I just returned from the 2009 m-Libraries conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (which–let’s get this out of the way up front– was an exceptionally beautiful and well-organized venue). The topic of the conference, the second annual, was the influence of the rapid expansion of mobile technology on libraries.
While those of us [...]
We’re happy to announce that, as promised, our Infomaki usability testing tool has been released Open Source under the GNU General Public License. If you would like to tinker with its inner workings, you can grab a copy at https://sourceforge.net/projects/infomaki/.
This first release is a “throw it over the side and see if it swims” release. [...]
In a fortuitous bit of timing for us here at the Library, Google released its Analytics API last week. We had already been discussing ways of exposing site usage statistics to NYPL staff, and the API makes that job a lot easier. This means that we can set about accessing our 18 months or so [...]
OK, so Stat of the Week has returned! Can we just agree to pretend those twelve skipped weeks never happened? Thanks.
Recently, the Digital Experience Group gave a presentation to the occasional meeting of our Site Managers, the people who run each of our branch libraries. These are the people who work every day with our [...]
There’s been a trend in web design over the past few years towards increased usage of Javascript. For you non-techies in the audience, Javascript is a “client-side” programming language, which means it’s used to write small programs that run on your computer when you load a web page. The “your computer” part is the important [...]
Our home-grown usability survey launched a couple of weeks ago and it’s spent most of the intervening time quietly gathering a ton of feedback from our users. Since there’s been a lot of interest around the app, I’d like to share some of the findings so far. First, some top-line stats:
Usability questions posted: 78
Total unique [...]
As we roar into a 2009 that is filled with major Labs projects, we have a constant need to get as much input from our users as possible. This need is fulfilled in many ways, from statistical analysis to focus groups to in-depth personal interviews to online surveys. Over the last month, however, it has [...]
Today we’re rolling out a beta release of NYPL Mobile (http://m.nypl.org/), a miniaturized version of our site for iPhones and other mobile devices. We have noticed a small but growing number of mobile visitors to our web sites, and this new site is an effort to launch a platform on which we can experiment with [...]
One of the reasons for the NYPL’s participation in the Flickr Commons is to facilitate creative uses of our photographic content by the public at large. In just over a month since launch, we’ve already seen lots of people posting “then and now” comparisons of our historical photos of New York City.
Paul Hagon of the [...]
Here’s a goofy little “stat” for a freezing Monday afternoon. I’ve been recently using the Twitter microblogging social network since seeing some very interesting uses of it at the Digital Library Federation Fall Forum. I realized that its usefulness lies not the value of any one post (140 characters ain’t much), but in the ability [...]
