Top of the web – January 2013

Kia ora, this year we will bring you information on what Christchurch City Libraries’ webpages and blog posts were popular each month. Satisfy your curiosity!

On the blog

31 January was our busiest day as Cats r us highlighted library cats. Also in the top 5:

• Crabby library bloggers celebrate 3000 posts
• Stepping lightly into twenty thirteen
• Rainy day brings new E-books for you!
• Best names in a novel. Ever.

Photos on Flickr

The last day of the month was our busiest day on Flickr as people enjoyed the library cat photos – especially this one of Barbara Collie and George.

Facebook favourites

Albums of photos are often the most popular on Facebook. Visuals rule the day. In January it was:

• Vero House demolition
• Wongi and Ikarus art
• Kia ora Christchurch, how are you looking this week?

 

‘bizarro breaking bad librarians’

Jason Scott is mad and he wants you to know it. In fact he’s bloody furious – people’s stuff is being deleted, the world’s nascent digital history is being destroyed, entire artforms are being erased and forgotten. But he and his “bizarro breaking bad librarian” friends “are going to rescue your shit” and if you’re really lucky it may even find its way into a museum.

Jason, @textfiles, is an archivist and historian with a particular interest in digital formats. He started out on BBS systems and has filmed a documentary about them. From there he started collecting textfiles and ascii art and this has developed into a network of archives. Some of the ascii art started out as teletype art and even typewriter art before being transferred to ascii.

Out of the Yahoo announcement that it would close down Geocities in 2009, the “human race coming online for the first time”, was born the Archive Team (not to be confused with archive.org) and his principles of RAGE (“I find hostility’s really worked out for me”), PARANOIA (trust no one with your data – companies are constantly being taken over and destroyed and with them goes your data) & KLEPTOMANIA (backup everything and download entire sites to protect them for posterity). With software such as the Archive Team Warrior, a virtual archiving appliance, they encourage site owners to capture their own sites to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts. But they can only grab public information and encourage everyone to make secure back-ups of all their private data. After hearing of the loss of the sole copies of recollections of deceased family members and entire family histories when Geocities was deleted we should all make this a priority. Recent projects include saving as much of MobileMe that they could get to – they have rescued 420 Terabytes of data over the past two years.

Jason also has a very famous cat Sockamillion @sockington.

 

Pizza tastes better than broccoli

So last week I went to the amazing Webstock conference in Wellington. I have gone to this most years and always there seem to be a few themes that seem to creep into many of the talks given. Because usually many of the speakers are American its not uncommon for the ‘themes’ to be heavily influenced by whatever is going on over there, but this is valuable because many of the trends we see in the US eventually make their way here as well. This year a major ‘theme’ that I picked up on is that the news media is broken.

Clay Johnson @cjoh talked about “industrialised ignorance” where a highly politicised media is based on affirming the reader in their existing beliefs, not in informing them. One of the stunning examples he gave was that of the leaked AOL document, The AOL Way, available as slides over on the Business Insider website. It demonstrates how every click that we make reinforces the demand for more of that type of content and therefore is an ethical choice. He showed how today ignorance is caused by the consumption of information, not by its lack, and recommends that we all go on an Information Diet, become a conscious consumer, shift our focus to the local and focus on producing quality content ourselves.

Miranda Mulligan @mirandamulligan was equally critical about the news media although more from a design perspective. She says that journalism is important for democracy but that too few journalists understand the current mediums. They need to understand how the Internet works, not to become developers, but to understand how their content will be consumed. She’s worked in the news media for years trying to teach them but it hasn’t worked so now is trying to get web designers to be journalists as she sees them as being “uniquely positioned to have global view on how the business works”.

Meanwhile Robin Sloan is a media inventor and writer. We have his book Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore, but his talk wasn’t about that. Rather he discussed some of the inventions of the past: printing and the development of italic script, movies and Edison’s rotating ‘black maria’ studio (one of his early ‘movies’ featured cats boxing) and his own invention of a new type of media, the ‘tap essay’ available in the Tapestry app for iOS.

I thought that all of these sessions were very interesting as they demonstrated how different sectors are handling the tremendous changes that have been occurring in information format and delivery over the past decade. I think that there’s a message there for librarians too, like journalists our job is still being transformed by the internet and we need to understand how it works, not just at a surface level, in order to be able to help our customers. Karen McGrane talked about throwing away any idea of there being a ‘primary’ medium and focusing on the content and that’s part of this too. Finally we need to become more mindful consumers of information so that we can better assist and teach our customers – if we all need to be on an information diet maybe librarians need to learn to be information dieticians.

 

Down with blobs, long live chunks!

The weaknesses of content management systems (CMS) have always been pretty obvious to me so I was not at all surprised when Karen McGrane referred to them as “content mis-management” in her content strategy workshop at Webstock this year. CMS just substitutes one set of problems for a set of different problems where people can just shove any old garbage onto the internet with no editorial process or standards. The CMS, she said, is “not your editorial staff, its your printing press” and therefore only a part of the content life-cycle, not the final solution as many try to treat it.

Blobs vs. Chunks

Separate content from form and create presentation-independent content. Don’t encode meaning through visual styling – instead, add structure and metadata to your content.

A big part of the problem is that we’ve gotten sucked in to believing that content creators need a MS Word-like WYSIWYG interface, but this allows them to dump unstructured ‘blobs’ of styled content onto the web. These blobs are inevitably unsustainable and in the face of the need to now re-style content for various forms of delivery, including but not limited to mobile, they are extremely limited.

What we need, Karen says, is systems that create more structure around content, to create content in reusable ‘chunks’, not amorphous ‘blobs’ and systems that can deploy the most appropriate content for the platform. So we need to create content packages: for example, we might have 2 or more variations on the page title, of different lengths or keyed to different audiences, a short and long page description, the page content itself,  appropriately structured with subheadings that can be reused as in-page contents links, several sizes of each relevant image and a range of metadata.

