Overdue Ideas

As part of the Lucero project I’m currently working on at the Open University, I’m looking at lots of library catalogue records. While exploring the first set of data I was playing with (around 25,000 records in MARC format) it struck me that one of the more recent library ‘search’ products might be helpful. These new products (sometimes known as ‘next gen’ (NG) discovery platforms) are being taken up by libraries to replace their (often aging, rarely pretty) ‘OPACs’ (online public access catalogues) which tend to be a web interface onto what is, at heart, a ‘business’ system – one that administers books, users, serials, and other library stuff.

These discovery platforms tend to work by taking an import of data from the library catalogue on a regular basis, and specialise in indexing the data, rather than the many other administrative tasks that the library catalogue hides. Using dedicated software, that isn’t worrying about any other functionality, these new platforms tend to be much faster returning search results, and give a lot of flexibility in how indexes are built on the data.

While many of the available products are commercial pieces of software (or increasingly, services), there are a couple of relatively high profile open source solutions –  VuFind and Blacklight. If you are interested in a comparison of these two systems, keep an eye on the CREDAUL at the University of Sussex (http://credaul.wordpress.com) which is looking at the both.

So I decided I’d try installing VuFind and use that to explore the data. VuFind is PHP based, but also makes use of the SOLR search platform, which runs on Java. It took me a couple of hours or so fiddling to get the whole thing working – but I thought that was pretty good going – by the end of it, I had my 25k records fully indexed, and was ready to use the system to explore the data.

All of this gave me an idea – this is something you can run on a laptop, and is a great way of looking at your library catalogue data – often exposing issues with the data that you can correct in the catalogue if you want to as well. So, I had the idea that at the next Mashed Library event (Mashspa in Bath) we could run a VuFind ‘bootcamp’, helping delegates get VuFind installations up and running.

Being an impatient sort, 29th October was far too long to wait to get started, so then I thought that maybe I could do a ‘virtual’ version of the bootcamp beforehand (and that would also make sure I was prepared on the day!). So, the idea is that I’m going to post weekly blog posts dealing with the installation of VuFind step by step. I’ll focus on Windows, but already have some people who are interested in doing an install on Linux and Mac OS X. Along side these, I’ll run weekly ‘support sessions’ where I’ll be online to try to help work through problems/issues that people are having – the idea is that these will be live sessions – although I don’t know whether that will be via chat, voice or something else.

Anyway, the starting point is this blog post, and this forum on the Mashed Library site. If you are interested in joining in, sign up to http://www.mashedlibrary.com/groups/vufind-virtual-bootcamp/ and follow along – I’m intending to post the first set of instructions within the week, with a support session to follow shortly after.

Finally if you are interested in the various ‘next gen’ discovery interfaces for libraries, I’d recommend having a look at this list of JISC projects http://code.google.com/p/jisclms/w/list that all deal with improving/experimenting with the library discovery interface and experience.

written by ostephens \\ tags: jisclms, mashlib

I’m working with the University of Oxford on a new project called ‘Sir Louie‘ (which has a website and a blog) to integrate Reading Lists with their online learning environment called WebLearn (which is Sakai under the bonnet). This project has some similarities to the JISC funded TELSTAR project I recently finished at the Open University – but with some different angles, approaches and different systems involved.

Sakai already has a ‘resource list’ functionality called the ‘Citation Helper‘ (which came out of the Sakaibrary project I first heard about at IGeLU 2006 – not 2008 as I originally stated  - thanks to Lukas for the correction to the date).

With the Sir Louie Project, the hope is we can further enhance the Citation Helper through some quite ‘loose coupling’ of various systems. In essence we want to enable:

• The addition of citations to a Citation Helper resource list from the ‘resource discovery’ system run by the library service at Oxford University called SOLO (actually Primo by Ex Libris under the bonnet)
• The addition of holdings/availability information to resources in a Citation Helper resource list so that students (or staff) can see at a glance what is available (and where)

The first part we are hoping to emulate the existing functionality the Citation Helper has for Google Scholar (described in this blog post). This adds an extra button to search results in Google Scholar to import the reference into a Citation Helper resource list. However, where Google Scholar seems to push the metadata across in a reasonably arbitrary format, instead we want to enable the Citation Helper to translate any citation formatted as an OpenURL – which should mean that the Citation Helper can then import citations from any database/search interface that provides OpenURLs for results.

