Librarian Avengers - Page 44 of 54 - Pugilistic Periodicalistas

March 21, 2005

Makin’ coffee

When you grow up and own a house you will discover that houses, like weblogs, hairstyles, pets, and biceps, require maintenance. Often, this maintenance comes in the form of a large man who likes to bowl arriving at your home at 7:30 in the morning to resurface your floors. Assuming you are female and have issued social-class-indicators such as “hey man” and “shit it’s early,” you will be pounded companionably on the back and asked for coffee.

Herein lies a difficulty. In the hope of being judged as a comrade and therefore avoiding the spurious charges and bill-padding that are the norm for your ivy-covered neighborhood, you have opened yourself up to requests for coffee. However, all of this back-thumping and dude-ing has been a ruse. You are really a cuisinart-owning rhododendron-tending yuppie who only drinks tea.

Tea. You can’t offer this man tea. If you offer him tea, you might as well come down the stairs in a ballgown carrying a Persian cat. My god, your very house is at stake. He could use the cheap leveling compound if he thinks you don’t know any better. You have to find coffee.

Ohthankgod. You have coffee. Sort of. In the back of the cupboard is some instant that you keep for when your parents visit. Maybe he won’t notice. You make it extra strong and dump in a bunch of sugar to mask the taste. He calls you sweetie and says thanks. Sweetie? Shit. Now the girl thing is going to kick you in the ass. He’s probably down there screwing up the water/concrete ratio right now.

March 17, 2005June 1, 2011

SXSW

I’m back from webgeek megaconference South by Southwest in steamy Austin, TX. For all y’all librarians out there, SXSW Interactive attracts designers, web standards cheerleaders (closed tags, closed tags, rah rah rah!), and I’m-famous-online types for five days of geek panels and heavy drinking. One of things I got out of the conference was a strong feeling of guilt for not taking better care of my website. So, once my headache subsides you can expect big changes. Big!

Until then, I’m just glad to get back to the cat and my G5.

February 25, 2005April 29, 2013

Thaw already. damn.

Northeastern living. Deer tracks on the frozen pond. Frozen gas tank. It kind of balances out.
So this has nothing to do with anything, but here’s some stuff:

Listening to the White Stripes obsessively. obsessively. ob. sess. iv. ly. Yes, still.
Another argument for moving to a real city: Urban golf. I love this guy.
I might go contra dancing tonight. It seems like fun, and there’s fuckall to do here. I hereby renounce any street cred I may have accumulated over the years. Sigh.
My secret boyfriend Jon Stewart is coming to campus and I can’t afford tickets. You would think he’d hook a sister up, but no.
My cat is a demonic armchewing bastard. Any suggestions?
I’ll write some more stuff about library websites and web design soon. I’m kind of drained of wrath right now. Gotta go recharge my batteries by taunting small children and defacing public property.

February 8, 2005May 29, 2019

Counterweight to snark

I’m typing with my face today due to a stupidity-induced thumb injury from, I think, painting my basement. Homeowners beware.

In the meantime, just to show that I’m not all thorns and lemons, here are some good websites. Good in that attainable way. You will notice that these are mostly not library sites, but I hope you will enjoy the parallels between, say, a really clean weblog about t-shirts, and a really clean list of community activities.

Decent design example #1

The New York Public Library’s Main Page

Good things:

A nod to the principles of graphic design – a grid is established, everything is on one page, so no scrolling. A bit font-y, but not too bad. Clean and reasonable.
Respect for web traditions. Contact link, search, hours up top, copyright statement at the bottom.
There are tons of links, but they are separated by negative space and grouped to reduce clutter. There are only links to things the public might care about. If you want info about their current grants or whatever you have to dig down a bit, because fewer people care. I sure don’t.
User-friendly labeling. “Pictures, Photos, & Maps Online” rather than “The Boogaboo Collection” Thank you. As a user, I like pictures. I don’t know Mr. Boogaboo and I don’t want to.
Visually consistent (at least within this main page). The logo matches the icons which match the features. Don’t click on “Teens” or it will all go to hell.

