A state-wide library management service (LMS) can be an incredibly advantageous for both libraries and users. Libraries SA’s OneCard Network is a brilliant example where a centralised LMS can work better for the community.

From a library user perspective, a state-wide LMS like OneCard Network can be incredibly beneficial, as it allows library users to browse the catalogues of libraries across the state and gain access to over 4 million items (Libraries SA, 2019). It also gives them the ease of borrowing and returning catalogued items wherever is most convenient for them. This makes the library a much more easily accessible place from a user perspective.

Studies have shown that it can also be beneficial from an economic perspective. The creation of an LMS for twelve Welsh university libraries proved that joining together cut down costs thanks to sharing the load, as well as allowing for further discounts on purchases that could be bought and shared between universities. It was also estimated that hardware costs in relation to updating systems would also be much more cost-effective when shared between the libraries (Owen, 2016). Economically, it is clear to see how sharing the cost of a joint system can save libraries money in the long run. This would also be incredibly beneficial for smaller, likely more rural libraries with limited funds. By pooling funds and having access to the funds of larger libraries, this opens up the possibility of what users can gain access to in rural areas.

Library cataloguers can also benefit from centralised LMS’. Open Source LMS’ allow for the automation of a lot of tasks, including things like acquisition, classification, and other cataloguing tasks (Totar and Katageri, 2018). This allows for staff to do less repetitive tasks and focus on doing tasks that are more worthwhile of their time.

References

Libraries SA. (2019). About One Card. Libraries SA OneCard Network. Retrieved from: https://onecard.network/client/en_AU/sapubliclibraries/?rm=ABOUT+ONE+CARD0%7C%7C%7C1%7C%7C%7C0%7C%7C%7Ctrue

Owen, G. (2016). “Delivering a shared library management system for Wales”, Library Management, Vol. 37 No. 6/7, pp. 385-395. Retrieved from: https://doi-org.access.library.unisa.edu.au/10.1108/LM-04-2016-0032

Totar, S. V., & Katageri, B. (2018). Value added services in library management system: Marching towards an era of open source software. International Research : Journal of Library and Information Science, 8(3) Retrieved from: https://access.library.unisa.edu.au/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.access.library.unisa.edu.au/docview/2277566359?accountid=14649

This week’s task is to read two articles and describe how I have used five elements whilst creating my own website. The articles I chose to read are “8 tips to improve your library’s website design” by Piola and “What do the best museum websites do?” by Pat Hadley.

From Hadley: visitor focussed design – what good sites do.

Hadley breaks down what good websites do into three categories: “practical”, which are practical, crucial details such as when and where, cost, etc, “stuff”, which is the actual services offered, and “feeling”, which is how the website and the service should make the user feel. When building my website, I made sure to look at what I was creating through this lens. If something was being put on a page it had to fall into one of those categories and be either informative or add to how I wanted to sell my library.

From Piola: cut links.

Piola recommends that some library websites will put far too many links on a page, cluttering the page and giving too many options to the user when they only need one or two links to get where they’re going. As a result, my website – with the exception of the events page – only has one or two links per page. The events page does have more, but that is because each event links to an Eventbrite page.

From Hadley: layout and images.

Hadley argues that images on a GLAM website are crucial, but the three strongest types are images of the building or grounds, images of the collection itself, and images of visitors. When using images for decoration I ensured to follow these guidelines. I used images of Calgary Public library on the homepage and hours and location page to represent my library. I also used images of people reading or accessing books as a stand-in for visitors to my library. And on the homepage under the search bar I included a large picture of a bookshelf as a representation of the books within the library.

From Piola: watch for jargon.

Piola recommends steering clear of industry jargon in the text of the website so to avoid confusing customers and making them think, but also making the text more difficult to read. Instead I used plain English with smaller words, so that even users with learning disorders or low reading levels would be able to understand what was written.  

From Piola: simplify searching.