The second part we are planning to use the Juice framework, which in turn is built on JQuery. The Juice framework is designed to enable additional functionality, generally in library systems, using relatively simple javascript. Juice has two main components:

• Metadefs
• Extensions

Metadefs enable Juice to grab relevant pieces of metadata from a webpage. Essentially it is a way of telling Juice where specific pieces of information are stored on a page – a typical example is to define where an ISBN is stored. So we will be creating a new Metadef for the Citation Helper screens. However, rather than simply creating a metadef that just works with Citation Helper, we are intending to create a metadef that understands COinS – a way of inserting an OpenURL into an html ‘span’ tag.

COinS are already used by a variety of systems, including the Zotero reference management software, and the LibX library browser plugin/toolbar – so if we add COinS to the Citation Helper lists (it already supports OpenURL), not only can we use it for our own purposes, but we are also enabling these existing applications to work with Citation Helper.

There has already been some work done in making Juice work with COinS as part of the VuFind metadef, so I’m hoping that it won’t be too much of a stretch to get this working with Citation Helper.

Once COinS has been added to the Citation Helper, and we have the metadef working, we can look at the Juice ‘extension’ we need to build. This will need to use metadata from the Citation Helper page – probably an identifier (or set of identifiers) such as ISBN, DOI, ISSN, etc. – and then query appropriate systems to get holdings/availability data back. Rather than build a query to each relevant system (and deal with any cross-site scripting issues that may arise) we are planning to write an additional piece of software here to mediate these requests.

We hope to use a standard format for holdings/availability data using the DLF-ILS ‘GetAvailability’ specification, and possibly looking at DAIA (Document Availability Information API) developed by Jakob Voss. We know Ex Libris (who provide the software for SOLO, and also the core library management system in use at Oxford) are committed to this approach (see the Ex Librian newsletter from 2009), and the DLF specification is also being used by other JISC funded projects, such as Summon4HN.

We are very interested in feedback on this approach – any issues people can spot in our approach, questions, or suggestions are very welcome – just leave a comment below.

written by ostephens

A quick post inspired by Chris Keene who recently asked:

On itunes, should classical music ‘Artist’ be the composer or conductor?

Since I had similar questions around entering classical music into iTunes I thought I’d just note down quickly the method I’ve settled on, and why.

iTunes isn’t really well designed (some would say I could stop right there) for handling music metadata beyond the basic stuff you might need for a collection of popular music. The data entry, and the browse interface, tends to focus on:

• Name (of track)
• Artist (single field)
• Album

While this seems to work relatively well for my collections of pop and jazz (although my jazz collection is small and I’m not so bothered about detailed metadata), it doesn’t do so well for my classical collection. I’m not sure this is a problem isolated to classical music, and I suspect it is about specific forms of music as well.

The type of thing I found didn’t work well was an album containing several pieces of music with multiple movements. So, for example, I had a CD of Anne-Sophie Mutter playing Mozart’s 3rd and 5th Violin Concertos, with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. The track listing on the CD looks something like this:

Konzert Für Violine Und Orchester Nr. 3 G-dur KV 216
1. Allegro
2. Adagio
3. Rondeau. Allegro

Konzert Für Violine Und Orchester Nr. 5 A-dur KV 219
4. Allegro Aperto
5. Adagio
6. Rondeau. Tempo di Menuetto

Unlike a typical pop album, this track listing is not a useful in terms of the ‘Album’ (CD). This is where we can immediately see the fact that the physical item (the CD) was an artificial way of bundling two pieces of music together. So the first thing I do is to treat the CD as being comprised of two albums – one of violin concerto no. 3 and one of violin concerto no. 5. Once I’ve separated the music from the physical constraints of the CD, there seems little benefit to treating this as a single ‘album’. This is not always the completely the case – ‘The Kreisler Album’ on which Joshua Bell plays a variety of pieces by Fritz Kreisler is probably still worth treating as an album – I tend to make these decisions on a piece by piece basis.

