researchers with a...
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Reading list systems
There seems to have been a flurry of activity around reading system systems in recent weeks. There’s the regular series of announcements of new customers for Talis Aspire which seems to clearly be the...
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LAMP and RefMe
To Birmingham at the start of last week for the latest Jisc Library Analytics and Metrics Project (http://jisclamp.mimas.ac.uk/) Community Advisory and Planning group meeting. This was a chance to...
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FOTE 2014
Friday in early October, so it must be time for ULCCs Future of Technology in Education at Senate House in London. I’ve been fortunate to be able to go several times, but it is always a scramble to get...
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FOTE 2014 reflections
Holborn Circus – I was struck by the different angles of the buildings Themes For me two big themes came to mind after this year’s Future of Technology in Education Conference (FOTE). Firstly, around...
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Design4learning conference
At the end of November I was at a different sort of conference to the ones I normally get to attend. This one, Design4learning was held at the OU in Milton Keynes, but was a more general education...
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2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000...
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