Om du skal til London - kom og hils på! :)

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We are presenting Reaktor at the annual Internet Librarian International conference in London. Our presentation is placed in track A in the session "Using 2.0 to Benefit the Public". You can find the paper on the conference website.

Please come say hello! :)

This year sees the 10^th anniversary of the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference. This year's event, ILI 2008, will be held at Novotel London West, London, UK on 16-17^th October 2008. And, unfortunately, it will be the first ILI conference I won't be able to attend. I have spoken at all of the ILI conferences and have also been a member of the programme committee and chaired sessions for a number of years.

My Involvement In ILI Conferences

Details of all of my talks at ILI are available on the UKOLN Web site. In light of the forthcoming anniversary I thought it would be interesting to produce a timeline of my involvement with the conference. I used the Dipity software to produce the timeline of my involvement in the ILI conference series, as illustrated below (and I should add that an embedded version of this is available on the UKOLN Web site, which also provides access to a locally managed copy of the data, so that potentially the service can be recreated if the Dipity service is not sustainable).

The conference has been of particular relevance to UKOLN, as it has provided an opportunity to actively engage with the communities served by both of our core funders: the academic libraries and the JISC development community together with those working in public libraries. Producing this timeline has provided a useful opportunity to observe and reflect the topics which have been of interest to these communities over this time.

Talks On Web Standards

My first talk was entitled "New Standards on the Web" and I described emerging new Web standards, including a range of XML standards (XLink and XPointer) and RDF. Looking back at the presentation (and the references to related work such as Eric Miller slide's on support for RDF in Netscape) I can see how naive I as in my expectation that the emerging new W3C standards would be quickly deployed in a mainstream service environment. I gave another talk on standards at ILI 2003 entitled "HTML Is Dead! A Web Standards Update" in which I avoided the complexities of Semantic Web standards and focussed on data formats including SVG and SMIL. Again I was soon able to appreciate that the market place had little interest in these standards, although my comments on the importance of and XML and CSS, for example, were appropriate and timely. The final talk I gave related to Web standards was given at ILI 2005 and was entitled "Facing The Challenges Of A Standards-Based Approach To Web Development". Here I reflected on the failure of various Web standards to gain acceptance in the marketplace and described the 'contextual approach to use of open standards' which I had been involved in developed for the JISC to help avoid repeating the costly mistakes made in the past when open standards (e.g. Coloured Book software) had continued to be advocated even after their failures had been widely acknowledged.

Web Accessibility

A talk on "Benchmarking Of Library Web Sites" given at ILI 2002 included a description of use of automated Web accessibility testing tools. The following year, at ILI 2003, I took part in a Web accessibility panel session entitled "Web Site Accessibility: Too Difficult To Implement?" and this time I gave one of my first presentations in which I argued that the traditional approaches to providing accessible Web resources, based on implementation of WCAG guidelines, was flawed. Two years later the joint UKOLN/Techdis holistic approach to Web accessibility had been developed and at ILI 2005 I was able to run a half day workshop with Lawrie Phipps on "A Holistic Approach To Web Usability, Accessibility And Interoperability".

Best Practices For Publishing E-Journals

ILI conferences have provided a dissemination opportunity for various projects I have been involved in. I gave a talk on "Electronic Magazines: Issues in Implementation" at ILI 2000 which described the EU-funded Exploit Interactive e-journal. The following year, at ILI 2001, Marieke Guy and myself ran a half-day workshop session on "Publishing Web Magazines, e-Journals & Webzines", the first of four workshop sessions I have facilitated at ILI conferences.

Other Areas

Other topics which I've covered at ILI conferences have included advertising on Web sites (at ILI 2001), new devices on the Web (ILI 2002) and quality assurance for Web sites (a half day workshop at ILI 2004).

Web 2.0

Since ILI 2004 the main focus of my involvement at ILI has been related to Web 2.0. The first talk was entitled "Beyond E-mail! Wikis, Blogs and Social Networking Software", with a talk on "The Sceptics View Of New Technologies" being given in a panel session at the ILI 2004 event.

A talk on "Email Must Die!" at ILI 2005 described the benefits of various Web-based collaborative and communications tools, and, at the same event I continued to argue the need to adopt a critical approach to the new technologies with a talk on "Folksonomies - The Sceptics View".