Back to Mozart and Anne-Sophie Mutter:

Having now got an iTunes Album of Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3, with the tracks:

1. Allegro
2. Adagio
3. Rondeau. Allegro

I could enter the details with “Violin Concerto No. 3″ as the Album title, and the movements as the track titles. I use the ‘Track Number’ to make sure the movements are going to play in the right order if I play the ‘album’.

I can add Mozart as the ‘Composer’, and I have to make a decision about ‘artist’ – in this case I’m most interested in the fact the soloist is Anne-Sophie Mutter, so this is what I go for, but equally well I could have entered Karajan or even the Berlin Philharmonic – again these decisions can only be made on an individual basis – iTunes just isn’t up to anything more here If I want to, I dump the rest of the ‘artist’ information in the ‘Comments’ field. My general rules would be to use the soloist if there is one, and the conductor for orchestral pieces, and if it is a chamber group I’d probably use their name – but these aren’t hard and fast rules – it’s a personal collection, not a library catalogue

However, even with all this information entered, I still found some irritations when using iTunes to browser my music collection. Although I could add the Composer to the browse interface, it is empty for almost all my non-classical music (and a pain to have an empty column taking up screen estate much of the time), and when sorting by Album, all the Symphonies/Concertos etc. bunch together (as the ‘Album’ is just called “Symphony No. 1″), so I end up having to flick between two columns to know what the piece actually is (i.e. to see the composer is Beethoven etc.)

So, I decided to add the composer information (abbreviated) into the Album title. So now rather than just “Violin Concerto No. 3″, I enter “Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 3″

This is what the entry for the 1st movement of the violin concerto looks like:

And this is how it looks in the iTunes browsing interface:

I have played around with adding numbers in at the start of the movement names (and in some cases the movements of a piece are explicitly numbered anyway), and overall it is far from perfect, but it works pretty well for me.

written by ostephens

I’m currently working with David Kay (and others) from Sero, and Paul Miller from Cloud of Data on a JISC commissioned Guide to Open Bibliographic Data for use by managers, practitioners and developers in the library community. The Guide, which is intended to synthesise information from existing sources, rather than do any new research, will support and will be enhanced in the implementation phase of the Resource Discovery Task Force vision.

This post isn’t really about the guide as such – but more about how such a document might be structured and navigated. It is intended that the basic structure for the guide is a series of  Use Cases – essentially scenarios in which a library/institution might publish some bibliographic data in an ‘open’ way. Each use case is made up of a number of (common) sections and subsections.

For example, each use case will have a ‘Benefits’ section, divided into several parts (subsections) describing the benefits to the Institution, the Library Service, Researchers, Students, etc. Each subsection will (probably) be relatively short, perhaps made up of a paragraph or so of text.

We want the final Guide to be a useful and powerful online resource – and so having got a notional structure, we brainstormed what it might look like online. One of the first things that came up is that not all aspects of the Guide would be equally relevant to all possible audiences. For example, a Vice Chancellor may be interested in possible benefits to the institution and potential cost savings, but probably isn’t going to want to know the technical detail of how the data is made available openly.

We also felt that while a common approach might be to read through a Use Case from start to finish, there might be examples where you want to simply see the Licensing issues raised by each use case in a single place.

Finally we were also keen to support commenting on individual subsections – getting input and experience from the user community on the different aspects of each use case. [as an aside, early on we considered whether using WordPress with the digress.it plugin (as used by JISCPress) might be a possible approach, but eventually felt that although this gave a detailed level of commenting - down to paragraph level - it wasn't quite what we needed in this case].

After a bit more discussion, I took on the task of looking at what might be achieved with WordPress to facilitate all these different possible entry points, views, and routes through a document with the kind of structure that we had agreed. I’ve been playing around with WordPress (v3.0) and I’ve now got something I think has the beginnings of a reasonable approach to the problem.

