This post is for Emily Frigo, the greatest librarian at GVSU.
Wow! This is my final blog post for my LIS753 class. The experience has been utterly amazing. This post is supposed to discuss my experience in creating a series of 3 web pages that we all had to code by hand.
Coding by hand is tough. One little “<” out of place and the whole thing does not work. In my experience, the overall objective was to get our hands dirty and play with html. Well, we did, and the fear of coding has been minimized. I know that I won’t have to code a page by hand in the future, but I can jump into a site and make some minor modifications by hand.
As for my thought process for the creation, well I knew what I wanted from the beginning. The pages that I am submitting are similar to the ones I created at the beginning of week 2. I have played around with color schemes and table layouts quite a bit. I don’t have a super creative side, so it took me a while, but I am satisfied. The use of CSS solved a major issue for me. One of the colors I really liked made the links very unpleasant. I was not looking forward to changing all these links, but with CSS it was really simple.
The content, bibliographic control, is due to my recent reading on the discussion taking place among bloggers and librarians about the future of such an endeavor. I tried to keep all the pages uniform in color and layout. I am a fan of minimalistic and simplistic design. I used the National Library Week video because it is fun, and we all need a good laugh from time to time. I could go on to write about how/why I choose to use certain code.
In the end I have learned much from this course. I have further constructed knowledge about us humans. I have been reading a great deal about love, separation and relatedness. Our awareness of our separation is what makes us human. Love and relatedness are attempts to bridge that separation gap. It is our reason for existence.
Social networking, virtual or online communities and even libraries are attempts to bridge the gap; to answer the question of separation. Whether someone is trying to gain a better understanding of the relatedness to the past – through libraries, or to conquer the feelings of loneliness and separation through some type of social networking application, the greater goal is to solve the human question. That question is why we are here. The answer is love and relatedness.
“In the end, these things matter most. How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you learn to let go?” – Buddhist saying
So I’ve updated my website and showed it to one of my students workers. She said that it was old school and that she can write much cooler sites, and that I should use Dreamweaver. How sad! But it seems that kids from 18 to 22 seem to know how to write web sites.
Check out this article in the Chronicle. A Stanford Professor shows that “Our virtual identity is not separate from our physical identity.” It shows that when you watch your avatar run, it motivates you to run in real life. Pretty cool.
Its a work in progress, but here it is:
Do you feel information overload. I am constantly trying to catch up with my readings and RSS feeds. Well, a new site (brijit) aims at reducing the amount of information. It uses people, not algorithms or computers, to summarize articles to 100 words or less, and ranks them from avoid to must read. Wired magazine adds “Every day, Brijit publishes around 125 concise summaries of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as audio and video programs”. Check it out.
This post is a website review of the Rebecca Crown Library, Dominican University. I will use Columbia College, Chicago and the North Carolina State University Libraries websites as a comparison.
The first thing I noticed about all three web sites is that none of the links changed colors after visiting a link. This is the number 3 top mistakes in web design. It makes for revisiting a page unintentionally highly like, and that is annoying.
Another common mistake was in regards to text sizing. Only Columbia’s web site allowed the user to adjust text size. And this was surprising. Columbia’s text was the largest of the three to begin with. And while Dominican’s web site had a lot more white space than NCSU (their site tries to cram too much stuff onto the front page) it would be nice if the size was adjustable. This is top mistakes number 5.
On the plus for Dominican, and Columbia, was the use of bread crumbing. This is when clicking through to pages from the homepage, a bar at the top of the screen tells the user where they are in the web sites hierarchy.
Another mistake for Dominican, and not Columbia or NCSU, is a link opening in a new browser. This happens only when clicking on the catalog link, either Dominican’s or CARLI’s. It is very annoying, and I am not sure why its only for the catalog link and not the other links, so besides being annoying, it is not uniform. This is also one of the lessons that top ten web site design mistakes discusses.
The last mistake that I will address for Dominican is the fact that it looks like an advertisement for the school. This is shameful! Neither of the other two web sites that I looked at looked like this. No library web site that I can think of has an apply for the school box or stories from past students in such a prominent position on the page. This is what happens when a marketing department gets their paws on overall web site design.
The last thing that I would like to address is the fact that Dominican Library has two homepages. https://jicsweb1.dom.edu/ics/Library/ and http://www.dom.edu/library/ . They are not at all uniform, and it makes reference work very difficult. Walking someone through a process over the phone can be hard when they are looking at one homepage and you are looking at another.
Is the wisdom of crowds coming to an end? A recent article in Newsweek is indicating that the pull of the wisdom of crowds movement is waining. It says, “In more recent years the ideal of the noble amateur has been bent to include a general disdain for the professional writer, editor or journalist. But while the tide of investment seems to be shifting somewhat, the nature of the Internet suggests that Web 2.0 populism will never be thrown out entirely. “There’s always a Big New Thing, but the old Big New Thing doesn’t really go away,” says Reynolds. “It becomes just another layer—like we’re building an onion from the inside out.” “
Only time will tell. Maybe people are realizing that the democratization is really an affront for pure business. Somebody is making money for all their hard work, it just isn’t them.
Many of my classmates have given wonderful descriptions of the history of the internet. I especially like David’s account. So I decided, and hope that Michael approves, to write about the history of the internet as it relates to libraries. Much of this post will be dervided from the IMLS study “InterConnections“.
The question the IMLS wanted to answer was whether or not the internet was replacing libraries. They stated,
Museums and libraries have long been sources of recreation, learning and information for personal, family, educational and workplace purposes. However, the Internet, Web and other technologies have become an increasingly used source of information that some believe will largely replace their physical counterparts. On the other hand, some have speculated that the Internet and related technologies will actually enhance and increase museum and library use. There is no solid evidence to support either assertion, particularly considering the wide range in types of museums and libraries.
What did they find? They found that Libraries and Museums are the MOST trusted sources of information for the more than 1,700 adults surveyed. They also found that nearly half of information seekers use the internet, libraries and museums. 
The best results of the survey found that
“In 2006 remote online access increased adult visits to museums by 75%
and to public libraries by 73% (while in-person visits have increased over
time).” and that “
Public library in-person visits per capita have increased 26% over the past
13 years.”
How cool is that! The internet has increased both trust in libraries and number of visits. So how does this relate to the history of the internet? Well the report summarizies
The on-line information environment has changed dramatically since the
earliest on-line systems emerged in the early 1960s. Growth has occurred
both in the number of users of on-line information as well as in the number of
on-line information resources and providers. The rate of growth in each of
these areas increased exponentially with the availability of the public Internet
and the World Wide Web. These foundational technological developments
created an environment in which almost anyone can “publish” or function as
an information provider and have virtually instantaneous access to massive
volumes of information.
So the history of the internet is also a history of libraries. The library has moved from the physical building to the “galatic network”. As the internet has gone everywhere so has the library.
