Ab’s Blog

I didn’t blog very much this month; the start of the school year is always a hectic time and we had what must have been a record number of technical problems with our e-resources. Besides that, I’ve been preparing for Cornell’s Digital Preservation Workshop, which requires completion of a pre-workshop tutorial and the reading of a couple hefty articles beforehand. The tutorial is very worthwhile on its own, and even if you’re not into the whole digital preservation thing you might be interested in the Chamber of Horrors, which illustrates media obsolescence, and the Timeline of Digital Technology and Preservation, which reveals, among other things, the original name of IBM and the identity of the first computer bug (it was a moth).

I hope to blog about the workshop, but will probably do so after the whole thing is over since I’ll have a long commute to and from Ithaca all week.

D2D is the new thing, popping up recently on Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog and the program for NISO’s upcoming workshop.

What is it? Simply an acronym for “discovery to delivery,” the process that a person goes through to get anything from a peer-reviewed research article to a new pair of Manolo Blahniks. Four steps are often outlined: discovery, location, request, delivery.

Unfortunately, and for many reasons, much of the free web does a better job at providing a seamless D2D experience than libraries. What with our catalogs, database lists, metasearching, ILL systems, next gen catalog overlays, and tools and technologies yet to be developed (not to mention links into library resources from sites like Google and Windows Live Academic), you can expect the D2D puzzle to occupy the profession and show up on blogs, programs, and journal pages for the foreseeable future.

How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better? –Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think

I love this quote! There are a lot of things I can’t control, but this makes me feel good simply about adding some alt text to a web page. In fact, when Krug addresses fears that accessibility will mean more work, he mentions missing alt text as an example of something that is easy to fix.

Which is why it was so disheartening to hear recently that our metasearch vendor, which is supposed to release an upgrade soon that will significantly address accessibility problems, is planning to use the same generic alt text for all its resource icons rather than alt text specific to each icon. How this is supposed to help someone using a text browser or screen reader is beyond me, especially given that customers can create and add any icons they want. If the plan goes forward (and it may change), patrons will be clued into the fact that there is some sort of graphic associated with the record but–sorry!–they won’t be able to figure out exactly what it is.

Using alt text is the baby talk of accessibility. If you can’t get the other stuff right, or you’re still learning about it, or your organization doesn’t support something you’d like to do, at least get your alt text right, for goodness’ sake.

Most of what I know about web design and development I’ve learned from New Riders books. I’m finally reading Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, a book on web usability that practices what it preaches. (Those of you who have read the 1st edition might want to get hold of the new edition, which includes 3 new chapters.)

Other books on my shelf:
Designing with Web Standards by Jeffery Zeldman, just out in a 2nd edition
Eric Meyer on CSS by Eric Meyer, of course
Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark

There are many more titles available on topics from Photoshop to writing for the web to search engine optimization.

I should also give a nod to A List Apart (the other ALA), where these authors and many more contribute useful articles that are free of charge.