You can pop over and have a look at a demonstration site, bearing in mind that all content is extremely draft and may not represent the final content of the Guide in any way. Also note that I’ve used the WordPress v3.0 default template as a starting point, and done almost nothing to the ‘style’ of the site, so ignore anything about the style – it is really the way the document navigates that I’m working on at the moment. That said, please feel free to leave any feedback you have on this post, or on the site, whether to do with the navigation, the style, the structure, the content etc.

Interestingly we came up with similar needs when putting together the ‘ReMIT’ (Reference Management Integration Toolkit) documentation for the TELSTAR project that I’ve been working on – especially the idea of a filtered view based on audience – so I hope the work here might have some wider applicability.

written by ostephens

James Lappin and Pete Gilbert talking about Sharepoint.

90% of UK HEIs using Sharepoint for something – but very wide variety of use – this talk going to explore this.

Pete says ‘Sharepoint is a like an Elephant’ – telling story of ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant‘ – in the story 6 blind men all touch an elephant and try to describe it – but each one only gets a small part of the story because the elephant is so big, and they can only touch it in one place.

Sharepoint is like this – so big, and so many bits, experience with it can vary hugely.

The most popular use of Sharepoint in HE is the collaborative functions – document sharing etc. Tends to be used on the adminstrative side, and also some in research projects – but not so much in teaching and learning. Ambitious project in Oxford to roll out Sharepoint for all research groups.

Lots of ‘big implementation’ type of projects with Sharepoint. E.g. “use Sharepoint as student portal”. Sometimes Sharepoint is used – because it’s there – you’ve got the licenses, and the IT department start to use it to do something and slowly grows.

Why does Sharepoint have such high penetration in HE? Microsoft added in client licenses for Sharepoint into other software that is licensed in the Campus license agreeement – so just there.

“I don’t think your community loves Sharepoint” (says James) – but also says you can’t ignore it, because it is there – at somepoint someone will ask ‘can Sharepoint do that’?

Sharepoint is better at somethings than others – so Pete now going to relate how he has used it. Started to see use of Sharepoint for ‘quick and dirty’ websites where teams could collaborate, they had control over permissions etc.

Started small, but then found people were directed to Sharepoint team when core web team couldn’t provide solution. Pete says it has enabled him and his team to develop for the web quickly (even if quick and dirty).

But if you are going to work with Sharepoint, you have to buy into the Sharepoint way of doing things – steep learning curve.

I have to admit my personal experience of using Sharepoint as an end-user is the UI was just horrible – I’m not sure if that is down to implementation I experienced or something else – but it really put me off. I suspect there is some stuff there that it can do good stuff – but I don’t think it is really a good web facing product.

written by ostephens \\ tags: iwmw10

Next up Josef Lapka from Canterbury Christ Church University  - talking about building a student portal.

The concept of the CCCU portal was to support the student journey from browser to alumnus – something they would recognise and go back to – to achieve:

• sense of belonging from early on
• transparency of data and processes
• gateway to external online apps like Facebook, online mail services

Advertised concepts with mock-ups of portal to stakeholders – got approval.

Then had to start building it! Turn the concept into reality. Had variety of options for building the system:

• Sharepoint (too clunky!)
• In-house development (too difficult/big)
• DropThings – same architecture that Pageflakes built on…

DropThings – personalised online experience. Each user can have one or multiple pages – currently CCCU restrict students to a single page. Relatively standard organisational structure – you get ‘columns’, ‘zones’ (to hold apps, widgets etc.).

Each zone can contain one or many widget instances. A couple of the areas in the student view are fixed – ‘applications’ and ‘notifications’ – and the rest is made up of widgets that can be moved around or deleted.

Particularly worth mentioning is the WebNote widget – allows you to send messages to students or groups of students – granularity goes down to individuals, but then can do to groups of students, or to everyone. Can also be automated – so can send prompts based on other information – like when it is time for students to choose modules can nudge them to do it.

