Fondren’s mobile site: http://m.library.rice.edu Developed by Jeff Koffler, and  Fondren’s webteam. We will be having usability testing on this in late November, early December. If you are at Rice and want to participate, please email: Debra Kolah dkolah@rice.edu

Fondren Library Mobile Guide: by our AUL for Collections, Kerry Keck, an invaluable resource for identifying new mobile sites for Fondren resources. http://libguides.rice.edu/mobile

Sites of special note:

• Rice University’s iPhone app
• Chronicle of Higher Education‘s iPad app
• SciVerseScopus
• Bluefire You need this in your toolbox to read many ebooks from Fondren.
• Science apps from Wired. A bit dated, from 2008, but still useful.
• Great “citizen science” apps

Internet Archive

Fondren Library has been quite busy with putting material into the Internet Archive. In collaboration with the Rice University Centennial Celebration committee, materials which tell the story of Rice University from the opening in 1912. Materials include:

• The General Announcements–a view of each academic year’s course offereings, departments, and faculty members
• First 20 years of The Campanile
• Selection of Rice University Report of the President
• Rare Books from the Woodson.18th Century British Plays digitized for a Rice Course taught this Fall
• A walking tour of Rice University

All texts have multiple formats, including PDF, Kindle and EPUB formats.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Note: Not all of these digitized items are noted in the library catalog yet; however, you will find them listed in the Digital Scholarship Archive.

Online Books

Fondren Library has been busy arranging  for access to more and more ebooks. By December 2011 you will see a marked increase in ebooks when you search the library catalog. Searching for ebooks is easier than ever in our library catalog. Go to the advanced search screen, and then choose the last option on the top: other searches. This will give you ebooks in the pull-down menu.

Here are some of the collections we have had for a while, but do get updated:

Safari Computer Books: great resource for programmers and IT professionals. Our subscription includes access to 130 titles, and 2 simultaneous users. Please remember to log out! Includes books from O-Reilly, Que, and Adobe Press. Titles in the collection do change, based on usage and requests.

Springer: we have strong ebook holdings in mathematics, physics, and statistics. You can search in the library catalog for titles, or go directly to Springer.

• Physics
• Mathematics ex: Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics
• Use the advanced search button to limit to “books” to find only books

If you are on a mobile:

Google Scholar

A brief tutorial for optimizing Google Scholar for Fondren Library resources is available on YouTube.Have you set your Preferences on Google Scholar? Doing this takes a moment, and allows Google to better help link you through to the fulltext of articles.

Google Scholar often will take you directly to the fulltext by clicking on an article title. Sometimes, however, the article is available from multiple sources – Fondren may have the article available at a source other than the one listed in Google Scholar.
Instructions:

• Go to Scholar Preferences
• look for the section marked “Library Links” and use the search box to find the entries for Rice University, Fondren Library (there are several – chose all of them for the best results)
• Save your preferences and return to searching

You now will be able to Click on either “Check Fondren Holdings” or “Fulltext @ Fondren” to see if the article is available from another Fondren database than the one listed in Google Scholar.

All that being said, another easier way to optimize Google to access Fondren resources is just to follow this link:  http://library.rice.edu/collections/eresources/google-scholar-rice-university

The setting applied in Scholar Preferences is cookie dependent, so if you clear your browser cache or use a different computer, you have to remember to apply the setting again.

GoogleBooks

Using Google Book Search, you can find extraordinary classic books, such as:

* Ferriar’s The Bibliomania
* A futurist from 1881′s 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
* Aesop’s Fables
* Shakespeare’s Hamlet
* Abbott’s Flatland
* Hugo’s Marion De Lorme
* Dunant’s Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
* Bolívar’s Proclamas
* Dante’s Inferno

There are an amazing amount of magazines in Google,  Popular Science, New York Magazine, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Tips on searching from the Google Blog, ” Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you’ll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword “Magazine” on the search snippet.”

See more titles at the Official Google Blog!

Just for Fun! Free Popular Journals: Free popular journals: One of our academic journal databases, LexisNexis Academic, has a large number of popular and consumer journals. For example, you can find Consumer Reports, full text, from 1988 to the present. Organic Gardening  is available from 1984 to current issue in Academic Search Complete. Sports Illustrated is available, full text, from 1992 to the present.

Hathi Trust is another good source of digitized material.

Thought I would share my favorite cloud sites! To start with, how I find out about cool new things:

Chronicle of Higher Education Profhacker Great tips about academia and technology.

Lifehacker There is a lot more to this site than just technology tips, but the basic premise is tips and tricks for getting things done.

DiRT Digital Research Tools A Collaborative project started by Lisa Spiro to identify and review mostly free digital tools. The site is arranged by “what you need to do,” so it becomes easy to identify tools that do text analysis, or allow you to collaborate.

Ok, onto the tools!

1) Dropbox Never email yourself a file again! Downside: does require  a download. Works great on an iPhone.

