TIS Lab

The following post was contributed by our Outreach Librarian, Meghan Sitar…

The University of Texas Libraries have maintained a presence in Facebook for several years now, starting as a Group before transitioning to one of the newer Fan Pages.  We’ve used this space to post content from our other social media sites, including blog posts from our New for Undergraduates blog, video tutorials posted on YouTube, and event photos published on Flickr.

With the redesign of Fan Pages and the ability to publish our content to our fans’ News Feeds, it seemed like a good time to reexamine how we were managing all of this and to look for methods of automating the interaction between all of these different sites.  At the same time, we had been hearing from students who wanted to see us on Twitter, which seems to have finally gained some popularity among students on campus.

Matt Lisle, our intrepid Instructional Designer, had the brilliant idea to link Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, and our Wordpress blogs together using FriendFeed.

This is where things get a little complicated.

When one of these sites posts to FriendFeed, the post is then exported to Twitter.

Using a Facebook application called Twitter Fan Page Sync, we’ve linked together our Twitter account and our Facebook Fan Page.  Twitter then posts the same information it receives from the Friend Feed to the status on our Facebook Fan Page.

Perhaps an illustration is in order?

(Click the image to see the full version)

The benefit of this system is that the cross-posting between all of these outlets is automated and no one person is responsible for repurposing the content.  The time investment in posting to any one of these sites returns a greater yield since the visibility of that post is at least doubled.

We’ve seen some problems with the stability of the Facebook application.  While the FriendFeed postings are readily feeding to Twitter and then to Facebook, direct posts to Twitter only showed up in Facebook onces we installed a second Facebook application, Selective Twitter Status, which requires tweets to include a #fb at the end.

That small nuisance aside, we’re pleased to have found a way to consolidate our social media empire into one relatively simple system.

• UT Libraries on Facebook
• UT Libraries on Twitter
• UT Libraries on Friendfeed

As reported during the last Web Author Brown Bag, work has progressed on the Content Management System for the Libraries’ site. Web Authors have added to and maintained the following sections; News Releases, Army Map Service Maps, For Undergraduates, Perry-Castañeda Library and the Computer Science subject guide. In addition, two of the Web Authors who did not edit their content before, have been editing their content in the CMS in order to provide a realistic evaluation of the system.

Title:	CMS Site Sections
Description:

Noted features include…

• Managing users/groups and roles
• Editing content in the browser
• Tagging and automating views of content (Ex: RSS, News Releases and Tag Clouds )
• Managing/inserting Media, PDFs and Documents
• Scheduling publication
• Saving and comparing revisions
• Tracking page views

Title:	Features
Description:

Additional server configurations have been performed to optimize performance, flexibility and dependability. We are now ready to start the last phase of the evaluation. Thursday, April 22, the Library will display the News Releases, Perry-Castañeda Library, AMS Maps and Computer Science Subject Guide on the development server in preparation for publishing after all stakeholders have had a chance to review. This will help determine the scalability of the CMS and provide valuable information for further improvements.

In addition to our work to identify new technologies to assist in serving library users, we will often be asked to evaluate new hardware or gadgets for how they might best fit into the services that the UT Libraries offers.  We poke them and prod them and hopefully find their benefits and weaknesses before rolling them out into service.

Our team needs to be building and testing our interfaces so that they work on these next generation devices.  Our users are accessing our sites from a growing array of rich media devices and trying to test on all of them can be a challenge.

We want to make it easy for other UT Libraries staff to get experience with the devices before they show up in our collections or in our users’ hands.  

As we add devices, we will add posts here with the tag [techlib]  Anybody who evaluates the device is welcome to post comments about their experience with it.  If you happen to want to suggest a device for us to test, you can add your comments to this post.

Our users spoke, and we listened!

After several comments came in via the website from users who missed being able to Renew items from the homepage, we decided to add it back! 

Some background:

When LIBsearch was introduced a couple months ago, the quick links box went away.  We had tested whether users could still Renew items without a dedicated link and they had no problems with the task.  However we recognized the potential that this particular link might be missed and planned to assess adding it back in conjunction with upcoming homepage content modifications. 

Our thinking was:

Since it is not a link just for Students or just for Faculty/Staff, it didn’t belong down in that lower left section.  There was a suggestion to add a Renew button to the LIBsearch box but we wanted to keep that functionality of the search box as searching only. 

So, after reviewing our page’s architecture and some other sites for guidance, we elected to add it to the top right utilities area of the site on all pages, as shown below.

We see this as a solution that allows us to add back in a popular link in the most logical place within the current page.  When the homepage modifications take place, it is possible the Renew link will be featured elsewhere, in a more logical place.

Feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns.  We hope this makes our users happier and aids in easy and satisfying use of our site!