The portal view is the ‘homepage’ across the University (I’m guessing this means on student computing provision – fine if you control the environment, but this is often not the case now)

Want to do further work – Blackboard integration, Facebook widget, external mail clients, possibly CampusM. Also getting requests from staff and students now – e.g. ‘timetabling widget’. Only takes a few days to develop a widget – Patrick says ‘you just need an API’ (this is where the problem usually arises in my experience – getting the data out of other systems – which brings us back to Chris Gutteridge’s Linked Data?)

Patrick then showed the StudentNET portal – think the fact it is built on the same tech as Pageflakes showed through – very nice looking UI

written by ostephens \\ tags: iwmw10

This morning’s session is described as a ‘panel’ session – with a mixture of speakers.

First up is Richard Brierton from the University of Sheffield on ‘Replacing your CMS’. University of Sheffield have used Polopoly CMS since 2003, with 600 editrs, 100,000 pages, and 14,000 new pages per year. However Sheffield were running an old version of Polopoly (version – and Polypoly had decided to rewrite the product for version 9 – so Sheffield were on an unsupported version, but the upgrade path not straightforward.

Negative feedback on the CMS system from users – “breathtakingly shit” was one phrase used in a feedback form! So time for a change – but want to preserve the good stuff while getting rid of the bad. Lots more experience with CMS now than when they first implemented in 2003.

Try not to blame the system for failings when they are about implementation or policy decisions. If CMS is the answer, what is the question? Making CMS easier to use actually increases the number of people you need to support – when you set the entry bar to editing web content, you are dealing with small numbers – but as you make it easier to do, you get more people, with less experience, editing content on your website. Lots of the problems you see are about bad practice creating content – e.g. using ‘click here’ for links.

Users don’t deliberately set out to make bad sites. No matter how many ‘checks’ you put into your CMS to encourage best practice, it doesn’t get away from the need to educate – e.g. requiring an ‘alt’ description for images doesn’t make people put in sensible descriptions – and the CMS can’t make this happen – it is about education.

Richard lists his ’7 Commandments’ (more what you’d call “guidelines“):

• Keep the 90% (of users) in mind all the time
• … oops – missed a few here – hope it wasn’t “thou shalt not kill your web manager”, or “thou shalt not covert thy neighbours website”
• Editors will often best-guess when unsure
• Avoid unnecessary flexibility
• Most editors don’t care – most people are doing other jobs – they aren’t that interested in the web, but need to publish information

Practicalities… Sheffield had to:

• Develop a new CMS
• Develop a migration process – mix of generated HTML, parsing content XML form old system, used CouchDB to store content, used Polopoly import tools – not just migration, but Sheffield team also cleaned up content
• Roll-out departments one-by-one – don’t need to migrate all content in one go – but does mean supporting two CMSs during migration period

written by ostephens

This session led by Chris Gutteridge from the School of Elecronics and Computer Science (ECS) of the University of Southampton.

ECS have just published all their public data as open linked data – and so Chris was able to share both his knowledge of how to publish linked data, why do it, and how not to do it. Chris gave a relatively gentle introduction to Linked Data and RDF. RDF is a pretty simple way of expressing information – at it’s heart is the idea of a ‘triple’ made up of a ‘subject’ a ‘predicate’ and an ‘object’ – typical example is for a book:

‘The Hobbit’ (subject) ‘has a creator’ (predicate) ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’ (object)

Chris described this as ‘really really simple’ – when I tweeted this I got a lot of sceptical responses, but I think Chris’s point was as a concept, the idea of an RDF is not complex. However, several responses on Twitter suggested that it maybe simple in theory, but when you start using it to describe stuff, it can quickly get complex.

Chris went on to describe the concept of ‘cool URIs‘ (Tim Berners-Lee said “A cool URI is one which does not change”), and how a RDF uses URIs to identify things – and how Linked Data principles say that when you follow a URI it should ‘resolve’ to some useful information. Chris mentioned a few of the issues – especially the difference between a resource and a document. Chris also mentioned another problem which is ‘blank nodes’. RDF can be visualised as a ‘graph’ – a diagram of connected dots, with each dot representing a subject or object, and the lines between the dots representing the predicate relationships. Sometimes when you design RDF, you can end up with ‘blank nodes’ (a.k.a. anonymous nodes or bnodes), which are essentially nodes in an RDF graph which are not identified by a URI and is not a literal.