I was invited to chair a session on Wikis at ILI 2006 and, due to the late unavailability of one of the invited speakers, also gave a brief talk on "Reflections On Personal Experiences In Using Wikis". My main talk that year was on "Web 2.0 and Library 2.0: Addressing Institutional Barriers".

Finally at ILI 2007 Kara Jones and myself ran a masterclass on "Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library" and I gave a talk on "The Blogging Librarian: Avoiding Institutional Inertia".

Returning To ILI 2008

I had intended to participate at the ILI 2008 conference, but as I have been invited to present a paper at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference, I will unfortunately not be able to attend. I will be there in spirit, though with my colleagues Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman this year facilitating the half-day blogging workshop.

I would like to take this opportunity to give my thanks to everyone who has helped to make the ILI conference series such a great success, especially the conference organisers (including Marydee Ojala, Jane Dysart, Nancy Garman, David Raitt, Bill Spence, Jean Mulligan) and the people I've met at ILI (too numerous to mention, but I should include Michael Stephens, Mary Peterson, Frank Cervone, Karen Blakeman, Phil Bradley, Darlene Fichter and Peter Scott). All my best wish to everyone at ILI 2008 - and all the best for the next 10 years.

First up, it's probably worth pointing out the unique organisation of the OU, because this impacts on the way the Library website is used.

The OU is a distance learning organisation with tens of thousands active, offsite students; a campus, which is home to teaching academics (course writers), researchers, "academic related" services (software developers, etc.), and administrators; several regional offices; and part-time Associate Lecturers (group tutors), who typically work from home, although they may also work full- or part-time for other educational institutions.

The Library is a "trad" Library, in that it is home to books and a physical journal collection (as well as an OU course materials archive and several other collections) that are typically used by on-campus academics and researchers. The Library has also been quite go-ahead in obtaining online access to journal, ebook, image and reference collections - online access means that these services can be delivered to our student body (whereas the physical collections are used in the main by OU academic and research staff.... I assume...!;-)).

Anyway, to ease myself back into thinking about "Library Analytics", (I haven't looked at the Library stats for several months now), here are some warm-up exercises/starting point observations I made, for whatever they're worth... (i.e. statements of the bleedin' obvious;-)

Firstly, can we segment users into onsite and offsite users? (I'm pretty sure Hassan was running separate reports for these different gorups, but if he is, I don't have access to them...)

Even from just the headline report, it appears that a 'just about significant' amount of traffic is coming from the intranet.

Just to get my eye in, is this traffic coming from the OU campus at Walton Hall? If we look at the intranet as the traffic source, and segment according to the Network Location of the user (that is, the IP network they're on), we can see the traffic predominantly local:

By the by, if I'm reading the following report correctly, we can also see that most of the intranet traffic is incoming from the intranet homepage...

And as you might expect, this traffic comes on weekdays...

So here's a working assumption then (and one that we could probe later for real insight in any principled cases where it doesn't hold true!): most referrals from the OU intranet occur Monday to Friday, from onsite users, via the intranet homepage.

Secondly, how well is the Library front page working? Whilst not as quick to read as a heat map, the Google Analytics site overlay can provide a quick way way of summarising the most popular links on a page (notwithstanding it's faults, such as appearing not to disambiguate certain links...)

A quick glimpse suggests the search links need dumping, and more real estate should be given over to the "Journals" and "Databases" links that are currently in the left hand sidebar, and which get 20% and 19% of the click-thrus respectively. Despite the large areas of the screen given over to the image-based navigation, they aren't pulling much traffic. (That said, if we segment the users it might well be the case that the images in the middle of the page disproportionately attract clicks from certain sorts of user? I don't think it's possible to segment this out in the general report, however? For that, I guess we need to define some separate reports that are pre-segmented according to referrer?)

Just chasing the traffic a little more, I wonder if there are a few, popular databases or whether traffic is distributed over all of them equally? The Library databases page is pretty horrible - a long alphabetical list of databases - so can the analytics suggests ways of helping people find the pages they want?

So how are things distributed?

Well - it seems like some databases are more popular than others... but just how true is that observation...?

Let's do a bit more drilling to see what people are clicking through to from the databases pages... I have to admit that here I start to get a bit confused, because the analytics are giving me two places where databases are being reached from, whereas I can only find one of the paths on the website...