2) Google Docs:  is provided to google users to create and share files on the web.  Google Docs allows multiple users to work collaboratively and in real time on shared online documents.  With access to a web-based word application, spreadsheets, presentation and forms,  Google Docs is an incredibly useful service that anyone working on group projects will love.

3) Mendeley: Facebook for academic papers. It becomes easy to build a network around a paper that interests you. You can also create a group, and share things privately.

• Organize research materials into a personal library
• Assign tags to materials
• Create groups of users to collaborate on research projects
• Build a profile page that shows resume, grants and awards

• How It Works: http://www.mendeley.com/how-it-works/
• Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.mendeley.com/faq/

4)Linkedin Your rolodex in the cloud!

Other interesting sites:

• HUBzero: connect a communities in scientific research and educational ideas
• Academia: share your academic life; you can follow researchers of your choice.

• Conducted two interview and observation sessions with instructors at Rice (December 2009), in order to understand why and how they use scholarly resources to prepare and conduct their courses.
• Interviews were not transcribed, nor coded, but rather blended into personas for the project.
• Rice participants filled out a confidentiality & consent form.

Project Website: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=9895999 Consists of the process timeline, interview protocol, interviewee summary, and final report.

Download the report: Why and How do Instructors Use Scholarly Resources in Preparing and Conducting Their Courses? Multi-Institutional Research Findings Library and Sakai 3 Integration Project

2) Mobile Devices as a Research Tool study (April 2010- July 2010)(Fondren Mobile CREL group)

• One Rice staff, one faculty member, and a postdoc were interviewed about how they use mobile devices for research.
• Report: https://library.rice.edu/fondren-intranet/allstaff/crel-reports/CRELMobileReport.docx/view (Requires login at this time.)
• This research helped inform the Mobile Library Research class, as well as, Apps for Academics. Both taught extensively though 2010 as a Fondren Fast Class.

3) Establishing fondren@brc: Insights from a User Study (June 2010-August 2010)

• Interviewed 3 faculty members, 4 graduate students, and a library liaison to inform service decisions at a new library location.
• Report available online.
• This was also included in the recently published ARL Spec Kit on Library User Experience.
• A great deal of citation analysis was also done as a part of the study, analyzing if Fondren owned the journals that faculty publish in at the BRC. Additionally, some cost/benefit analysis was done to determine if it was better to ILL journals not owned by Fondren, or to purchase the journals. At the time of the report, ILL services were determined to be cheaper, but did have some research slow-down implications.

4) Usability testing on the new Fondren website (April 2011)

• Semi-structured testing was conducted  on two undergraduates, two graduate students, one postdoc, and three library staff members.
• Problems were identified most especially with the ejournal portal.
• Interviews were transcribed, and a new innovation, color-coding, was incorporated in the coding process. The color codes were: Pink (Good kudos), Red (Tabbed Searching), Green (Service implications), Yellow (Problems), and Light Blue (User Suggestions).

5) Discovering Discovery: How Researchers Find the Sources They Need (April-May 2011)

• Research Team: Debra Kolah, Marcel LaFlamme, Jane Segal, and Leah Krevit.
• Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 2 faculty members, 4 members of a nondepartmental academic team, 1 postdoc, and 5 research analysts.
• This project was conducted on a tight time constraint: the research instrument was approved on April 5th, the interviews were from April 18-28, transcription and coding took place from May 2-13, and the final report was submitted to the Fondren Library Resource Discovery Tools Working Group on May 18th. This led to the term “Bootstrap UX.”
• A brief summary report was generated before the report was completed to help the research team start to group findings. The broad categories were: One interface to search for everything, Interdisciplinarity, andSpecific/Targeted Searching.

6) Research Flow (July-September 2011)

• Guided research team consists of 10 librarians, all of whom had participated in Nancy Foster’s training session at Rice in January of 2011.
• More videotaping of interviewees was achieved.
• IRB Protocol approved on 6/9/2011. Research project currently in progress. 14 interviews have been conducted.

Other things I mentioned:

Link to handout: http://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/services/training-material

The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/

Journal Citation Reports http://ezproxy.rice.edu/login?url=http://isiknowledge.com/jcr  

For me, User Experience means creating a holistic picture for the user from these three components:

1)Librarians and IT doing usability together. No more silos. And no more not doing usability testing before we hand a product over to users. I read Aaron Schmidt, white papers from Human Factors International, and attend webinars from the Usability Professionals’ Association. I recently started a caucus in SLA.

2)Research-based librarianship. The medical librarians have had this right for a long time. Anthropologists can lead us to a wonderful ethnographic practice in libraries.  I love Nancy Foster, Andrew Asher, and Sharon Traweek. Dr. Traweek is an anthropologist that studies scientists, and does great research.  I have done a handful of studies at my library over the past year, and am currently leading a team of 13 to interview around 25 subjects. We are looking at their flow of research, from the generation of an idea to gathering information, grant applications, evaluating information, writing, organizing, publishing/sharing/presentation, archiving, citing, and protecting intellectual content. I love looking at all of these things, and seeing how the library can work to make things amazing for our users. Or at least better.