Decent Design example #2

Preshrunk (hipster t-shirt weblog)

Good things:

This is negative space, my friends. As a user, it calms you, soothes you. Makes you feel a bit less like you are being attacked by dozens of people who all want your attention. Feel the negative space? Ohm…
Look! A clear focal point for each easily-distinguished item. It’s an image! A high-quality image! Not clip art! A visually consistent size and presentation for each image! Don’t you feel safe and warm?

Decent Design example #3

Planet Dog

Good things:

Great info architecture. What section are you in? It’s obvious! Your location is the only highlighted thing on the page. These guys aren’t out there trying to get you to “Find Databases” or click on “Interlibrary services”. Do you want a leash? Click on leashes. Do you want to know how the company works out contracts with various wholesalers? Of course you don’t. Click on leashes.
Here is a really full website that still seems calm and peaceful. It’s that negative space and consistent design thing again.
Notice all of the images? Aren’t they nice? Nobody downloaded those from Microsoft. Notice how they have their backgrounds dropped out? This gives them a consistent look and reduces visual clutter. If you can’t make, attain, or afford images that look this good than don’t use images. Use a clean CSS based layout instead…

Decent Design example #3

A List Apart (the other ALA)

Good things:

Look ma! A simple clean layout, and only one image up top. No need to keep a Photoshop maven on staff. Like it? There’s more.
This site changes its look every day. Why? Because they use CSS and it’s easy. Still, each design is minimalist, standards-compliant, and simple to navigate.

Finally, here are some books if you’re into that kind of thing…

Usability for the web [link]

Information Architecture [link]

Don’t make me think! [link]

Designing websites for every audience [link]

February 6, 2005May 29, 2019

More on lousy digital library design

Thanks for all of the kind comments on the previous post. They really helped balance the freaking out I had to do when a kind well-meaning soul posted this link as an example of a REALLY GOOD children’s website.

Ok. Let’s go through this again. Slowly. This time I’m going to spell it out.

Anyone can make a website. The web is the most democratic publishing forum ever conceived. But, unfortunately, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you are the best person to do it. It is an unpleasant fact that most library websites, most digital libraries, most catalogs and electronic collections are badly designed.

And by badly designed, I mean this. Ugly. Ill-conceived. Verbose. Inaccessible. Acronym rich. Confusing. Lofty. Unnecessarily complex. Deprecated. Self-absorbed. Low-quality. Pointless. Patronizing.

Are you still with me? Remember, I’m being a bitch so that you don’t have to.

There is a tendency in the library community to blow sunshine up each other’s asses, as though our intent to do good were enough. As though our good works shouldn’t be held to the same standards as commercial products because we are Nice. People don’t seem to criticize each other’s work in this profession. Which makes for a perfectly lovely working environment where you can find yourself producing piles of junk because all you have heard is happytalk from supportive colleagues. And that’s not Nice. Nope. Not at all. That’s painful and embarrassing and rather cruel.

You would tell a friend if she had toilet paper on her shoe, right? Gentle criticism (not my specialty, obviously) has a place in any relationship, especially when the stakes are high. When your TP-shoed friend is about to go up on stage in front of a bunch of elementary school kids, they probably aren’t going to listen to her charming and educational speech. They are going to see the toilet paper and turn into a pack of hyenas.

And it’s a shame, because the Internet Children’s Digital Library (and the gajillion sites like it with smaller budgets) have the potential to become popular resources if they will only make the connection between quality of content and quality of interface. Like so many digital collections, they have great ideas, like sorting books by color, but they don’t have the skill or the perspective to realize these ideas. And they don’t have the humility to hire someone who does. So up they go in front of the auditorium with a big wad of TP dragging behind them.

January 25, 2005April 22, 2014

Designing for hyper-attentive cyborg children

I got this in my email today:

What children can teach us: Lessons learned from the trenches of digital libraries“…developing digital libraries that support young people in querying, browsing, and reading scanned materials.”

