Librarians and MOOCs

Things librarians do (or are asked to do) on campuses that produce MOOCs:

  • Easy & quick
    • Connect with instructors to say hi
    • Promote public information literacy by producing simple, general guides for MOOC takers
  • Moderate difficulty
    • Enroll in your campus’s MOOC(s) to better understand the student experience
    • Advise faculty regarding open access content sources (see event detailed below)
    • Produce course-specific resource guides (see DLib)
  • Hard & expensive
    • Be an embedded librarian: hold office hours and respond to common questions
    • Negotiate with publishers whose texts are used in the course (see Chronicle)
      • Can they offer the text for free? (see Inside Higher Ed)
      • Can using a text or portion thereof be considered fair use?

If you’re in CUNY and interested in distance ed, there’s a free online seminar coming up on April 30 on “How Recent Copyright Court Cases Affect Distance Education: What Educators Need to Know About Copyright,” sponsored by CUNY Office of Library Services. We’ll be screening it here at John Jay’s Library from 2pm–4pm. RSVP to Kathleen Collins by April 19!

Library website usability testing: sample scripts

If you haven’t done a usability test on your library’s online services in the last 12 months, you’re overdue! Web trends and user expectations change at a fast rate, as do the many parts of a library’s resource ecosystem. Before rolling out the new Lloyd Sealy Library website in December, I conducted a usability test on the beta version of the site in November. The feedback from students and faculty was helpful in refining parts of the site that weren’t as usable — in areas that were already of concern to us and in places we didn’t know were problematic.

There are a bundle of resources out there for usability testing, but not many example scripts specifically for library websites. Below are the scripts I used for students and faculty. Note that this is tailored to John Jay College’s Lloyd Sealy Library website, so some tasks might not be phrased the same way or even performed on your site. At the bottom of this post, I’ve included some notes about this usability study and my approach.

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Trying out GeoStoryteller

At today’s fantastic LACUNY Institute here at John Jay, Anthony Cocciolo (Pratt Institute) gave a very good presentation on “Rebuilding Post-War Europe: New York and Digital Archives as Reconstitutive Fabric.” He asked this striking question: How can digital technology build understanding and compassion between people?

He’s part of the German Traces NYC project team, which created a map of German historical sites that automagically creates a walking tour for you based on where in the city you are now and how long you want to spend walking around. They released the software, GeoStoryteller, both on SourceForge and as a web app in which you can create your own “geostories” and “portals” (collections of geostories). Pretty cool.

Walking map from downtown, with 1 hour 30 minutes selected as tour time
Walking map from downtown, with 1 hour 30 minutes selected as tour time
Detail page for one point of interest
Detail page for one point of interest

I just tried my hand at creating a portal myself. It was pretty easy and very quick, plus it gives you a clickable iPhone preview. At John Jay, we have some pretty gruesome / interesting photos online that are totally georeferenceable. Perhaps a Crime in New York walking tour could happen in the future? Hmm…

I couldn’t find any help pages though, so if you’re going to try out GeoStoryteller…

GeoStoryteller tips

  • When creating a portal (collection of sites), you’ll give it a keyword; it should be unique, like politicalhistorynyc.
  • When creating a geostory (single site), the only way to associate the geostory to your portal is by pasting that keyword (politicalhistorynyc) into the Keywords field. I don’t know if general keywords like ‘park’ or ‘politics’ do anything.
  • Image Icon of Site is what will show up when you tap a geostory (the Park Building in the image above).
  • Users will probably only read the description, but there is an option Link to more info by creating a page with much more information that allows for styling, embedded media, and more (or linking to a preexisting one). That’s what the green “Next: Begin Exploring this Site” link on each geostory takes you to.

More about georeferencing

GeoStoryteller works by georeferencing places — assigning latitude/longitude coordinates so the place can be mapped by GIS services like Google Maps or Open Street Maps.

Now that georeferencing is actually useful and usable, I’m seeing more and more digitized primary sources come into our mobile devices from libraries and archives. One of the first big projects was City of Lit from the University of Iowa (web app / mobile app). If you live in a big city, the HistoryPin app is a lot of fun to use. Many libraries and archives are contributing to HistoryPin as channels. Also, Wikipedia uses georeferences on articles (see upper right). One of my favorite ways to explore is by opening up the Articles iPhone app and selecting Nearby. So cool.

It’s always tough to get our historical sources in the public eye, but projects and tools like these expand your potential readership far beyond your walls or even your own website. I myself am of the splatter approach to digital collections. If you scanned it once, get the most bang for your buck by splattering it across the internet in as many venues as possible: your own site, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Internet Archive, HistoryPin, etc. This way, you promote your institution, contribute your high-quality materials (with context!) on high-traffic media, and cast a wide net for interested researchers and inspired passersby. Sharing is caring!

Sketchy mocks

In designing the new Lloyd Sealy Library website, I used Balsamiq, a sketchy wireframing tool, to plan page layouts, information architecture, and user flows. I like the sketchiness particularly. Too often, group-approved design gets bogged down in colors and fonts, but charmingly drawn mocks like these free your conversations from the details so you can focus on the important elements of user experience.

Here’s a real mock I used to design a page on a forthcoming project (click for larger):

fake mock

 

I use the desktop software ($79), but there’s also a cloud-based web app ($12+/mo), which is amazingly well done. There are some very nice touches, like the kinds of items you can drag ‘n’ drop to create your mock, the auto-filltext that appears when you type ‘Lorem,’ and the ‘What should I make for dinner?’ option in the Help menu (really). It’s not the speediest tool, but I have found that added friction allows time for you to really consider what you’re designing. Perhaps William Morris phrased it best: “You can’t have art without resistance in the materials.”

Related reading: Bethany Nowviskie, “Resistance in the Materials” (2013)