aadl.org 3.2: proposed feature list
by eli
We've recently finished a major maintenance upgrade on Drupal and Innovative (our library automation system), and while there's one more Innovative upgrade right around the corner, we would like to finalize a list of new desired features for the public website. We're calling this project aadl.org v3.2, and we anticipate that after our Innovative updates are complete, each of these features will be independently developed and implemented over the winter and into spring.
We'd like to get your feedback on these ideas, including other ideas you might have or changes you'd like to see, so that we can have specifications complete when we're ready to begin development.
Events Database
Our events database is one of our oldest running applications, dating back to the coldfusion era. It handles the entire process, from reservation to booking to promotion, and our first phase will be to modernize the backend and the middleware, migrate the content, and drop it in as an essentially transparent upgrade. From there, we'd really like to add features that will help patrons be more aware of our events, from better searching and organization to data about live broadcasts and rebroadcasts, and even links to video on demand after that service rolls out.
One of the issues we'd most like to tackle is how our events engine can help patrons access our events. RSS feeds are a start, but as you know, most of our audience does not use RSS yet. Would email reminders on an event-by-event level (i.e. remind me of this event the day before) be desirable? What about more general email reminders for events of a certain type? Of course, searching and categorizing has lots of room for improvement too, so ways that you might expect the events to be classified would be helpful. Also, would a comment thread for each event be useful? We'd like to round-trip the whole event process, from registration where applicable to emailing attendees a post-event evaluation, but we don't want it to be too spammy. In short, what would you want out of the library's events listings?
Top Items & New Items
This is a very popular service and there's plenty of room for improvement. The New Items specifically are a bit hamstrung by cataloging issues and a current lack of an automatable report, and finding the right balance between too much and too little information is always a challenge. Obviously, the ability to better limit a new items search along lines such as adult/teen/youth materials, fiction/nonfiction, etc would be a big step here, but what other information would you like to see on these lists? One of the ideas would be a display of the number of requests and the number of copies, and link to directly request the item. This plays into several other ideas we've got below, but how could these services be more useful and usable?
Click Tracking / Statistics
We have good aggregated stats, but we don't yet have node-level views or click tracking, which would not only be very helpful to us, but in the spirit of transparency, may be very interesting to users as well. Would you like to see the number of clicks on a link within a blog post, or the number of views of a blog post, as a user? What else might you like to know about how others are browsing the content?
Pop-out links & covers
Similar to click tracking or demand stats, we've thought about making mouseovers for book covers in a listing or blog post that tell you how many requests and copies there are on that item, or other information that might save a click. Of course, pop-outs can have quite a bit of functionality (clutter?) to them, so what information or features -- if any -- would you like to see when you mouse over the cover of or link to an item in the collection?
Social Catalog
We've taken a few steps in this direction with the personal card catalog, but we'd like to go much further and bring some life to the otherwise dry catalog. Our ideas here include user tagging of titles, not to replace subject headings, but to supplement them; title-level user comments, ratings, or reviews, and expanding the personal card catalog to serve as more of a wishlist to allow people to better manage their checkouts and requests.
With the frameworks we've put in place, these are not large development projects, but we want to think carefully about how these features are integrated and presented to the users to get the power of the paricipation without it being overwhelming. A particular question is what form should patron feedback on the item level take? Simple comments can easily serve as reviews or discussion, but there is also value in some quantitative ratings from users, especially as an easily distilled sparkline in the hitlist. We'd like to avoid the 5-star boildown, with more of a mini-chart of numbers of patrons who gave an item a particular rating, but that's going to look pretty bleak as we get started.
Comments on an item could also include a rating, amazon-style, but we want to allow discussion as well, so should users be limited to submitting a single rating per item, or should it be handled differently? Any thoughts?
Household Accounts
With more patrons and families managing their accounts online than ever before, we'd like to offer a way that households can aggregate account access and save some serious clicking in managing everybody's cards. Our idea is to require a web account to be set up for each library card you wish to access, and you can then add views of other accounts onto your myaccount page if you have the username and password. We could display summaries of each card's items due and request statuses, allow a single-click to renew everything renewable that the household/group has out, and more. Of course, this needs to be done carefully to avoid privacy concerns. If the parent (and I mean that on all levels =) account has the username and password for another account, is there a privacy concern? We could only allow this for matching household addresses, for instance, but that not only ignores the complexity of modern families, but could also be made impossible by simple inconsistency in the address field. Any thoughts as to different approaches, or desired features of this service?
