October 02, 2007
Open Library 2.0
The OU Library website has just been relaunched as Open Library 2.0, so congrats to all concerned :-)
You can tell it's 2.0 because of the fluid layout and the orange RSS button (err, wot no feed icon?!) in the news panel!
As ever, I assume it's all good and will only comment on the bits I don't like much ;-) For the lowdown on the new features, great new things to look for, check out the site's release notes... er.. hmmm... this is the closest I could find:
(I don't really want to do a 101 here, but if you do have a feed from a page, feed autodiscovery and persistent URLs for each story item might be an idea on that page? And a proper feed icon? And if there aren't any related links, why bother with the header? The separate items could also be separated a little bit more clearly, maybe?)
I did notice a Library 2.0 toolbox in the services section too, so it'll be interesting to see how that develops.
(Maybe I need get things like the OU Library Traveller up to production standard? In fact, that post was part of that process... now I wonder, did it get finished? I remember tweaking the styling (which I guess would need to be orange, now?))
There are now quite a few Library feeds listed, some of them using Feedburner, which was interesting...
My immediate impression of the site was: "lots of words, lots of lists of links."
I'm also not too sure how the site is intended to be used? Is it supposed to be sticky? Or is it supposed to be a place I go to occasionally in order to find a particular link to somewhere else, which I can then bookmark?
At this point I probably should declare that I have no idea what I want from a library website or what I think other people might want from it (though analytics should help work that one out...). I look up books in the OU library "by proxy" on Amazon or Google Books using the Traveller script, or via my browser address line using a smart keyword or a custom keyword to a OUseful redirect (http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/voyager/author/authorName, http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/voyager/isbn/ISBN, http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/voyager/keyword/keyword). I use a libezproxy bookmarklet to get me into commercial databases, I track library news and new books via my feedreader and so on. But then - I am hardly a typical user...
Anyway, back to the site...
Signs of personalisation and community are not too evident on the front page, although I did the site without any OU authentication (not that I could see anywhere to log in?). I wonder what sort of news is going to appear in the Library News box, too (and more importantly, who is that news targeted to?)
When I loaded the page, the featured links were "Libraries near you", "Your subject", "Services for you", which shows me the page is not mine. Maybe if I visited the site with an OU authentication cookie it would have links to "Libraries near me", "My subject(s)" and "My Services"?!
But that would be confusing navigationally... a bit like some of the current navigation. Clicking on the "Research" tab and the "Open Research Collections" graphic on the front page take me to two different pages. Which is fine... But how do I tell which page I'm on when I do go to one or the other of them? By using the coloured background cue in the sidebar navigation panel?
Lorcan Dempsey picked me up earlier in the week for posting "a little harsh[ly]" that librarians would rather record city of publication than an ISBN. I'm sure if I mentioned that I thought librarians should be kept well away from information architecture I'd get into even more trouble... so I won't... err... ;-)
PS I guess the new site launch means that all my previously posted links to library services are now well and truly broken! ;-) Good job Voyager is still in place though, and handy that it's searchable from the front page, even if it does violently hurl you into the stylistically very different Voyager site when you make a query...
2.0 has come to mean many things to many people,depending on when they first heard about it... style and presentation, underlying technology, personalisation, social networking features, leveraging "crowd intelligence", APIs, and so on. So how many 2.0 features - of whatever sort or legitimacy - are there on Open Library 2.0?
I'll spend the next week exploring and counting. If you'd like to play along, please send in your answers on a postcard/via a comment, etc etc. ;-)
Tags: library
Posted by ajh59 at October 2, 2007 12:25 PMHi Tony,
Thanks for your comments, was looking forward to reading your blog about the new site!
Just wanted to reassure you about (some) of your bookmarks. We have put in over 700 redirects from the old site to the new website yesterday afternoon.
You may also like to have a look at our relaunched OpenURL resolver which we also launched yesterday. Watch out for the special icon when searching our databases:
http://openurl.open.ac.uk:3210/sfxlcl3/sfx.gif
I'm sure you could tweak the Library firefox toolbar to query it as well (as Harvard have done).
It has a copy link facility for users to copy openurls to articles etc into blogs and wikis etc and can resolve DOIs like the last system (see your 2006 blog posting on the subject: ./005952.html).
here is a doi link using it: http://openurl.open.ac.uk:3210/sfxlcl3?ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&ctx_id=10_1&ctx_tim=2007-10-3T11%3A43%3A6BST&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_id=http%3A%2F%2Fopenurl.open.ac.uk%3A3210%2Fsfxlcl3&rft.genre=article&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1177%2F0961000607080419&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&svc_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Asch_svc&url_ctx_fmt=info%3Aofi%3Afmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&url_ver=Z39.88-2004
Cheers,
Tim
Hi Tony
Thanks for the interesting posting about the new Library website. I would like to make a couple of responses to your comments. With regard to Open Library 2.0 - this is the project name, not the name of the website. You know of Open Library 2.0 because you have been (very helpfully) involved in the project, but others do not.
Our vision is to have personalisation and customisation features and more mobile, web and web-based services. However, developing the core site has taken longer and been more complex than we originally envisaged, so we have split the project into 2 phases, with the core site being phase 1 and the new enhancements being phase 2. We have lots of good ideas, but unfortunately, our technical development resource is rather limited, and we will be looking for funding opportunities to help us along our way.
Look out for the new cross-database search system that will replace the catalogue search on the homepage, coming soon. This will have the same look and feel as our website and have some personalisation features.
At the end of this month, we expect that we will have a "find it at OU" button in Google Scholar, so you will be able to get full text articles that the Library subscribes to from there.
We are really looking forward to a production quality version of your Library traveller.. PLEEEESE. In the meantime, we will put details of Library related web 2.0 services on the toolbox page of the website for interested people to play around with.
Posted by: Susan Eales at October 25, 2007 05:28 PM