Digital library services guru, David Lee King, gave  an enlightening presentation Tuesday, Building the Digital Branch for the 21st Century.  He pointed out that many libraries’ websites focus on the physical building, so aside from providing access to electronic resources, their sites are basically just online brochures.  Virtual reference makes them a little more interactive, but provided there’s adequate staffing, we should strive for a lot more interactivity online. 

This can be labor intensive, as producing blogs, podcasts, reviews, exhibits, online programs etc. is time intensive, but if you open your website to patron created content, customers can do a lot of the work for you.  While you’ll probably want to monitor patron input, creating spaces for users to hangout (e.g. online forums and meetings, social networking opportunities, online bookclubs, patron generated reviews, live feeds, patron produced videos…) will make your web presence much more dynamic.

To reinvent the digital branch at his library, King talked to patrons (especially people whose library use was mainly virtual – people in the physical library may not be the primary users of your online branch).  Despite having staff working for the digital branch, meeting with all staff was essential – he needed their ideas, contributions (getting written commitments from staff in advance ensures features like blogs have postings and someone overseeing them), and buy-in to make it work.  He then set goals so he’d know what success would look like.  Making sure there are ways for people to learn about digital features (e.g. podcasts on how to use Twitter or the RSS feed) is also vital.  

Then, just make sure your website is intuitively navigable and you’ll be ready to serve your online customers. 

Of course, this is a lot easier when you have staff dedicated to the process, but even small library websites can garner a lot of content just by allowing customer contributions and videoing some programs and storytimes or moderating online book discussions.  Just make sure local media promotes your new features so the community gets excited about being part of the library and does the content creation work for you.

I did a free webinar last week called Recession Relief that covered ways libraries can help patrons during these tough economic times, and you can watch the archived session and access my PowerPoint slides and notes (which include all the links I mention in the presentation). 

BCR does these hour long Free Friday Forums fairly regularly, and if you miss one you wanted to see, you can always view them later by going to the archive.

9/24 Just saw a newspaper article on the eTrain Mobile Training Lab – a partnership between my local workforce center and library.  Cool!

Many of us have had the opportunity to do (or have at least heard about) the 23 Things training originally developed by Helene Blowers of the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County.  It’s a training program developed to give library staff experience with Web 2.0 technologies.  It’s great that we are getting the chance to understand newer technologies used and offered in our libraries and by tech savvy patrons.

But, in this economy, so many of our customers are having to reinvent themselves and learn new technologies to be employable.  For some of these patrons, Web 2.0 concepts and terms, the internet, and even computers are a whole new world that they just don’t understand.  Sure, we offer computer classes and assist them with Flickr and YouTube and help them download audio books, but I haven’t heard of a public library that has done a 23 Things program for patrons.  For so many of us, continuing education is part of our missions and what better way to educate your residents in what they need to know to avoid becoming obsolete.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Technology Playground event is certainly a great start.  And the Aarhus Public Libraries in Denmark’s amazing Transformation Lab gives us an extreme version of how to introduce new technologies to the public (but could any US libraries afford to create this?) and really involve them in the library.

In the March issue of American Libraries, Chrystie Hill tells us in Inside, Outside & ONLINE (see p. 38 and especially p. 39 Where is the library?) that between 2005 and 2007, using a library website was the only online activity that declined among regular internet users!  While ideally a 23 Things for Patrons event would be done in the physical library space so confused users would have a staff member close by to help them, perhaps creating an online version of the program (and linking to some of the Web 2.0 technologies used on our websites) would be a way to improve our online usage.  It would also give patrons who can’t make an in-house program convenient 24 hour access to an opportunity to learn about Web 2.0.

So are you contemplating doing a 23 Things for your users?  Or have you already done one?  If so, please share it so we can learn from your experience.

I just took a class in User Centered Design for Digital Projects with Brenda Reeb.  Public libraries’ web pages have come a long way from our early sites, and there are some institutions that are doing amazing things with targeted recommendations, page personalization, heavy media content and opportunities for patron contributions.  However, we can still learn a lot from sites like Amazon, YouTube, Facebook and even (the dreaded) Wikipedia.

Some of her tips are by now obvious.  It’s about what the user wants, not what staff wants (they can have an intranet for that), and it’s not about teaching them how to do it our way.  So, make it easy to find stuff and don’t use library language – e.g. reader’s advisory sounds like a warning to the layman, rather than a helpful service.

Stressing the need for market research and statistical analysis of your pages, she recommended finding out why users are coming to your site before even thinking about a redesign.  Also, don’t design by committee (it’ll take forever to get it done) and be sure to have real users and/or focus groups test out your designs at every step.  For example, to test usability, give the user a set of tasks to accomplish (based on your original goals for the website) and observe how they do them.  This tells you how intuitive your site is. 

You can use committees for content (one of the three components to the web site design process, the other two being usability and design), since content groups are convened only when you need them for specific projects and the members can and will change.  But, your usability and design staff should be stable (if you can’t afford someone in both of these positions, consider combining them or outsourcing some of the work).

For the usability component, you need someone who can test for usability and interpret those results effectively.  For the design component, find a good graphic designer with extensive web design experience and be sure to review their portfolio.   Both people should seek input – especially from front line staff who can reveal some of the most common questions asked by patrons (e.g. parking, bathrooms, accessing stuff from home) which should be prominently addressed on the web page – but the ultimate decision for what the website looks like should lie with the design and usability people who are implementing the redesign. 

Brenda also suggested you have a page where staff and users can report problems they encounter at the website and make suggestions.  Also, use software that fixes misspellings typed into the site search box (e.g. for Crone’s Disease, it asks “Did you mean Crohn’s Disease?”).  And she mentioned that you can let the user personalize your page (so they can remove aspects of the site they don’t like or never use) with Drupal, which is open source.

Two online sources to help with design and usability are Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines and W3C’s validator which lets you check your page for compliance with best practices and errors in your code.

Although there was an academic library focus to this class, much is transferable to public libraries, so if you are interested in best practices and processes in this subject, Brenda just published Design Talk: Understanding the roles of usability practitioners, web designers, and web developers in user centered web design.