In order to improve the current Libraries website, it is necessary to take inventory of the site as it exists today. The Libraries website has over 80 web authors and thousands of pages. Keeping track of such a huge, evolving site can be a daunting task, to say the least.

an example of a map of a website

The deceptively simple way to inventory a website is to click through it and draw a map showing every page. Imagine clicking every link on www.lib.utexas.edu and making a note of where they all go. Fortunately, there are specific tools that exist to do things like this. Those tools are called Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs), and one just happens to sit in the TIS suite.

But before putting me, the TIS GRA, to work mapping the Libraries site, the technology pros in TIS suggested that it might be worthwhile to investigate software that will automate the task of creating a website map. An automated tool would be much faster than a GRA and might be just as effective.

one type of content visualization

I found a couple of automated tools designed to help assess the information architecture of a website. I evaluated them and summarized my conclusions in a report. The automated tool I found that best fits the project requirements crawls the Libraries website and creates a surprisingly accurate map of the content. It also generates nifty visualizations of that content, which can be useful when demonstrating the depth and breadth of such a huge site. These visualizations make it easier to see overlapping content, organizational flaws, and pages that might get overlooked by human eyes. And did I mention the software does all this automatically? No GRA required? Sounds like a good deal to me.

Update 4/24/09: So far I have created 14 separate maps and have received some great feedback.

Spurred by the realization that our home page lacked a clear starting point, and that patrons are confused about their various search options, the Libraries recently decided to implement a tabbed search box.  We wanted it to be prominent, simple, and intuitive. 

A working group was formed to determine what tabs and sub-choices we should include as well as to make recommendations on functionality and aesthetics. 

After taking inventory of our searchable services and reviewing other academic libraries, we fielded an online survey to get feedback from our staff and patrons on what tabs to include, what they should be labeled, etc.  View a PDF of the results or see them online. The second link includes the ability to read open comments we received.

We created a working prototype and tested it with users which lead us to make some structural and graphical changes.  See the first round of testing’s script and results summary, which mainly showed us that the search box needed to be more prominent in the overall design.  In the second round of testing (script &  results summary), users had a 94% success rate overall and completed most tasks in a straightforward manner using our new LIBsearch box.  Feel free to contact me, Jade Anderson, directly if you’d like more detail on the testing methodology or results.

We went back and forth a bit about branding it–users had varying opinions on the matter–but we did end up branding it LIBsearch in the end.  The tabbed search box that we are pushing live in a few days will be monitored closely and is subject to alterations based on feedback and analysis of use. 

In current times where technologies evolve at a lightening pace and we strive to provide usable and relevant web services to our patrons, we are more interested than ever in your ideas and feedback.  Let us know what you think of our newly redesigned search by commenting, filling out an anonymous one-question survey, or emailing lib-searchbox at utlists dot utexas dot edu.

A few months ago, we announced that the University of Texas Libraries created an application that would integrate subject-specific library information into Blackboard courses. Finally, we’ve gotten around to sharing our code.

• First, read our previous post that explains how to use template variables in Blackboard
• Then, go to http://code.google.com/p/library2blackboard/ to obtain a php script, 2 sample xml files, and an html file for testing.

TIS is proud to have our work featured in a three part series from News8 Austin.  The U.S. Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project, created by UT Professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, has been making an impact since it went live several months ago.

Professor Rivas-Rodriguez brought her work and the website into the national headlines when Ken Burns’ documentary on PBS, “The War”, added Latino veterans to the program (after not including them in the original cut of the documentary).

The website has an extensive searchable database of transcripts and videos of interviews with these WW2 veterans.  Also featured are hundreds of photographs, both then and now, of these heroic individuals.

Not only does this body of work from Professor Rivas-Rodriguez serve as an important historical and research source of information, it has also served to reunite friends and family members that have until now, not been able to make contact.

Below are PDFs of the website stories from News8 Austin.

News8 Austin Story 01

News8 Austin Story 02

News8 Austin Story 03

TIS, along with our Instruction staff, created a new All About Plagiarism tutorial that teaches students to:

• Define plagiarism
• Determine what sources need to be cited in your writing
• Paraphrase the words of others
• Effectively incorporate quotations in your own writing
• Describe other methods that can be used to avoid plagiarism

The tutorial also includes some helpful tools for instructors, including the ability to embed portions of the tutorial into their own courses and a test that can be imported into Blackboard.

Feel free to point your students, faculty, or coworkers to our tutorial.

We are now offering the option of sending an SMS message to reference librarians by using the AOL IM hack described here. This enables us to answer questions via instant messaging, which means that we can answer these questions alongside those that we receive from our chat with a librarian service.

The text messages have already started rolling in. Hopefully this new service will be useful to students, faculty, and staff at UT.