UX Interest Group forming

I am starting a monthly UX  Interest Group here at Fondren, starting next month. We will have speakers, discussions, webinars; everything to keep UX front and center in the room. As a long-time librarian, I am gathering up some books, and some software sites to be ready!

The UX Interest Group will be useful for anyone that is in the Houston area and wants to meet with people that are doing user experience or thinking about doing user experience, learn about new tools and resources, and generally have a good time! I hope we attract a group of problem solvers who work with usability,  human factors and design issues.

User experience combines user research, such as ethnography, user interviews, stakeholder meetings, and usability tests. When you combine research with project objectives, you will come out with a set of deliverables such as wireframes, personas, and storyboards that will guide you into actionable insights. The bottom line is you will be building things that really matter to our users. UX demands innovation, creativity, passion and commitment!

More information coming soon on time, date, and the summer schedule. Hope you can join us!

Books:

Don’t make me think!: a common sense approach to Web usability. Krug, Steve. New Riders Pub., 2006.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. (on order)

Global UX : design and research in a connected world. Quesenbery, Whitney. Morgan Kaufmann, 2012.

Observing the user experience : a practitioner’s guide to user research. Kuniavsky, Mike. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2003. QA76.9 .H85 K86 2003.

Sketching user experiences: the workbook. Greenberg, Saul. Elsevier Science, 2012

The inmates are running the asylum. Cooper, Alan. Sams, 2004.

Undercover user experience : learn how to do great UX work with tiny budgets, no time, and limited support. Bowles, Cennydd. New Riders, 2011. QA76.9 .U83 B69 2011.

Videos: A great list of UX videos is at Smashing Magazine.

The Library Experience

I am currently working on a book chapter, and despite having pretty good online access to good library literature, I decided I wanted to go sit at a table, and surround myself with print books, and lots of current journals. I know, old school. But, I am a tactile learner, and there is something about being immersed, physically, in what you are studying.

Unfortunately, my library doesn’t really have the print books and current print journals that I need. So, I headed across town to another huge university library. It was a wonderful experience. There were so many students, and a true excitement in the air. There was lots of work being done in the information commons areas. But, the stacks were a different story!

No room at the inn

Hellllooooo......

Some of the bookshelves were overcrowded, with books stacked upon books, stacked upon books, and then, just around the corner, there were rows and rows of empty bookshelves. Now, I know that my own stacks are super crowded in certain areas, and I suspect that more libraries than not have areas like the two above.

So, why does this happen? One, we only have so much time in a day. And, most of the time we are working to make sure our virtual presence is amazing. (The library above has a stellar website.) Do we forget about the stacks? Maybe.

I know that I have needed to weed my VHS (video) collection for several years. And, typically, I am not a procrastinator. But, there are always other jobs to be done, and that task gets pushed down the list, because my users have more pressing needs.

Is it time to think about the death of stacks?

The days of huge columns of stacks in research libraries are numbered. They are so out of sync with the dynamic information commons areas. Recently, one of my favorite mathematicians introduced me to a library in Germany. Now, it has some special circumstances; it actually gets publisher support to have beautiful collections of print journals, as well as, lots of new books all the time. The Oberwolfach
http://www.mfo.de/
understands the way that mathematicians do work, and has  several types of working spaces for both individuals, and groups.

But, more interestingly, they have a book exhibition program with the publishers:

http://www.mfo.de/cgi-bin/path?general

This program benefits everyone. The publishers, in essence, have exhibition space, and the researchers see the newest, best math books in a well-lit, beautiful space. In many ways, it looks like a book store, doesn’t it? The lighting is perfect. The new journals are displayed like books, each on the shelf, ready to be browsed. The mathematicians also have book stacks available, in nice, uncrowded conditions.  They also have lots of computers, of course, but print lives in this space, and is not an overcrowded, dark, mysterious thing. In essence, they have the best of all worlds.

So, where are we going? Are we left with overcrowded, dark, or worse, empty stacks? Or do we recreate these areas? Can we make beautiful, discipline-specific homages to print? Can we inspire our users with beautiful space?

I am taking a walk through my own stacks today. I’ll let you know what I find.

Digital books…

Last week while on the reference desk, I had a faculty member that needed a book…fast. Our library has the copy he needed in our library service center; we could have gotten it into the library by that afternoon. But he would have missed an important deadline. So, I went searching online. I started, of course, at Google Books. Now I should point out at this time, this was a novel from the 1920′s.  Google Books had a few pages, and I let the faculty member know this. I cleared it with him that it would be fine to have a digital copy.

