David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Use Google to find magazine articles and book exerpts!

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I just read about this on Research Buzz – Google is now indexing magazine articles and book exerpts! How cool is that?

Here’s how to search for them:

To find magazine articles, enter this:

libraries site:google.com inurl:articleid

To find book exerpts, enter this:

libraries site:google.com inurl:isbn

And to find both, do this:

libraries site:google.com inurl:isbn | inurl:articleid

My guess is the “|” must be similar to an OR search – never seen that one before. So, I’ll play around with it and try to figure it out a little.

Enjoy!

Following eye movement in usability

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Eyetrack III – What You Most Need to Know – very cool!

This summary shows what the eye does as it scans a webpage – and believe it or not, “The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.”

Also – “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page.”

Whoa, this one’s cool – “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning.”

And this – “Underlined headlines discouraged testers from viewing blurbs on the homepage… This may be related to a phenomenon that we noted throughout the testing: visual breaks — like a line or rule — discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break, like a blurb.”

And – “Eyetrack III found that people do typically look beyond the first screen. What happens, however, is that their eyes typically scan lower portions of the page seeking something to grab their attention. Their eyes may fixate on an interesting headline or a stand-out word, but not on other content. Again, this points to the necessity of sharp headline writing.”

Lots more stuff here – read it!

Five “Must Have’s when Planning for a New Tech-based Service

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Swiped from Tame the Web: Technology and Libraries: Planning for a New Tech-based Service — Try these.

Five “Must Haves” when planning for a new technology-based service:

Creating policy
Acquiring the Technology
Staffing
Training staff
Promotion

Think about it – can you have one without the other? Let’s see:

No policy – nothing will happen on the staff side, and customers will get irate because nothing is consistent

Getting the technology – can’t do it if you don’t buy it!

Staffing – who’s going to run this in his/her spare time? Most library staff already do this, I suppose… but at the least, the new service will be mediocre if it’s not adequately staffed.

Training Staff – staff HAVE TO understand how to run the new service, what to do when problems happen, etc. They also have to understand how to teach the new thing to customers (more on this in a sec)

Promotion – why spend all that money if the service isn’t promoted? Why waste staff time if it isn’t promoted? Technically, this point can be forgotten if the service is cool enough – word of mouth travels pretty fast.

But – one thing that the author forgot is Training Customers. Possibly, this was supposed to fit into the “training staff” part… but I think it’s important enough to make it a separate focus. Customers won’t use it if they don’t know how. Training them is essential.

All for now!

New twist on federated search

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In the latest InfoWorld trade mag, there was an article on federated technology from a corporate point of view. Most of the article was boring, but there was one eye-opener, for me anyway: bank ATM machines are basically a federated system… wow! never thought of that before.