It all sounds very impressive until you click the link. Look at that thing! It’s like getting stabbed in the eyeballs with suck! How can these people sleep at night?

This is a perfectly good children’s resource that is absolutely hidden from children. What is the focal point of the page? The word “Advanced” forgodsake. Why are there four search options? Do they actually think children care enough to distinguish between different search criteria? Who are these children? Can I have one?

I can’t even begin to list the mistakes they are making in this interface. Where is the content? I see three books. Why is there so much text? I don’t want to read that badly-formatted crap, and I’m a grown-up. Why is 98% of the navigation dedicated to links that are of absolutely no interest to children? Executive Summary? Yeah, my kid’s gonna click on that one. Why didn’t they hire a professional web designer? They make a huge deal about how kids “designed” the site, but they didn’t bother to honor those kids’ contributions by hiring a decent web developer. They’ve got more than 5 million dollars, they can afford it. In the time it took to write their complete curatorial policy (conveniently linked on the FRONT PAGE) they could have at least changed the default link color.

Once you actually find the content (just click “Simple Search” and chase the badly-written JavaScript pop-up around the screen until it works! It’s obvious! Cyborg children love to search!) the interface settles down a bit. The links related to the grant go away, and the library experiments with some innovative ways to find books, by color, length, etc. Good stuff. Except except except the graphics are so shitty and the labels are so poorly thought-out (“Real Animal Characters” rather than “Animals”, “Imaginary Animal Characters” rather than “Pretend Animals”) that it just all falls apart.

This site was designed for librarians, not for children.

Humor me and compare it to nick.com (a favorite among the kids we researched in grad school). The big difference between the two is, on this site you can click absolutely anywhere and find something satisfying. You don’t even need to click. Information is conveyed by rollover sounds and animations. I’ve personally witnessed kids fight with each other over headphones in order to hear these sounds.

Look, I know I’m being an ass, and this is a great resource and these are good people and I’m going to get hate mail, but somebody has to say it.

It’s not enough that we are lovely librarians who care sooooo much about children. It’s not enough that we put all of this great content up on the interweb. It’s not enough that we are overworked researchers who will have to write tedious papers about the project to justify our tenure.

We need to run everything we do through a filter that asks: “If I click on this without a Master’s degree in Library Science, will it piss me off?” We need to acknowledge that design matters. We need to remove ourselves from our collections. We need to design websites that don’t mock the resources they contain. We need to do these things because otherwise all of our efforts are worthless. We need to design websites that don’t suck, because otherwise the kids that we care so much about are going to wander off and smoke crack. And it’s going to be our fault.

January 24, 2005

Weekend update

Highlights included:

Driving up a hill forward, yet sliding backward
The cat chasing a German Shepherd
Hey! That’s not yellow snow! That’s coolant!
Nicole hitting everyone with the Stick of Self-Awareness
Painting injury
A newly apendixless dad
Two more friends getting married – A plague of affection!

January 21, 2005October 9, 2011

Planned Parenthood bar crawl

I joined the Planned Parenthood drinking team last night, and attended their first ever pro-choice pub crawl.

Highlights included sliding condoms down the bar and engaging large construction workers on the topic of reproductive rights. Much fun was had by all, including the drunken gentlemen who thought we were rushing a sorority with our matching pink t-shirts. Alpha Gamma Roe, man.

For all you librarians out there, wow, what a way to raise the visibility of your infomation services. Why not start Librarian bar crawls throughout this land? I can see it now, schnockered crowds of library workers handing out community health and information flyers in our nation’s drinking establishments. Wear something funny, matching and visible, get a drink at the bar, say something really loud like “Librarians need liquor!” and just start talking to folks.

Social conservatives may use churches to spread their hardline social agendas, but more people go to bars, baby. Let’s take our librarianship to the streets. Let’s put information about Black History Month, HTML workshops, book clubs, and storyhour in the hands of The People.

Plus, beer!

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