Researching Usability

Overview of Twitter Use in Libraries

For those not involved in Higher and Further Education, JISC provides a service called JISCMail which facilitates knowledge sharing within the UK using mailing list based services.  One of these mailing lists, Web 2.0, is for anyone interested in Web 2.0 and its use in libraries. This month there has been an ongoing and interesting discussion (via the public library mailing list) on the evaluation of Web 2.0 services in libraries. This is something which is relevant to our project and in particular Workpackage 2: to undertake usability inspection and contemporary UX techniques research. Out of this discussion is seemed appropriate to examine how libraries are currently engaging with Web 2.0 and the impact it is having on users.

Something which Phil Bradley said in his response to the discussion stood out:

Measurement and evaluation has to be linked more to the activity than anything else

Quite often we concentrate on the technology or platform such as Twitter or Facebook, when often it’s the experience that should be considered first. Often there are multiple tools available to do the same job. In addition, tools are increasingly working together to ‘mash-up’ technology into a single service for end users. User’s are more interested in obtaining information to fulfill their needs or complete specific tasks than the technology being used.

I am hoping to write a series of blogs on this subject providing a snapshot picture of Web2.0 use in libraries. This will help to identify trends as well as the more innovative things being done which other libraries might be able to learn from. It wont be exhaustive but will hopefully provide a grounding for the project’s development work while also being useful to those working in libraries.

I have included the list of resources which were provided to the mailing list during the discussion. Thank you to everyone who contributed, the information will provide a valuable starting point for the overview. If you know of other resources please feel free to post them here.

• Libraries and Web 2.0 Wiki
• Twitter Experience at Chelmsford
• Twittering at Sheffield Library
• Birmingham Libraries use of Web 2.0
• Case studies/guest blog posts on Cultural Heritage blog
• Phil Bradley’s List of Web 2.0 Tools, Apps and Resources

Edinburgh Coffee Morning Quiz of the Year

This morning Edinburgh’s techy collective lined up to take part in the annual social media quiz as organised by Mike Coulter. As a regular at the weekly coffee mornings, I was excited to take part this year and test my knowledge. As it turned out I have a lot to learn, especially in knowing the meaning of acronyms like ASCii, JPG and USB, recognising company headquarters, famous tech faces or knowing the Google Protocol for rss feeds. The winner will be announced later today but I doubt our team are anywhere in the running. As they say, its the taking part that counts! Below is an image taken by Brendan MacNeill of me dutifully writing our answers down. Thanks to Mike for organising such a fun event for us geeks.