3)Compelling experiences. Steven Bell and Brian Mathews are great. By the way, Brian’s blog has moved over the Chronicle of Higher Education. How cool is that! So, in the library, how can we create compelling experiences for our users?

So, my vision of user experience includes these three very important components–and all of them are deeply needed to work together to gather information, and offer results for our users, in a very compelling holistic way.

Explore the word cloud (PDF, 11 Mb)

SWOT

Strengths: What does an organization already do well? *understand attributes What resources do they have?
What does an organization already have that will help them succeed * Are they innovating in ways that others are not?

Weaknesses: What is not helpful/or even harmful? It is more interesting to see where business is failing * What resource is the company lacking? *Low employee morale? Strategic blunders? Are they in the right segments? Are they missing trends?

Opportunities:  What factors are being driven by external factors? What is the competitive landscape and how are the peers? How is the market share changing?

Disruptions: Threats? What is coming down the pipe that could be negative? Where are the competitors succeeding? What is the company missing? How can the economy affect the company? Who are the big customers? Are they balanced?

“We all tell stories. It’s one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human   race. This book is not about a new technique, but how to use something we already know in a new way. Stories help us gather and communicate user research, put a human face on analytic data, communicate design ideas, encourage collaboration and innovation, and create a sense of shared history and purpose. This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice.

If you…

• Need to share research and design insights in a compelling and effective way
• Struggle to communicate the meaning of a large body of data in a way that everyone just “gets”
• Want to explore a new, innovative idea, and imagine its future

 

… this book can help you, by showing you how and when to choose, create and use stories.”

Several years ago I took a class at a local acting school that was entitled something like, “Telling Stories, and Sharing Wisdom.” I really learned alot from that storytelling angle, and most importantly that within 3-5 minutes you can tell a story that is compelling, memorable, and wise. I can go out and do ethnography, and maybe even create personas sometimes; but, even better, if I can create a story that captures the user experience within our digital landscape, or a physical experience, that is the thing that will inspire design change, and allow our library to “get” what it means to our users to use our library. Ok, more reading, and I will let you know how it turns out!

Loop11  http://www.loop11.com/
This program works by asking participants to complete a series of tasks on a given website. After each task the user clicks a ‘task complete’ icon and the website measures the time it took to complete the task.

Loop11 is a very simple program to use from a user standpoint. That said, I did not see any opportunities for the user to make additional comments, however, I was only able to view an abbreviated model of the program so that may still be an option. This program would be much easier and much more systematic than individual interviews. It provides thorough feedback on site navigation that is organized and easy to read. Although the major rubric is ‘time’ which, admittedly, is important, it is not as comprehensive as one may like. I would prefer something that tallied total links clicked, options typed in text boxes, as information like that would be relevant and helpful for user-ability. I would recommend this as a complimentary program to another method in order to evaluate more than just the amount of time it takes for a user to complete a particular task. This will be good for measuring the navigation of a site, but does not address issues of cosmetics or organization. The instructions are created by the owner the website so they can be tailored as needed for specific issues or concerns.

Websort http://websort.net/
Websort is a program which permits participants to categorize a series of words, ideas, or topics into broader collections. The program then tabulates theseresponsesand offers a rather in-depth analysis of the results, presenting the consensus votes for the organization of the given words.

In my opinion, the Websort program is a poor program for website analysis. It allows people to sort through a list into a variety of categories and titles and then tabulates the results. It just seems like a lot of work to both generate the list and then sift through the results. I would not recommend this product for website analysis or creation. I think this would be helpful for a small group attempting to prepare a presentation, booklet, or something along those lines where a basic level of organization needs to be developed by a number of people before more detailed work can be completed.

Ethnio http://ethn.io/
Ethnio is a program that intercepts users as they search through your site. When a user visits the website a ‘chat’ box opens up and asks the user to answer a series of questions. It effectively functions as a pop-up questionnaire that can be as specifically or broadly designed as needed.

I have not encountered this program specifically, but many websites employ similar programs. As a user, I hate pop-up programs like this, although I do recognize the value of the product. The ‘chat box’ which opens can explain the purpose of the questionnaire, “we are remodeling the website and your feedback is appreciated” so at least the user can understand the reason for the interruption. If the owner so desires, there can be incentives placed into the questionnaires so that participants can win cash, gift cards, or other prizes. The program will also tabulate the results and can even include demographic information so that the owner can distinguish between faculty, staff, student, men, women, ages, etc. Overall, I think this is a useful program and could be helpful, although as a user I caution against using it as it is intrusive and interrupts the user experience of the website – even if for a good cause.