Three recommendations were made by Piola in regard to searching on the website:

• “Allow users to toggle between a catalog and website search
• “Include the search bar on every page (like a header or footer)
• “Make searching prominent on the homepage” (2018).

While I did not include the first recommendation on my website, I did use the second and third. On every page I included a search bar in the header just under the navigation, so that the user could predict where it would be from page to page. And on the homepage, while it was sitting under the navigation, it was overlaying an image of the collection, which drew more attention to it, and included a link underneath to access and search the library catalogue.

References

Hadley, P. (2017). What do the best museum websites all do? Retrieved from https://blog.cogapp.com/what-do-the-best-museum-websites-all-do-8d6727504605

Piola. (2018). 8 tips to improve your library’s website design. Retrieved from https://meetpiola.com/8-tips-to-improve-your-librarys-website-design/

This week I am reflecting on using WordPress, with a focus on what is easy to use, what the challenges are, and how suitable I think it is for developing a website.

My time using WordPress for this class has been a mix of positive and negative experiences. This has made building this blog and my library website an interesting challenge to find the balance between creating my vision and the limitations of WordPress when it’s free.

I personally quite enjoy the creative process of building a website. I’m a very visual person and so having the challenge of building something where the visual appearance is such a crucial part of the whole project has been really exciting for me. I like that what I can build with WordPress is effortlessly visually appealing, especially if you use one of the prebuilt layouts the website offers. Those same layouts give you a starting point to bounce off from in building a page, and I have both used them with my own personal alterations as well as taken elements from them to build a page from scratch. I like that I have the opportunity to go in either direction.

Where I find WordPress has its limitations is that it’s limited by what I assume is types of websites the company thinks its users are likely to make. WordPress began primarily as a blog platform (Haefele and Kroski, 2015), and while that is still offered to users as a website to build, when looking at the pre-built page layouts offered to free users it feels more like they’re catering more towards business websites, and probably small businesses in particular, offering multiple contact pages, about pages, service and portfolio pages, and only one blog page. When I was building my blog I actually found it more difficult to update and alter the visual aspects of the blog than it was altering the visual aspects of my library website, and so it feels like blogs are more of a second thought or more of an addition to websites.

While I obviously cannot comment on if the paid version of WordPress would change my opinion of using the website, what I can say is that I see its appeal from the perspective of someone wanting to build a website with little to no knowledge of HTML coding. I don’t think it makes the best blogging platform, and while I think libraries can and will be able to use it effectively, to what extent will probably depend on how much said library is willing to pay for their website.

References

Haefele, C., & Kroski, E (2015). WordPress for Libraries. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

For this week’s topic I chose to look at the Marion Library Service (n.d.) website. The website covers all three libraries for the Marion City Council: Marion Cultural Centre, Cove Civic Centre and Park Holme Library. The library website is actually not its own website, but part of the Marion City Council website. The council’s libraries can be found in the venues and facilities section of the website, found on the navigation bar at the top of the page.

The homepage of the Marion City Council website makes the library pages easy to find. The homepage does not follow the ‘F’ page format, but instead is formatted in a way that would be well suited to mobile devices as it has a header, the contents are broken into different sections, such as a search bar, a larger, more simple navigation menu with images, and a section about community events, followed by the footer. This homepage follows a lot of the recommendations made by the Government of Western Australia (n.d.) for making webpages accessible, most notably in the brightly coloured images used in the secondary navigation section which aid people who have difficulty reading text, and the contrasting colours used in the website design (the majority of headers are green, with blue for the text in the top navigation bar, dark grey for the content text and a white background).

Similarly, the library page on the website contains more of those simple navigation images for catalogue searching, library membership, events and library locations. The library page is set out in an ‘F’ shape with a navigation bar at the top, a menu down the left-hand side, and content in the centre of the page. It also has a bread crumb trail at the top of every page, so users know where they are while they’re browsing.