Login / Logout / Remember Me
By default, a login to aadl.org lasts 3 weeks. While this is very popular with home patrons, and does not apply to machines at AADL locations, we'd like to put this in the hands of the user at logon. Our first pass at the options we could present at login would be to stay logged in for one week, one year, or to not stay logged on at all on a public computer. In-house terminals would be locked to don't remember me to help reinforce the public nature of the machines. We'd also like to look at better ways to let the patron know that they are logged in to avoid some of the use questions we get from less experienced users who don't see the logout button. Any ideas?
Video on Demand
We have a sizable collection fo digital video of library events that could find new value to patrons over the web, on demand. We have the infrastructure and the bandwidth to deliver this service. How might these be presented? Should we offer a medium-quality stream, and an optional torrent? We are predisposed to quicktime, but what format would you like to see this content take?
Patron Contributors
Now that the ball is rolling, we'd like to find ways to encourage more participation in our comment threads around the site (other than the teen gaming area, which has plenty of chatter as-is =) and possibly open the door for accomplished commenters to be invited to submit posts for other patrons to read. This could not only increase the volume and quality of the posts on the site, but also help us to grow stronger, more involved relationships with our most passionate (super)patrons.
We've discussed using a reputation system that gains value through comments towards a posting threshold; however, it would be very, very cool to do something with reputation as currency, like the nascent 'whuffie' of bitchun.org (from Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). However, that may well be too geeky. There are so many commenters in Ann Arbor; what can we do to get them commenting on our posts?
Handheld Account Access
We have an alternate catalog engine that is optimized for WAP-style, ultralow bandwidth access, that allows searching, requesting, and renewals. We'd like to look for ways to offer that service, but it seems like the WAP bandwagon has pretty much rolled to a stop as phone browsers have gotten better and better. SMS may well be where the action is; google's outstanding texting services hint at how a library could better reach into a patron's pocket (that didn't come out quite right =) without trying to cram a 1024x768 interface onto a tiny screen. What type of services would you like to see accessible from a phone, blackberry, or treo?
OK, Tech Advisory Board members, this is what we're thinking about at this stage, and we'd love to hear your comments on it and other ideas that we haven't thought of. Thanks for your time to make it to the end of this post, and we look forward to hearing what you have to say!
[eli]
Blog Post
Comments
wow, Eli, lots of stuff
wow, Eli, lots of stuff here. Let me try to tackle things in order.
Events.
I've been using upcoming.org for managing events for a calendar I keep. It has a pretty good API to program against, and there are a number of people in town who remix events from it into their own calendar streams. It would be worth checking out if you could post all library events to that calendar without too much difficulty.
Popular and new items.
I'm sure I've asked a couple of times about how to get a "nonfiction" feed out; I guess I'll ask again. There are a few more metrics that might be nice to link to or pull out - # of holds, # of copies, # of times the item has circulated ("circs" is what I think you call it), or even metrics that you could pull from LibraryThing like # of those people who have a copy, number of reviews, and the bookshare stuff they have going. Making all that intelligable might be hard, but I'll bet you could pick some way to do it to somehow highlight the "hot" items.
Click tracking.
Something about this worries me (the patron privacy thing). But it would be good and useful to be able to track incoming referrals, so that you could see where people are coming from when they get to the library, and also where they are going to if the library sends them off-site. Page views of blog entries is useful I guess but only as a simple signal of overall site usage.
Popouts and mouseovers
If you're going to the trouble of doing all that, can you make it so I can reserve with a single click from the book image? I'd redo my "wall of books" with the same code (and then of course have 30 books on hold that I wouldn't be able to all read before they were due).
Social catalog
I like how the social catalog and tag cloud at LibraryThing has evolved, and you'd do well to grab a few hints from their presentation. To make things look a little less sparse, can you get some kind of beta test group to tag up a bunch of books so that there's some data to start with rather than nothing?
Household accounts.
If there was some kind of reasonable household accounting, it would let me give my 6 y/o his own library card to check out books on but it would also make it easy for me to renew those books for him and get notices by mail. I am not sure that you necessarily want to give spouses by default access to each others records - it would be very easy to make arguments against it. I'd look hard at what the law lets you do and makes you not do.
Video on demand.
