19 November 2010
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS
University at that point.
“Final Post”
I’m personally particularly excited about “sputnik” which isn’t so much a widget in the traditional sense, but a Firefox plugin (Chrome to follow) which advertises how your library (or University more widely) can cope whilst you surf the web. In some ways it resembles Libx, and was inspired by the iCite life sciences plugin, but it’s much less shy than either of them and, we think, has massive potential. For example, if you can’t use the OPAC, find it in Amazon, and we’ll tell you where it is in the library. Commercial vendors are not going to be shy about their offerings, they’re not going to hide their information one or two clicks away, so why should we be reticent about our alternatives on commercial pages, particularly as the user will have to actively elect to install the plugin. The large area set aside also gives room for us to go beyond holdings in the future.
NOV 12, 2010 01:09P.M. I’m in a slightly odd position writing a final post for this project. There’s two reasons for that. The first is that we’re still working on future versions of all of the things we produced in this project, and will for some time. This blog won’t be stopping, please don’t unsubscribe! You’ll miss out on all our future widgets. The second is that I’m used to writing formal final reports, where we detail what the project has achieved, this time it’s already on the blog. It’s also very difficult to get the tone right in such a different environment.
The exam paper widget (and associated uploader) helps students find exams and knows their subjects from our student information system. That’s pretty much the first time we’ve integrated with our SIS, and we now have a feed which can help contextualise information. We have to work to the natural student year for this widget, of course, we can’t move exams, and also the natural round of meetings of committees, but we’ve already got many papers from one of our subjects and approval to include more, so watch out for future posts on this subject.
I don’t think it’s worthwhile duplicating all that detail, but I’ll summarize it here, and you can find the detail if you’re interested. First, you’ll have seen the financial statement. The project management side of things seemed to work well, and we’ve also forged some good relationships within the University, for example getting a feed from our Student Information System. The widgets we’re proudest of, probably because they’re the most advanced, are the “Library Widget” which provides the functionality you’d expect from a library (catalogue, books on loan, etc), in a single widget, embeddable in our VLE, in Facebook and in iGoogle. A related widget provides the same functionality on a mobile. These were halfdone at the start of the project, through institutional commitment, but it was great to spend the time and effort to put them into production as a proper University service. The uptake was dramatic, and a little scary (see previous posts). If you want hard numbers for impact, that’s where you’ll find some pretty impressive ones!
Cambridge has many libraries and which library a student is a member of is not trivial to work out. We did it in the end, though, and now you’ll see a widget which allows a student only to search libraries which they actually have access to. We think this is the first time this has been possible!
Whilst Huw was working on productionising more developed widgets, like the general purpose library widget, and the mobile interface, I was responsible for getting the new widgets off the ground and into alpha. You can see inside the laboratory here, to see what’s coming. But a laboratory can be dangerous, these widgets really are all in “alpha”, and will almost certainly break at some point in the future, on their path to production. So have a play, but don’t be surprised if something odd happens!
We mustn’t forget what might be the most valuable output of the project, the services for others to use, and our advice pages for widget writers which summarize much better than I am doing here the advantages of the approach.
We’ve widgetised a reading list for a course (data entered via google spreadsheet) and are working on genericising it to other data sources including the possibility of linking it to Zotero or some other reading list manager.
Thanks to JISC for their support, and keep on looking for future updates. I’ve probably missed something out which I’ll remember over the weekend, so I’ll continue this shortly. In the meantime, here’s a screenshot of my (personal) favourite “Sputnik” plugin, which I’ve already personally found invaluable (and see also Huw’s usage graphs in other posts!). All the code for these widgets, even the experimental ones, should be in our googlecode svn (seach for culwidgets), and we’ll make
More advanced widgets are here on our demo page, and our forthcoming “storefront” is here. With three more widgets due for release in the next couple of weeks, we’ll do a big announcement of the storefront to the
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
19 November 2010
sure they’re all complete at release of each widget. In the spirit of the brave new world of blog, if you’d like further information on this project, or would like to steer any updates as to outcomes, just comment below and I’ll happily answer.
CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS
Library Widget Report NOV 12, 2010 12:03P.M. This is the first of a series of end-of-term reports on each of our widgets. Who made the grade? Who must try harder? Who are the troublemakers? Who are the swots? We’ll start with the Library Widget. We’ve done a fair amount of development on what was already a fairly established platform. We added in Library pics to help with navigation, we beefed up security, we integrated it into our new resource discovery layer, and we did some behind-the-scenes jiggery-pokery to make everything work more smoothly.
CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS For the Library Widget, the project was more about launching it and seeing if it floated. So let’s take a look at this month’s Google Analytics and see how it’s doing (vertical axis figs 200 and 400)
CamLib Mobile interface Report NOV 12, 2010 12:04P.M. The CamLib mobile interface is entirely a product of the project. We decided that as well as pursuing students into social networking sites, we also wanted to inveigle ourselves onto their phones. There is no escape from the Library! We initially set out to simply recreate the library widget for smartphones, but as we went along we did some thinking about what people would want to do on their phones (as opposed to waiting until they were at a ‘proper’ computer)
Not bad at all! Plenty of users, plenty coming back for more, and with 2,168 unique users we are already exceeding our end of year target of 2,000 users per month. Obviously, there is more we can do with the Library Widget, but it’s essentially a stable product with an established and growing user base. The future looks bright!