The menu bar running down the left side of the page is unfortunately cluttered and confusing. This menu has all  the links for all of the pages for venues and facilities – sixteen different links – with the library page’s secondary links in the middle of this menu. This makes navigating with that menu particularly confusing for anyone unfamiliar with the website. Gambrell (2015) suggests that navigation should be kept simple, because too many options make it difficult for users to find what they need, and this is definitely the case here. That being said, there are only seven links listed under the library heading, which follows the rule of seven, and from the council homepage it only takes three clicks to get to the library catalogue. So while this navigation menu may be off-putting for its sheer size, if a user is lucky enough to stumble across what they’re looking for, they can at least be directed to where they need to go on the website without too much more hassle.

Overall this website is generally well designed. There is a duty of care here shown for community members accessibility issues, as shown by the website colours and the clear images used for navigation. Where the website becomes difficult to use is in the sheer amount of options from the navigation menu making it too much trouble for a user to find what they’re looking for.

References

City of Marion. (n.d.). Libraries. Retrieved from https://www.marion.sa.gov.au/venues-and-facilities/libraries

Gambrell, K. (2015). 7 best practices for creating a user friendly library website. Retrieved from https://www.ebsco.com/blog/article/7-best-practices-for-creating-a-user-friendly-library-website 

Government of Western Australia. (n.d.). Tips to make your website accessible. Retrieved from http://www.disability.wa.gov.au/Global/Publications/Understanding%20disability/Built%20environment/Accessible%20websites%20checklist.pdf

This week I will be looking at the article The dark side of Alexa, Siri and other personal assistants by Rozita Dara. The question posed for this week is “discuss the security issues raised in this article, current and/or future, for a library.”

In recent years, the world has seen technology evolving to include the digital personal assistant. This technology has been made a useful tool in both home and professional spaces. From the perspective of the library industry, this is a tool that could be seen as being greatly convenient as well, with the potential to expand beyond basic commands such as environment control like lighting or heating and cooling, to helping patrons with detailed research questions and book recommendations with the use of artificial intelligence.

It can be easy to simply consider a tool like this as potential time saver, allowing for staff to do other work while the AI answers customer queries, but it should not be forgotten that this technology is not so different from any other computer a patron might access. Digital security should therefore be high on the priority list of any library looking into this kind of technology (San Nicolas-Rocca and Burkhard, 2019).

For artificial intelligence of this calibre to, for example, recommend a book title to a patron, it must first be given access to certain kinds of information in order to find a title to recommend. This information may only be as simple as that “romance novel”, but over time and with extra use, these personal assistants can create pictures of the patrons it is interacting with based on whatever information is fed to them. Furthermore, if the library is also giving the digital assistant access to the catalogue and perhaps even access to information attached to patron library cards, then it wouldn’t take much to link queries from patrons to borrowed items to private information.

Dara (2019) points out that the biggest issue with these kinds of digital assistants is that they are vulnerable to hacking or even malfunctioning, recording private conversations and sending them to complete strangers. In libraries in South Australia, often patron’s library cards contain home addresses and driver’s license numbers, which risk exposure if a digital assistant fails in protecting that information. Effectively, if libraries aren’t careful, this information could end up anywhere without the patron’s permission or even knowledge.

Considering this, libraries looking to invest in this kind of technology must strongly weigh up the risks with the rewards. They must ask themselves questions like, “will patrons have to sign a form allowing themselves to be recorded by the AI?” And, “should patron information be made accessible to the AI at all?” As well as, “how will the community feel about being constantly listened to by AI within the building at all times, even when they’re not interacting with it?” What it comes down to in the end, is that librarians have to consider what the patrons will be willing to potentially give up for the sake convenience.

References:

Dara, R. (2019). The dark side of Alexa, Siri and other personal assistants. Retrieved from http://owll.massey.ac.nz/referencing/apa-interactive.php

San Nicolas-Rocca, T., & Burkhard, R. J. (2019). Information Security in Libraries. Information Technology and Libraries, 38(2), 58-71. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i2.10973