Are you thinking Youtube? It would be sweet to have some kind of embedded player so that you didn't need to download and play but could instead play from within the browser window.
Patron contributors.
Is there some way for me to see "all comments by a certain patron", and to have that record attached to my account or personal library card? I think you need to have some way to get people to think about how they are building an info stream that is theirs to use and share and that reflects well on them, and if you do that motivating thing you'll get the right feedback.
You might also try to figure out if there's some kind of "book swap" process you might facilitate somehow, not that it would turn into an online bookstore but there are certain titles that the library not enough copies of that I really end up wanting to own rather than have for a few weeks at a time.
Pocket catalog.
I'd love to be able to see a simplified catalog interface on my Blackberry. For that device, at least, you have a limited version of HTML that is essentially complete for very simple sites but that doesn't allow for intense Javascript or Ajaxy stuff. I suspect that any low-bandwidth version of your catalog would run on it just fine; it supports WML but only for compatibility's sake.
A Wayne State student showed me the Wayne catalog which has a mobile phone version - you could at least get some hands on experience by trying that to see whether it adds to your experience in the library or detracts from it.
It would be helpful to have a one-button "renew all overdue books" that worked from a mobile phone.
Thanks for your feedback,
Thanks for your feedback, Ed, let me answer some of your questions and ask some more of my own.
We've been looking at upcoming.org and thinking about how best we could make use of it. It's a great service and the API would allow almost effortless publishing if we implemented an export function to our database. However, we've got a lot of stuff going on here every day, and I don't think it would be appropriate to have everything exported there, would it? Should only high-profile events be pushed to upcoming.org, or maybe only events that appeal to a webbier, bloggier crowd?
As for the tops and news, non-fiction is always a problem, since it's something that people consider a top-level distinction, but it isn't really noted explicitly in the record, other than that most fiction items have 'fiction' among their subject headings. You can get new nonfiction; the list is linked on the catalog page. You'll see that the subject is just '!Fict' so that it matches fiction, fictitious, etc. It's not rock solid, and since the top items lists are by media and don't yet support subject searches, there's not a way to pull out the nonfiction from that database. Adding holds and copies to both lists is a great idea, though, and should be a snap to implement.
Click tracking, if we did it, would only be in aggregate. I don't think we would track individual visits at all, just the aggregate number of times that people clicked on specific links, especially within a blog post. I actually like the way you did this on your blog, Ed, and wanted to know the same sorts of aggregate data about how many people were following our links. I don't think there's a privacy concern in that presentation.
We've taken a pass or two at one-click requesting, but we can't really get far enough into the web catalog to make that happen currently. We can do two-click requesting though, and we're planning on adding those links to tops, news, and the personal card catalog, but the url is an ugly beast and I'm a little concerned that there's more than meets the eye, especially in weird cases like multivolume sets.
A beta group to seed the social catalog is a great idea, Ed, I wonder who we could get to particpate in something like that... =)
On the account aggregation, I want to be clear that we are not at all talking about anyone getting automatic access to anyone else's account, spouse, parent, child, or otherwise. All we are suggesting is a way for people who already log in to more than one account using the username and password to be able to simplify that process and view multiple accounts at once. The aggregating user would have to already have the username and password for any accounts they wish to view. While this approach does not expose any data to the user that they did not already have access to, it may be perceived to weaken privacy and we want to avoid that perception. We could limit the feature to households, or parent / minor pairs where the parent has already signed the release of minor records, but both of those would likely require staff involvement that wouldn't otherwise be necessary and make it difficult for nontraditional families to make use of the service. This is a frequently requested feature, and if nothing else, it would give the households who are currently getting this functionality by only using a single card an easy way to know in whose room to start the hunt. =)
On video, we are thinking a youtube-style presentation, but we have the infrastructure and the bandwidth to not need to use youtube itself. However, we'd likely do in-browser embedded quicktime or mpeg files also available for download. I'm keen to take the opportunity to show how different libraries can be from the DRM nightmares of most major media outlets.
Drupal does have a method to view all your contributions, but it currently displays the posts you've commented on, not each comment. However, that's a very good suggestion... Metafilter does a very good job of letting you see your own contributions, and I think we can take some cues from there.
Wayne runs the same automation system as we do, so I suspect that their pocket interface is probably the same one we would roll out. It does allow sorting by due date and renew all, so I think that ought to do the trick.
Thanks again for your comments, Ed!