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Friday, February 15, 2002 |
That's What I Want
"No single service has a catalog of music from all of the major record labels. Until there is DRM standardization and a sea change in industry attitudes, users will have to patronize more than one service to get an unabridged selection of artists. That means consumers are asked to pay for a service that might carry only half of their favorite artists, or to pay several monthly bills just to have access to the musicians they like. Not surprisingly, many users are unwilling." [at New Architect, via Tomalak's Realm]
This article is an excellent primer explaining why the online music services are failing, covering everything from Digital Rights Management (DRM) to usability issues.
"According to Pew, in the last year, of the users who were asked to pay for something that used to be free online, 50 percent found free online alternatives. Thirty six percent stopped getting the service online, and only 12 percent paid for it. Subscription service providers need more. They must offer a unique value proposition to keep their audiences from walking out."
What amazes me is how many people take advantage of free online services but then forget about libraries. Granted we're not loaning out digital music yet, but I don't think we do a good enough job of marketing our computers, our video & DVD collections, our audiobooks, our CDs, and everything else you can get for free at your local library. Not to mention the free expertise.
Of course, that's nothing new and we say that every year, but now we have to figure out that digital service and delivery part, otherwise known as "shifting." Similar to the concerns raised in this article, we need to work closely with our vendors to make sure our services based on their products don't have that usability barrier that so many of our online catalogs currently have.
9:36:01 PM 
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Inside joke: if only the sombreros were animated, they'd be dancing! Actually, the Flamenco Project sounds interesting, so you should check it out even if you're not spitting Coke through your nose right now. It "investigates how to effectively incorporate large category hierarchies into information access user interfaces" using categorical metadata. [via Peter on SIGIA-L]
8:55:36 AM
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Wednesday, February 13, 2002 |
Information Design using Card Sorting "The difficulty in organising the content stems from a lack of knowledge about how real users make use of this information. Without this, any exercise in information design is a purely theoretical one. A card sorting session can go a long way towards resolving this problem." [at Intranet Journal, via ia/]
Filing away for future reference because I want to try this technique when we start re-designing the SLS Web site to turn it into a portal.
10:35:09 PM
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And speaking of usability, I want to change the way my posts look and read. I want to put a small icon next to each new post so that it's easier to distinguish between them. Then I want to do something besides italicize quoted material, because I think it makes it more difficult to read. I don't want to put it in a different color because I'll eventually be designing my own templates. Do you have any ideas? Maybe just indent and quote the material? Thoughts welcome.
I also want to add titles at the top of each post, even though Radio won't pick them up as honest-to-god titles. I'd like to make the background color on these different, again to better delineate them. Suggestion for Dave and the Radio crew: add an option in the WYSIWYG editor for background color of a span done in CSS. I could do it manually, but that would defeat the point of using the editor.
6:11:54 PM
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Information Specialists at the Intersection of IA and Usability [via ia/]
This is an interesting article in its own right, but I just had to share this section:
"In a speech last year, GraceAnne DeCandido described the lure of librarianship by saying:
For most of us, what brought us to librarianship was the power of the word, the power of stories. Whether we called it reading, or scholarship, or research or study, what brought us to libriarianship was the power inherent in bringing together people and ideas.
She went on to say:
If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas, it doesn’t matter where the ideas reside. That means, if the ideas are on video, or on audiotape, or on CD- ROM, we adapted our collection policies to handle these materials. Format is no longer the controversial issue it once was. Or is it?"
6:07:31 PM
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Comments by: YACCS
© Copyright 2002 Jenny Levine.
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