Next stop, I did a search in Worldcat, but only turned up the incomplete scanned version in Google Books.  Next, I turned to my iPhone, and did several quick checks in two of my online book readers: Stanza, and Bookshelf.  Nothing. After several searches in Google, I was lucky enough to come across a link to a University of Chicago catalog record. As I clicked through, it would not let me in, but once I edited out the proxy server information, and put that into the url box, I went directly to a beautiful scanned copy! I knew from the catalog record that the digital version was available with no restrictions, and it was just the University of Chicago proxy that was keeping me out.

As a fun exercise, I gave the task of finding an online version of this book to the head of our Interlibrary Loan department. He logged into his OCLC database, and quickly found a copy–it seems that OCLC has cataloged many of the digital copies in archives. We are still investigating why it showed up in OCLC, but not in Worldcat. Perhaps a secret beta test?

Take away points: I am making it a part of my reference process to think about digital repositories more. Fondren will be creating a Libguide to address searching in these digital archives. Also, the Hathi Trust is an excellent resource. It is a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. This will enable greater searching into hidden repositories.

Of course, for math and physics articles, arxiv, Numdam, and Gallica remain the go to places.

Google Books

I am not going to discuss the settlement, but do want to think about how GoogleBooks changes the process for telephone reference. I got a telephone reference call today, and the user wanted to know if we had a certain book. My usual process is to check the library catalog, and then, if we don’t have the book, to look into Worldcat to see if another local library owns it. In this case, it was owned by a local library, and that was the end of the search. But is it? If I’m looking for an article, I often continue on to Google, and search, just to see if we might find a copy lingering out on the web on someone’s cv or institutional repository. But I don’t do that with books. Until now.  My interlibrary loan director had talked recently about a soon to be published article by Barbara Coopey, Assistant Head of Access Services, Penn State University built upon the poster session, “Utilizing Google Books to Fulfill Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Requests.”  So, this popped into my mind–I NEED to check Googlebooks. And it was there, or at least almost all of it, except the first 38 pages.  It is really quite extraordinary. And lifechanging.

EBooks

Looking for places that have free ebooks? There are several great apps out there–my favorite currently is Stanza. The native iPhone/iPod Touch Stanza application (available for free from the Apple App Store) can share books with Stanza Desktop wirelessly, so you can take your books on the road and read them wirelessly — no internet connection required! I’m currently reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. He is regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialize in hard science fiction and space opera.

Looking for more? There is a great page from Penn. Also, try FreeTechBooks – a list of free online computer science, engineering and programming books, ebooks, texts, textbooks, lecture notes, documentations and references. And, of course, the invaluable:  Project Gutenberg.

Happy online reading!

Cool summer reading list from UC Berkeley

So, apparently, UC Berkeley sends out a reading list to incoming students every year. Not much new there–but this is cool–a cool SCIENCE book list!
http://reading.berkeley.edu/srl_2009.html

And not just a list, but a "why you should care" letter from important people. Very cool!
Two of my favorites on the list:

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
Michael Shermer
New York: H. Holt, 2002

This
well-written and entertaining book is sure to stir up discussion and
debate. Shermer gives an excellent description of what science actually
is, a topic that is sorely lacking in most science classes and
textbooks. He also delves into how and why science comes up short at
times. The bulk of the book is about human tendencies to explain
phenomena they don’t understand with belief in things such as
extraterrestrials, ghosts, super­stitions, and prejudices. Shermer is
respectful of those who subscribe to these beliefs, but presents the
reader with alternatives grounded in scientific thinking.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard Feynman
New York: W.W. Norton, 1985

It
takes little time with this book to realize that this Nobel-winner was
truly a genius, but just as quickly you will recognize an incredible
sense of humor and someone who enjoys life and refuses to conform. It
seems he spent half his life doing practical jokes, and there was
usually a lesson in the joke for his victims. This has everything a
freshman needs in a summer read — from a series of entertaining life
experiences, to advice on how best to succeed with the opposite sex, to
the story of how the atom bomb got built. A great read!

International Year of Astronomy

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. There has been a lot of buzz among the astronomy librarians about bookclubs, and suggested readings. I'm starting to put together a list, and here are some of my picks:

Stargazer. Watson QB88. W3
Voyage to the Great Attractor. Dressler QB 991.673 D74
The Perfect Machine. Florence QB88.F55

Have a favorite astronomy themed book? Let me know about it!