Tag: technology

‘Tis the Season for Mobile Technology!

According to many sources, this Christmas was a big one for mobile technology! Ebook and app downloads hit record highs! Ebook readership continues to grow while print readership declines!

It’s an exciting time to be a digital librarian!

Wandering through the library these past couple of weeks, with new technology the talk of the season, I overheard several comments that went something like this:
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The Right War Over Ebooks

Last week, this article was tearing through the rounds of the library community:

The Wrong War Over eBooks: Publishers Vs. Libraries by David Vinjamuri

This is an important read. It raises some really good points, challenges some often unquestioned perspectives, and his proposed “pay-per-circ” model appears to have some real potential.

Still, though, I can’t get behind him on this issue. I feel that he misses the whole point. Continue reading “The Right War Over Ebooks” →

Speaking of Skeuomorphism

With all of the changes taking place over at Apple, people are wondering how it will affect the design of their future products – both the external look and the software interface. As a result, skeuomorphism is very much on the minds of systems and UX designers.

Skeuomorphism gets a pretty bad rap among many tech-savy computer folks. It’s kitschy, it’s gimmicky, it’s corny. Some feel that it dumbs down the essential nature of digital technology. By over-emphasizing analog equivalents (equivalencies that are, arguably, false in their foundation) skeuomorphism runs the risk of obscuring many of the things digital technology can do that analog can’t – the aspects of the digital tool for which there is no analog equivalent.

Mashable has a delightfully snarky gallery of some of Apple’s more infamous uses of it:

Say Farewell: Apple’s Skeumorphism Hall of Shame

Many of these criticisms are largely correct. So why am I still a fan of skeuomorphism?
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Library-Based Social Book Apps: A Question of Ethics

My library has been researching the SirsiDynix® Social Library app for Facebook. While there appears to be incredible potential in such social media-based library apps (friend recommendations, reviews, wish-lists, in-platform catalog interactions), for me it raises some serious concerns about patron data and privacy.

And it’s not just my innate antipathy to the thought of sharing any of our patron information with Facebook – an organization that sets the standard of notoriety for selling users’ personal info to any advertiser that wants it…
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Everything, Anywhere, All the Time

Yesterday, the Kansas City Public Library held the first ever Kansas City SirsiDynix Users Group Conference at our Plaza Branch. Representatives from several KC-area library systems and from SirsiDynix met and discussed what the future could hold for ILS systems and library technology.

Web-based services, cloud services, APIs, fully integrated discovery layers, social media integration, the role of mobile apps, patron-driven acquisitions, one-click downloads, the relationship of the library OPAC to the library website…

We’re brainstorming the nature and structure of libraries in the Digital Age.

I came out of the conference with three major take-aways:
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User Centered Design: The New Card Catalog for the Digital Information Age

The Kansas City Public Library just posted a new position: User Centered Design Specialist

I love that we’re doing this! I know that it’s become something of a cliché to talk about UX, but the simple fact of the matter is that user experience and interaction design are only going to become more important as we proceed in our Digital Information Age.

The landscape of information access is undergoing radical evolution. We have a wider variety of information accessing technology than ever before: desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones, gaming systems – with different operating systems and coding platforms for each. More importantly, these technologies have created a near-infinite variety in points of access – wherever we can carry our devices (and still have signal) we can access information at will.
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The Potential of Ebooks: A Modest Proposal

A colleague of mine recently recommended the book Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. It looks like a perfect creepy read for Halloween! I’m looking forward to it.

You can preview the first three chapters (plus the Prologue) through the publisher’s website. So, I clicked the link to the PDF and started scrolling through.

I was actually a bit disappointed. Not with the book, it’s really good (the Prologue and first chapter are, anyway!)

No, I was disappointed because the images don’t move. Reading it online, I found that I really wanted the images to be animated gifs.
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Showing My Age: An Ode to the Blue Screen of Death

Blue Screen of DeathThe other day, I was talking with some of my fellow librarians, and conversation turned to new technologies and digital information services. As it turns out, some of my fellow librarians are also fellow science fiction fans; naturally, we brought up the SF trope that someday our brains will be wired directly into our computer networks – no more external interfaces, the access and use of digital information will all happen through pure thought!

As is my habit whenever people discuss the concept of direct neural-computer interfaces, I offered my usual words of caution:

“Right, because I really want the blue screen of death IN MY HEAD!”

One of my fellow librarians didn’t get the reference. She’s in her early 20s, and she’s never seen a blue screen of death. She’s never even had a hard drive crash on her. She had no idea what I was talking about.

I should probably update my reference, but somehow, “Because I really want a network crash IN MY HEAD!” lacks the same punch.

Wearable Electronics

This could be very cool! The Age of Wearatronics (posted on medGadget, August 3, 2012)

Wearable electronics, Google glasses, augmented reality contacts, RFID chips and circuit boards embedded in our bodies… Kinda changes the scope of operations for a mobile digital library, doesn’t it?

Here’s the Bloomberg video that’s embedded in the medGadget article:

There’s a line in this video that bothers me. The interviewer, Sheila Dharmarajan, asks if having circuits that can monitor you installed in your skin isn’t all a bit Big Brother. The interviewee, John Rogers, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, responds that most people realize that it’s really no different than carrying a Blackberry.

Yeah, except that I can put down my Blackberry and walk away from it anytime I want to.

Thoughts on the Future of Technology

I’ve developed a passion for UX and I do my best to keep up with the professional literature on the subject. There’s one blog in particular that I keep coming back to: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design by Bret Victor. It’s almost a year old at this point, but I think the critiques it offers are universally relevant.

This post encourages me to think deeply about the future, and more generally about how we approach technology. I think Mr. Victor is absolutely correct – both in his critique of the currently popular vision of the future, but also, and more essentially, in his argument that our technological future isn’t something that just happens. It isn’t inevitable. We can choose where we want our technology to go – what we want to design and build and pursue.
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