Here's the one I can find - traffic from:
http://library.open.ac.uk/find/databases/index.cfm:

And here's what I can't find on the website - traffic from:
http://library.open.ac.uk/databases/database/:

They both identify the same databases as most popular though, though which databases those are I'll leave for another day...because as you'll see in a minute, this might be false popularity...

Why? Well let's just see where the traffic for one of the most popular databases is coming from over the sample period I've been playing with:

Any idea why the traffic isn't coming from the OU, but is coming form other HEIs???

Well, I happen to know that Bath, Brighton and Durham are used for OU residentlal schools, so I suspect that residential school students, after a reminder about the OU online Library services, are having a play, and maybe even participating in some information literacy activities that the OU Library trainers (as well as some of the courses) run at residential school...

Data - don't ya just love it...? ;-) It sets so many traps for you to fall into!

Van de website:

Celebrating our 10th birthday this year, Internet Librarian International 2008 takes place at Novotel London West, London, UK on 16 &17 October 2008

Technological change and development over the past decade has been breathtaking, but the challenge remains the same: to understand the impact on – and benefits to - your library or information centre.

Wat mij opviel zijn de Nederlandse bijdragen:
- Voordracht van Michel Wesseling (ISS) over Focuss.info (zie eerder artikel in IP);
- Voordracht van Harry Oosterveen en Ingeborg Krukkert (IRC);
- Voordracht van Karolien Selhorst (OB Vlissingen);
- Keynote van Erik Boekesteijn, Jaap van de Geer en Geert van den Boogaard (DOK) The Shanachi Story.

Ik heb de data al in mijn agenda gezet. Of ik ga....

Dit lijkt dus heel erg op de truc die commerciele uitgevers van tijdschriften toepassen met het overdragen van copyright. Het lijkt er op alsof geen van de sprekers hier in trapt. Nadeel voor alle participanten en achterblijvers is wel dat niet alle informatie op een plek te vinden is. Zolang iedereen de tag CIL2008 gebruikt kun je de meeste bijdragen altijd terugvinden.

Belangrijkste suggestie die de sprekers doen aan de organisatie is zorgdragen voor gratis WiFi internettoegang voor iedereen, zodat er flink geblogd kan worden. Dat lijkt dus niet vanzelfsprekend te zijn. Vorig jaar tijdens Internet Librarian in Londen, van dezelfde organisator, was er ook al geen gratis internet. Iets wat je bij congressen met dergelijke titels en onderwerpen toch wel zou mogen verwachten. In Londen kocht je voor 20 GBP per dag internettoegang! Hopelijk gaat het dit jaar wel goed. De website met de call for papers is al online. Het ILI congres is van15-17 oktober in Londen.

Van een aantal Nederlandse bloggers weet ik dat ze ook naar het CIL2008 congres gaan: De heren van DOK als keynote speakers, Moqub, Dee Books, Ecobibl, Gerard Bierens en ondergetekende. Gaan jullie ook? Laat het even weten middels een reactie.

Nu finns det inga ursäkter längre. Nu SKA du skriva ett paper till Internet Librarian International 16-17 oktober 2008! Kom igen nu, tveka inte, utan skicka in ditt projekt, din idé, din vision. Världen vill höra.

New digital initiatives, delivery options and Web resources make for increasingly challenging workplace interactions. Internet librarians excel at embracing change and love innovation. Web 2.0, Library 2.0. Learning 2.0 and other 2.0s impact not only what we do but also how we do it. We can communicate across national borders, collaborate across time zones, and collect amazing amounts and types of information. At the same time, we must ensure that we do not race so far ahead of our constituencies that our users can't follow. The necessity of establishing ROI benchmarks, ascertaining real value, and sharing knowledge on funding tactics goes hand-in-hand with learning new technologies, training end-users and implementing creative solutions to real problems. We are looking for a mix of papers for conference sessions, workshops, and short tutorials. Our emphasis is on the practical rather than theoretical; we are seeking case studies and proposals about initiatives in your organisation, not product pitches or overviews.

Sådär, nu vet du vad som gäller. Här kan du läsa om konferensens spännande ämnesförslag och här skickar du in ditt paper. Svårare än så är det inte. :-)

Deadline: 28 mars.

Just do it.