The content management system would then be set up to fit with the various tasks of its users and to publish the various chunks in the most appropriate way. Karen gave us ten ‘rules’ for content strategy:

 

Professional listening with Library Chat

There is a new podcast series called Library Chat: Conversations about the library world with professionals working in and around libraries. Listen to the first episode where Corin Haines, Manager of Digital Services – Libraries and Information at Auckland Council, talks to Jenica Rogers, the Director of Libraries at the State Library of New York at Potsdam. Topics covered include:

• staff development
• balancing the needs of seasoned staff and new recruits
• communication within the profession
• social media

 

Public Libraries Strategic Framework 2012 – 2017

The recently released Public Libraries of New Zealand – A strategic framework 2012-2017  “Charts the future of public libraries in New Zealand.  It is designed to help libraries, and their local councils to extend their services through new technology, and improve their efficiency through partnerships and alliances.” It is produced  by Local Government New Zealand and Public Libraries of New Zealand.

Some of the things the strategy highlights are libraries as:

• public civic spaces
• vibrant places of inspiration, debate and social interaction
• repositories of recorded knowledge and information about our cultural heritage
• significant conduit for services and information provided by government agencies and civil organisations
• places where reading for pleasure and lifelong learning is encouraged
• places of innovative services and rich content to meet the needs of users in the digital age

Have a read and see where public libraries in New Zealand are heading.

 

Professional reading: Digitising the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving biblical and extra-biblical texts in the world, are slated to be scanned with high-resolution multispectral imaging equipment and shared online, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Google announced …

The high-tech imaging of the scrolls, to be conducted with Google’s research and development operation in Israel, was originally conceived as part of an IAA initiative to conserve the thousands of delicate papyrus and parchment fragments and monitor their conditions much more accurately and noninvasively.

According to the IAA, the technology will also help scholars rediscover writing and letters that have “vanished” over the years. And “since we’re going to have the best possible images,” said Pnina Shor, the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls project manager, “we said, ‘Why don’t we take all the images, add to them all the translations, the transcriptions, the commentary and put them online?’” …
Read the rest of this article

Sargia Harrison
Information & learning

 

Press Display: New Search Features

Press Display is a database that provides full text access to 800+ newspaper titles from 76 Countries in 38 languages.  It includes a good selection of New Zealand papers including The Press, New Zealand Herald and Dominion Post.  Unlike other products that provide full text access to indexed articles,  Press Display provides access to newspapers complete with images, notices and adverts as they would appear in hard copy.

Press Display only has a 60 day archive of back copies though and attempting to use the search features has been a frustrating experience in the past.  Some recent changes have been made to Press Display’s search features that have improved the experience to the point where whilst there are still flaws relevant results can be retrieved.

New features allow the user to search across single or multiple titles from within a country.  For example this enables a search to be limited to the Press or Christchurch Mail, both or all New Zealand publications in the database.  Limits can be placed by choosing a date range to narrow results to a defined period and keyword results can be displayed by whether they were retrieved from the headline or body of the article.  Fans of Boolean searching can use an advanced search that offers the equivalent of the traditional And, OR, and Not operators and exact phrases can be searched.

Alan Seaton

Information & learning

 

Digital resources: a miscellany

Digital Library
There seems to be some confusion among staff as to what this location is.  This location is used for our electronic resources.  We like to have all our electronic resources available through the catalogue as it provides another access point for our customers.
The Digital Library displays like this in a search list:

Can be viewed online. Copy on shelf at Digital Library.

There is no physical copy this is just how Symphony will allow us to display this location.
The removal of International Newsstand
Part of Information Clearing House’s job is to find and add electronic resources which can aid in information provision.  It is also important to remove resources that are no longer performing in terms of usage and cost or if other alternatives can be found.

The decision was made to remove International Newsstand as the great majority of these newspapers are now available elsewhere.  The alternatives can be seen at  TRIM record 10/643386.  Access to International Newsstand ceased on the 30th of November 2010.

A new student resource: Student Research Center
Student Research Center is a new resource aimed specifically at students to allow simultaneous searching of all of EBSCO’s student databases. These include:

Academic Search Premier: a full-text database that  offers information on almost every area of academic study.

MAS Ultra–Public Library Edition: provides full text for nearly 350 periodicals covering general reference topics, including health, science, and the humanities.

Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre: includes magazines, newspapers, newswires, reference books and company information.

Health Source – Consumer Edition: health information including the medical sciences, food sciences and nutrition, childcare, sports medicine and general health.

Science Reference Center : access to a multitude of science-oriented content.  It  also contains biographies, a scientific dictionary, video resources, an image library and experiments.

This is a great resource to direct students to as it has all relevant EBSCO content in one place in an attractive interface. Through the Student Research Center, users can pre-determine which content sources (e.g., Magazines, Newspapers, Biographies, Country Reports, Film & Video) will be included with their search and even limit searches to an appropriate age group!

Colleen Finnerty

Serials & Preservation Librarian

 

Wildcard searching in TRIM

Searching for a document in TRIM and not sure of its exact title?

Using a wildcard might help.

• The asterisk wildcard ( * ) represents one or more unknown characters.   So, if you search for ‘bank*’ you will retrieve records containing the words bank, banks, banking, and other words that start with bank.

• The question mark wildcard ( ? ) represents a single unknown character.  This can be particularly handy when searching for words with alternative spellings – e.g. if you search for ’organi?ation’, the search will retrieve records containing organisation and organization.

You can use wildcard searching in text-based fields (e.g. Title and Notes), but not in date, time, or numeric fields.

Vanessa Tedesco
Upper Riccarton Library