Today I collaborated (virtually and in person) with three other Second Life educators to present a session on Libraries and Second Life at the TELSIG National Seminar which is being held in Palmerston North today and tomorrow.

I was incredibly nervous, and we were all crossing our fingers and toes that there wouldn’t be technology hitches – but all in all – even though there was the odd hiccup, I think it went pretty well! Everyone I spoke to afterwards had such nice things to say.

Clare Atkins from NMIT (Arwenna Stardust) was the MC – attending the conference in person along with me – introducing Second Life and describing its scope and features. We heard from jokay Wollongong (Joanna Kay) of ‘jokaydia‘, who took us on a tour of her Island, highlighting interesting learning and teaching spaces, including a “Virtual Classroom” project spearheaded by New Zealand educator Leroy Goalpost (Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytechnic).

Emerald Dumont (Kathryn Greenwood) joined us from Murdoch University in Perth. She talked about what libraries were doing in Second Life, gave us a guided tour of Murdoch’s Second Life space. Kathryn had set up a video feed from her office at Murdoch, so that we could see her as well as hear her speak. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get it to work on the spot! You can see a flickr video of what it would have looked like, though, if you’re interested. Kathryn had also suggested three great videos for us to watch, just in case Second Life failed us on the day! “Libraries in Second Life“, “Murdoch Uni Library gets a Second Life“, and “Murdoch Uni Island in Second Life“.

I gave a ‘mixed world‘ talk, with my slides and avatar in Second Life, but not managing to get out of standing up in front of 80 or so librarians! My talk was (of course) about my INFO580 research project “Second Life Libraries: Challenges and Strategies“. I had prepared lots more to say than I had the time to talk about, so I’m really glad I prepared a full transcript of my talk as a set on flickr for anyone interested in experiencing everything! (Of course, if you’re really keen you could read the whole report, or you could also check out my earlier presentation about Digital Libraries!)

It was so cool to do this, and excellent to get to work with clever people like Jo, Clare, Kathryn, Tim and Rob. Thanks everyone! ^_^

On Wednesday afternoon (along with staff and research students from Science, Engineering, and Architecture and Design) Elizabeth and I visited the Digital Media Design Lab to hear a selection of presenters showcasing their use of e-research technologies and demonstrating a number of cool projects they’d been involved with.

There were two visiting professors from other universities – Mark Gahegan (Auckland) and Neil Gemmell (Otago) – as well as six other academics from Victoria Uni. The general emphasis of the symposium was that e-research allows research to happen in new ways, using digital tools to enhance collaboration on a global scale. Research teams from around the world can benefit from each other’s work, share research data and even access (expensive) scientific equipment, across ultra-high speed digital network connections.

New Zealand’s “Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network” (KAREN) runs the length of the country, connecting most universities, and ties us into these international e-research networks.

For New Zealand, in the ‘corner’ of the world, the ability to borrow ‘number-crunching computing power’ or ‘telescope star-gazing time’ from other institutions with bigger budgets and more varied research environments is really exciting. Also, our own resources and data are just likely to be in great demand, due to their uniqueness and relative inaccessibility. By contributing our local research outputs to this global network we open up Kiwi ingenuity to the rest of the world.

Nationally, the “BestGRID” project has been run over the last 3 years to assess methods, applications, and infrastructure that could support a “fully-functional e-research ecosystem for New Zealand”. At Victoria, Sam Searle and John Hine from the school of Maths, Statistics and Computer Science are organizing equipment, facilities, friendships, and even programming know-how to help academics and post-graduate researchers make the most of this network of data and resources.

My favorite speaker was definitely Mark Gahegan, who spoke about his experience working in the US contributing to GEON, the Geosciences Network, and also about his more recent work developing visualization tools for geoscience resources. Gahegan is Director of e-Research and Professor in the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, at the University of Auckland (and an excellent speaker).

Gahegan described how, in the sciences and social sciences, a lot of time is often lost trying to interpret or re-interpret data previously acquired by other academics. How we understand come to understand the work we have created is tied up in the final research product itself, with few ways for us to convey quickly to the next person who comes along information such as:

• The process by which the research product was created,
• What other work the researcher was influenced by,
• Which scientific community ended up using the work,
• How that community used the work, etc.

Gahegan wants to capture and visualize geoscience research data in such a way that it is “semantically interoperable between people with different points of view, differences of opinions”.

More elaborate visualisation tools, like ConceptVista, an open source project that Gahegan has been developing, will enable researchers to view research data situated within the context of its creation and use. As a researcher works on her own project, she could be notified by the interface of previous outputs which match her method of data collection, or have been been used extensively by her target community in the past – and this could help her make better decisions about which resources in this vast global co-laboratory to make use of.