So the focus was on finding out if something existed, where it was, and how to get your hands on it. We did quite a lot of integration with maps and request functionality, and added a new “bookbag” feature to allow users to build lists of books from the catalogue and email it to themselves. Plus we kept in all the renewal, loans, libraries stuff as well.
Verdict: B+ Steady progress, will go far.
How is it doing so far? Let’s take a look (vertical axis figs are 35 and 70)
Well, just a bit better than expected. We knew that only a minority of students have smartphones, and only a minority of them use smartphones for work. So 540 unique users in a month isn’t bad. But we’re expecting a tipping point sometime in this academic year, much as happened with laptops a few years ago. And when they come we will be ready! Verdict: BGood effort, great things expected
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
19 November 2010
RESEARCHING USABILITY
UX2 wordcloud v5 NOV 12, 2010 11:11A.M. Last month a usability study was carried out on the UX2 digital library prototype. The study involved 10 student participants who tried to complete a variety of tasks using the prototype. The report is now available to read in full and can be accessed via the library (http://bit.ly/ux2usabilityreport1). The prototype is based on an open source ruby-on rails discovery interface, Blacklight which has been further developed for the project to provide additional features. Existing component services have been ‘mashed-up’ to generate the UX2.0 digital library. The prototype currently indexes the catalogues provided by the National e-Science Centre at The University of Edinburgh (NeSC) and CERN – The European Organisation for Nuclear Research. The report presents the findings of the usability testing (work package 2 – WP2.3) of the prototype which was conducted with representative users at the university. The study reveals a range of issues uncovered by observing participants using the prototype by trying to complete tasks. The findings outlined in the report provide a number of recommendations for changes to the prototype in order to improve the user’s experience.
However there were some usability issues with the prototype: • It was not obvious when the system saved previously selected facets in the Scope, often misleading participant’s expectations. • The external ‘Other’ links were not relevant to participants and often mistrusted or considered a distraction. • It was not clear when an item had a full text preview feature • Links to information resources were not prominent and often missed by participants
In order to identify and fully explain the technology responsible for each issue in the report, supplementary blogs will be published on the project website in stages, as and when developmental changes are made (follow the ux2 Twitter account for announcements). It is hoped that this supplemental development documentation will make it more accessible to other digital library developers and the wider JISC community. Some of the main findings from the report are summarised below.
• The format of text within the item details page made it difficult to read and consequently participants often ignored it. There were also a few lessons learned from the user study which I thought would be useful to share: 1. Recruiting participants via telephone does not necessarily guarantee attendance. Two participants did not show up to their slot after arranging the appointment with them by phone and sending them an email confirmation. However, this could also have been affected by the time of year. It transpired that many students had coursework deadlines the same week and the offending students did say they forgot because they had a heavy workload.
Positive findings from the study highlighted positive aspects of the prototype: • Allowing users to narrow results using the faceted navigation links was useful. • Providing users with details of the item content including full text preview, video and presentation slides was informative.
2. User generated tasks are not easy to replicate using prototypes. This was not unexpected but something which was tried anyway. As suspected, it was difficult to create a task which could generate results when using such a specialised and relatively small database. However, when it was successful it did return some useful findings.
• Allowing users to bookmark items and add notes was considered a useful feature. • Overall the layout and design was clean, simple and useful.
3. It’s difficult to facilitate usability tests and log details using Morae. Any usability practitioner will tell you that it’s important concentrate on observing the participant and interacting with them and to avoid breaking the flow by stopping to take detailed notes. I found it impossible to observe a participant, engage with what they were doing and log behaviour on Morae so would recommend you recruit a note-taker if this is important for your usability study.
These positive findings from the testing are reflected in the word cloud questionnaire participants were asked to complete:
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
19 November 2010
£13,925 £9,920 CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS
£23,845
Financial Report
£25,788
NOV 12, 2010 10:52A.M. £1,943 Here’s our project’s final financial report. I hope the format is ok. If you want any more info, just ask me. It’s fun to work on a project so inline with our aims, as it takes no effort at all to get people involved. The difficulty can be getting them to do their other work!
Directly Allocated Total (D) £5,477
td p { margin-bottom: 0cm; }p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }
£3,305
Cost
£8,782
Apr 10 - Jul 10
£8,782
Aug 10 - Oct 10
£0
Total Budget
Indirect Costs (E)
Total Spend
£12,657
Variance
£9,250
(+ve=over)
£21,907
Total Directly Incurred Staff (A)
£21,907
£12,725
£0
£9,620
Total Project Cost (C+D+E)
£22,345
£32,059
£24,988a
£22,475
£2,643
£54,534
Total Directly Incurred Non-Staff (B)
£56,477
£1,200
£1,943
£300
Amount Requested From JISC
£1,500
£26,400
£800b
£13,600
-£700
£40,000
Directly Incurred Total (A+B=C)
£40,000
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk
19 November 2010
£0 Institutional Contributions £5,659 £8,875 £14,534 £16,477 £1,943 p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } a. 195hr, 643hr, 57hr, 64hr. Spine points redacted for DPA. b. £300 travel (-£700 variance), £500 contingency. Contributions over life of the project:
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Budget Actual JISC 73% 71% Partners 27% 29%
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