LITA Guide on usability

A new LITA Guide on usability is available from Neal-Schuman:

If your library’s website is not as user-friendly as it could or should be, you need this book. A LITA guide, it is the most authoritative, current reference on usability testing for libraries. It gives you practical advice in clear, non-technical prose, plus success stories from […]

“Information behavior of the researcher of the future” and MyLibrary

I have read with great interest the latest report from the British Library and JISC called “Information behavior of the researcher of the future”. [1] Some of the comments support the need for MyLibrary-like applications.
Purpose
The purpose of the study was to predict how younger (school and pre-school aged) people are likely to access and interact […]

More Facebook and MyLibrary

I believe I have finished writing my first Facebook/MyLibrary application.As stated on the application’s about page:
MyLibrary is an application allowing you to save to your profile sets of scholarly and academic information resources enabling you to be more effective in your learning, teaching, and research.
To this end it displays a default set of library […]

Single sign-on and MyLibrary

We are playing with single sign-on technology here at the University Libraries of Notre Dame, and its implementation makes putting the “my” into MyLibrary almost trivial.

More specifically, we are experimenting with a thing called CAS (Central Authentication Service). It is relatively easy to install. Download WAR file. Drop it into your Java servlette container. Configure […]

Facebook framework

I have (finally) written a working Facebook application, and I can now post here a skeleton for a MyLibrary/Facebook application:

# require
use CGI;
use strict;
use WWW::Facebook::API;

# initialize
my $cgi = CGI->new;
my $fbml = ”;
my $facebook = WWW::Facebook::API->new(
api_key => “foo”,
secret => “bar”,
app_path => […]

New Year’s resolution

Happy New Year!

Among other things, open source software is about community. In an effort to build the MyLibrary community one of my New Year’s resolutions is to increase the number of MyLibrary mailing list subscribers by 20%. There are currently 149 subscribers. Therefore, by the end of the year I hope to increase that number […]