I made a Twitter account for my Pi, @welbegone. I set it up using a super-simple Pi + Twitter tutorial featuring the Python library Tweepy.
So far, it has only tweeted processor temperatures and light readings:
Next steps: hook it up with some more interesting data!
I’ve previously posted on the 70 lines of CSS I used to upgrade the look of John Jay’s LibGuides. They look better, but still not super great — still very LibGuidesy. We had migrated the John Jay website over to Drupal 7 because the CMS makes editing easy for all the librarians, but we have so much content on LibGuides — which get 5,000+ views per week — that it would be silly, at this point, to try migrating the content and dealing with hundreds of links to redirect. It’s a system all the librarians know well and can use with ease; students navigate them fine; and I haven’t found a module with the granular organization scheme LibGuides provides. It does take some TLC to liven up their appearance, though.
I’ve taken a look at some lovely LibGuides redesigns at VCU and UMich, as well as Stanford’s LibGuides departure.
Searching for ‘libguides’ on GitHub yields a handful of results, including this nice test design from VCU Libraries (whose homepage I’ve been admiring, too):
Of note:
I think they’ve done some finessing to the mobile view, too. (LibGuides currently detects browsers in order to present the mobile view automatically, making responsive design impossible.)
Their custom CSS is 320 lines long and available on GitHub.
Like us, University of Michigan libraries have stripped out even the mere memory of LibGuides’ gradients. Instead, they’ve opted for a really nice flat look with a restrained, Martha Stewart-approved color scheme. Still very LibGuidesy, but bearable, branded, and familiar. It’s about 220 lines of custom CSS. (If you’re looking to get inspired by any custom job on LibGuides, the custom CSS is actually just embedded at the end of the HTML header.)
Stanford is phasing out LibGuides. Instead, the library website offers topic guides and course guides, all within the customized Drupal CMS. They have a blog post from January 2012 briefly describing the process of designing their new guides for six personas. I’m not sure if they’re using a specific module or if it’s simply a content type.
Their LibGuides are actually still online and apparently being used, but they also migrated content over. So some appear to be duplicated, and some links in the new topic guides still lead to the old LibGuides. Not sure what’s going on. (XML export?) Anyway, here’s one example:
Instead of a line of tabs at the top, there’s a table of contents on the left, which makes more sense yet is somehow less visible. The function of the ToC links wasn’t immediately clear to me the way that skeuomorphic tabs are. On the plus side, all ‘tabs’ load at once (see source code) — so switching between them doesn’t require loading another page.
The user’s experience in the new guide template can vary widely. In exhaustive guides, the content of each tab can fast approach Wall of Text status, as in the Medieval Studies topic guide above. But others, like the Tel Aviv History guide (gosh, they get specific), offer digestible pages punctuated with images and section breaks.
One thing I haven’t touched on is the landing page for LibGuides. Ours looks a bit messy (“Display ALL the information!”), but our in usability tests, students seem to want to scan/hunt rather than click deeper into subject areas or use the search box, surprisingly. Still, should we want to tidy up, all three libraries mentioned exemplify excellent categorization and display of their guides.
Any other good examples?
Recently, I’ve been struggling to come up with a project to pursue using my Raspberry Pi and/or Arduino (assembled at an NYC Resistor class over the weekend). Because I’m quite the tyro and need a lot of handholding before striking out on my own, I have been browsing many inspirational step-by-step tutorials and thinking, How can I librar-ify this? And no, not just for an excuse to tinker during work hours, but also because I know that there are a million and one uses for a baby computer or microcontroller in the context of an academic library — if only I could dream them all up!
Here are a few I’ve been mulling over:
At the Sunlight Foundation, a vintage voltmeter is repurposed to count how many lobbyists are registered each week using a Raspberry Pi. (I particularly like the vintage-inspired meter face.)
Librarify it! Using a reference interaction tracker that we aspire to implement and test this summer, we could get a quick visualization of how busy the library or reference desk or computer lab is.
A Raspberry Pi and Arduino UNO power a server room monitor that tracks temperature, humidity, and light.
Librarify it! The same thing, but in our server room, not that guy’s.
Adafruit’s “internet of things” little printer uses a thermal receipt printer for whatever you please.
Librarify it! Search or scan a book, get a printout of information using an API from CUNY+ or LibraryThing or Google Books?
The “Tabulatron,” which uses the Arduino microcontroller, is an easy way to count patron interactions with the push of a button, sending the results to a Google Drive spreadsheet instantly. Tim Ribaric and Jonathan Younker at Brock University created this and wrote a tutorial for the Code4Lib journal.
Librarify it! Already librarified!! Perhaps the counter could include a “low-level panic” button, for when a librarian at the reference desk is overwhelmed with patrons and needs back-up.
What else can we think of? What frontiers have I completely missed?
On Global Women Wikipedia Write-In Day, I was extremely impressed with user Dsp13’s lists of red links — lists of notable women that hadn’t yet been written about on Wikipedia. I used that page as a springboard to write about some notable women in American history, like the wonderful Agnes Surriage Frankland. Dsp13 took these lists of names from resources like Famous American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, signifying the notability of the listed names and giving editors a place to start their research.
I wanted to do something similar for printing history, a research interest of mine. Here is a red link list I cobbled together. As it turns out, there are tons of other red link lists, too! I’m not sure how other people are generating them — probably from databases or other lists already in digital form. (Any info?) But many good resources are in book form, sometimes keyboarded but likely scanned and OCR’d. To make my red link lists, I’m taking indexes from scanned books and generating lists in wiki format for my user page.
Now you can get a quick visual of how many of these entities still need to be written up!
Note that some entities might be notable, and some might not be. And of course, some blue-linked wiki pages might not describe the right entity or might lead to a disambiguation page. Regardless, it’s a place to start!
Last Friday, I attended Computers and Crowds: Unexpected Authors and Their Impact on Scholarly Research at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, an excellent event organized by the LACUNY Emerging Tech Committee, LILAC, and OLS.
My notes are available as a very messy PDF of my scribbles made with Paper (iPad app). Another version of the presentation slides by Paul Zenke and Kate Peterson is also online under the title “Black Hats, Farms, and Bubbles.”