Slides from the speakers at the symposium should be available on the EResearch webpages shortly. Photos of the event should appear on the DMDN News blog soon as well.

I’ve just got my marks back from university for my final assignment in the Web and Intranet Content Management paper I took last trimester. This assignment gave me the opportunity to write a report evaluating our website at the Victoria library.

My report was significantly influenced by Jesse James Garrett’s book The Elements of User Experience. Garrett describes a five plane methodology to guide the development of websites and other interactive online applications. For my assessment of the library website I “reverse-engineered” Garrett’s strategy – using it as a guide to consider the success with which the library website met criteria drawn from four out of the five planes he describes.

So – I began from the bottom of Garrett’s diagram, and worked my way back up:

• Strategy

  Firstly, I examined at the library’s strategic planning documents attempting to determine what functional requirements and content specifications I should be expecting from the website. I considered the users a university library might have, and aimed to describe scenarios that could determine when the library website was doing a successful job.

• Scope

  Next, I considered what the content the website actually held, and what functions it facilitated for users. In particular, I considered the strengths and challenges of the current practice of using Web Content Maintainers to create website content. I also critiqued the site’s heavy use of tables and Dreamweaver templates, arguing that this ties site content to layout in a way that makes site maintenance much more difficult than it needs to be. Based on the marker’s notes, I think at this stage I neglected to adequately assess the functions possible on the site. I think I should have spent some time looking at the effectiveness of web forms and other tools on the site.

• Structure

  I attempted to determine if content was organized in a way that facilitated user navigation through the site and the discovery of relevant content. This part of the assignment was quite important to me because it provided an opportunity to consider the website information architecture. The library website has the potential to have a very clear structure, and the homepage, as it appeared at the time, articulated this structure relatively clearly. However, I feel that as the user navigates deeper into the site – at the secondary and tertiary levels of navigation – long lists of alphabetized content become confusing and frustrating for users who do not already know what they are looking for.

• Skeleton

  Finally, under Garrett’s Skeleton plane, I assessed the website in terms of the design of its navigation. I looked at instances where global, local and supplementary navigational elements were used, and also commented on the visual clarity of the site. This gave me the opportunity to overlay wireframe diagrams over screen captures of the site, and annotate these with commentary about the design of the site.

As a result of my investigations, the report ended with my top three recommendations for further improvements our library website. I feel that in thinking about a site redesign this year, we should be sure that we:

Use consistent & clearly visible site navigation

It is not always clear to users exactly where they are on the website. A more visual navigation metaphor (such as the use of tabs) would significantly enhance users’ ability to navigate through the site. Navigation needs to be consistent throughout the site, particularly in areas of local navigation, where the greatest amount of disorientation can occur. Contextual (in-text) links should give a clear idea of where they are taking users, especially if the link takes them outside of their current navigation structure.

Include user-relevant navigation elements

The website would benefit from navigation elements that are relevant to particular groups of users. The website could identify the user (passively, through login information, or actively, through user selection) and supply navigation to benefit the expected goals of the student concerned. The university’s new website template, currently being used on the Victoria homepage, appears to have user-relevant navigation in the form of a red navigation bar which changes depending what links the user selects. As the user moves around the site, further links are displayed in this location, based on the selection made earlier. It might be possible for the library to make use of this functionality in our redesign.

Manage ease of update & quality of content

The use of Web Content Maintainers is a clear strength of the website, giving it content produced by those who have expertise in the area they are covering. This area does need close management to prevent user error, and to ensure that different content areas complement each other. The library could enhance this work through:

• Training WCMs to be aware of important web publishing issues (such as the need for alt text and page-specific metadata), additionally solidifying this training with a clear set of guidelines for publishing content to the website.
• Implementation of a content management system: Content Maintainers don’t really need to use the advanced power of Dreamweaver when updating library content within rigid templates. Also, library staff must be trained to fill their web content roles so that they do not accidentally create errors. Future iterations of the library website might include a content management system that automatically styles, formats, arranges, and even adds metadata to pages staff create.

If you’d like to read the full thing, you can download the report as a pdf. You can also see the marker’s sheet on flickr. I’d really appreciate any feedback on this, and on improvements to the library website in general.

As I’ve mentioned before – the library is planning to re-design its website some time this year, and there have even been some temporary changes to the front page of the website recently to incorporate a new library blog. I think it will be very interesting to see what sort of changes are made, and hope to have some good ideas to contribute.