Having described some of the basics of Linked Data, Chris got us to brainstorm information in our institutions that might be ready to be published openly – and shared his own brainstorm of this in the form of a mindmap. Chris described some of the thinking that had happened at Southampton, and also some of the mistakes they had made. He mentioned several useful resources (see link below) and also had some ‘take aways’:

• get your URIs right
• don’t use anonymous (blank) nodes unless you really have to
• start with easy stuff – incremental approach with eye on future. (Chris says N.B. RDFa is not easy stuff! Get to grips with RDF first, as this is the basis for RDFa anyway)
• aim to publish as RDF but don’t underestimate simpler data formats like CSV – these can enable you to get data published quickly in interim

There was quite a bit of content in this session, and while it covered some of the basics of RDF and Linked Data, and was definitely aimed at those not that experienced with RDF and Linked Data, it was, by it’s nature, quite a technical session with quite a few concepts to get your head round. However, I found it useful, and some worthwhile hints and tips to those looking at publishing institutional linked data – especially some of the things that Southampton have learnt the hard way – so we don’t have to.

Chris has helpfully published a page with all the relevant links from his talk, except the mindmap of institutional data that might be published. Chris has also helpfully blogged the Linked Data session.

written by ostephens \\ tags: iwmw10

Jeremy Speller from UCL talking about disaster communication. Jeremy reflecting on his last presentation at IWMW – on 7th July 2005 – and as Jeremy was about to speak, news started to filter through of the bombings in London.

Jeremy was using the IRC chat channel at IWMW – and this was where he first saw news about the bombings – at 10:08 from the IRC log. Jeremy trying to get through to staff at UCL – no ability to get in contact – feeling of isolation from institution.

Jeremy going to talk about:

• How institutions respond when there is a crisis
• What methods can be used to communicate in a crisis
• And what happens in a real world…

Universities are ‘prepared’ for crisis in that they have a ‘Major Incident Plan’ – will identify key staff, a ‘bunker’ (somewhere remote that can be used to work from), communications. Many places don’t include web team in Major Incident Plan – and they should be in there.

Wide range of types of ‘disaster’.  Not always about ‘hi-tech’ – sometimes only way of communicating is with a megaphone!

However, vast number of wasy of communicating using technology – and you can cascade from one to another – using individuals in the network as ‘megaphones’ [did I get that right?]

• Email – UCL starting to use Live@edu email from Microsoft – but if you use normal UCL email addresses they get routed via UCL servers before going to live@edu service in Ireland – so need to look at how to use ‘live@edu’ addresses instead.
• campusM – mobile service …
• Twitter – example of University of Bath tweeting about campus closure when snow last winter. But unlike email and campusM, not control over it. Could use Audioboo in similar way
• Facebook – can be fed by same stream as Twitter
• Non-institutional email – e.g. individual accounts on gmail, hotmail. But how do you get the data? Who keeps it up to date
• Cellular phone network – difficult to get mobile numbers – people don’t want to give it out – again unreliable data. Also, some disasters cell network goes down
• JANET
  • use JANET web hosting to provide web host if your local provision goes down – JANET web hosting can run simple web apps – e.g. WordPress – so can use for content
  • JANET txt – can use to send out SMS messages – but comes back to unreliable data, unreliable network, costs can be significant if sending out messages to lots of users (4p per sms message)
• Shared services – can introduce single points of failure?
• Other institutions – work together provide mutual services – but some sites perhaps at more risk than others – so London institutions perhaps don’t look like a good place to host services – Jeremy hopes can do more of this though

What happens today?

At UCL, use JANET web hosting, use WordPress – can cross publish to Twitter and back again, which in turn can push to Facebook and/or audioboo.

