If you write for the web, you may find this tip sheet helpful. It discusses making your page easily scannable, optimizing for search engines, and (my favorite, as you may know) good reasons not to write “click here.”
I’m in the Atlanta airport for a good while, waiting for my flight to San Antonio for Open Repositories, so I shelled out for wifi access. And now that I have, I’m going to find things to do online until the last possible minute or until my battery dies!
One good way to pass time online today is to head over to the Ann Arbor District Library’s fabulous catalog, which is newly enhanced with the ability to tag, review, and more. John Blyberg describes his work on the development here. Be sure to look at the catalog cards, too, if you haven’t yet, and at their website in general, which won LAMA’s 2006 Best in Show award for library websites in its budget category.
I finally started cataloging my books on LibraryThing over the holiday break. Two things struck me immediately.
1. Library Thing is better than any other website I have ever used. Why?
The sign-up process is identical to the sign-in process! What a concept! Reason enough to upgrade to a paid account and support them! No e-mail address, no birthday, real name, state of residence, areas of interest, name of pet, or favorite color! I’m way over my personal quota for exclamation points. The only hitch in the sign-up proceedings was me pausing to read the text several times and thinking, “yeah, right, I wonder what will happen once I click submit.”
Of course, once you have an account, you can provide more information, including an e-mail address, which, as LT points out, may be useful if you forget your password.
2. On a more sobering note, there is no comparison between the search results for the two most prominent data sources in LibraryThing, Amazon and LC. Search for 1984 and 8 of the first 10 Amazon results are for the book by George Orwell (the other two are for Cliffs and Spark Notes). Even after viewing complete information for the first 10 LC results, I couldn’t always figure out why the item made the list. There was nothing by George Orwell on the first page. At the other end of the spectrum, a search on “lear nonsense” (without the quotes) brings up a relevant but solitary result in the LC catalog, while Amazon’s first 10 results are all–surprise!–Edward Lear’s nonsense poems and drawings. Guess which source I try first?
One of my favorite blogs right now is Creating Passionate Users, by authors of O’Reilly’s Head First series.
Yesterday’s post led me to Choice = Headaches at the blog Joel on Software. The entry is about the obscene number of ways to turn off a Windows Vista machine (up to 15 by Joel’s count), but it’s really about interface design, user experience, and choice, and there is a lot in there that we librarians would be wise to take to heart.