[Sorry - missed the end of what Jeremy said here - really sorry ]

written by ostephens \\ tags: iwmw10

Paul Boag – for blogpost on this talk see http://boagworld.com/talks/no-money – lots of talk about ‘make do and mend’ at the moment. But the coming cuts are the most exciting opportunity that you’ve ever had!

This is an opportunity to change how you work – to embrace best practice from the rest of the web. Establish university web teams as a driving force in the web world. Paul very very up beat about this! He sees two big opportunities:

• Opportunity to simplify - Universities have more legacy (in their websites) than anyone else on the web
• Opportunity to approach things differently

Simplicity

Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS) – said a lot, but really really true. At the moment you have massively bloated, unmanagable websites. Why? When you start to talk about simplifying website and removing content you get responses:

• But somebody might find it useful
• Well my content is too important to remove
• Users might not understand
• But we need to convince users
• Well its not my job to remove content (question – who in your organisation is responsible for removing content from your website)

You can no longer afford to maintain websites at their current size. Can’t keep content up to date, complicated to change, difficult for users to find content – too much stuff. Paul uses Microsoft as an example – they used to put everything online – and then a search for something like basic help with Excel brings back loads of stuff including research whitepapers etc.

So many people involved in putting content on site – can’t keep quality high.

Biggest issue – no time to think strategically about the website. Lack of planning for the next few months – how is your web site going to change in the next 6 months? It is growing organically not strategically.

Paul says “Less money means a smaller website” – so we should:

• Remove content
• Hide content
• Shrink content

Always try to remove content first.

Hide – example of a ‘get started’ guide on Wiltshire Farm Foods – shows the first time, then collapses to compact display after that (see http://www.wiltshirefarmfoods.com/).

Another example – move links you don’t want to do see – small text, bottom of the page.

But politics get in the way – Paul says, avoid politics, embrace policies. Universities like policies! Paul says introduce some of the following policies (not necessarily all of them):

• The link on the homepage with the fewest clicks will be replaced – automatically with another link – content gets pushed off the homepage if it doesn’t get enough response
• Pages that not meet minimum levels of views and dwell time will be unpublished – not deleted, but triggers review process – for content provider to come to talk to you about improving for republication
• Pages that are not regularly updated will be unpublished until reviewed – e.g. after 6 months – could follow email notifications – although could just let them find it. All they need to do is look at the page and decide to republish

These policies can be automated.

However, if unpublishing is too radical – rather than doing that, remove from navigation and search, insert a message on the page saying out of date.

If you could implement these three policies think about how much smaller your website would get immediately.

Paul moving on now to working with external organisations. Suggests that web teams work at 2 levels:

• Keeping website running, keeping it up to date
• Running big projects that will ‘solve all problems with x’ – e.g. re-vamp information architecture, redesign whole website

It is in the second area universities enage external companies – like Paul’s. He thinks that in general Universities are wasting their money when they do this!

These big projects tend to throw away all previous work. Also they bunch up expenditure into one place – e.g. once every two years need huge investment to redesign etc. websites. Also, often very interlinked set of big projects – combine new user interface, with re-branding exercise, with content management system implementation etc. – all have interlinked dependencies, and are all complex projects – creates huge problems and slows everything down.

Outside providers tend to be treated as ‘pixel pushers’ – tend not to use their expertise.

More agile approach needed – should be looking at doing one month ‘sprints’ – i.e. deliver something every month – at end of sprint should have measurable return associated with it. More continuous development – advantages:

• Don’t throw away existing work
• Don’t have single point of massive expenditure
• Avoids complex interdependencies
• Don’t throw massive changes at users
• Build ongoing partnership with external agencies

Paul suggests getting external view regularly – doesn’t have to be commercial company – could be someone from other institution web team. Once a month – meet with external, do some user testing, set sprint goals, talk strategically

Paul recommends “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” by Steve Krug to see how you can do regular usability testing quickly and easily.

Conclusions:

• Smaller sites
• Ditch ‘big projects’
• Think strategically
• Have a monthly roadmap

written by ostephens \\ tags: iwm10