Cynthia Ng

Access 2012: Opening Keynote – We Were Otaku: before it was cool

Archives (and libraries), where things are frequently obsessively collecting, are just like what happens with otakus.

Curating: the act of choosing, e.g. flickr galleries

The Economics

Time is money. Stand-in that something that takes time has the greatest value, but the counter is no longer true. Can no longer say that something quickly and cheaply made has little value. e.g. maps

Collapsing Distinctions

Distinction between museums and archives (and libraries) are collapsing. Assumption that archives are the basement of museums. What’s happening is a kind of mushing. Blur in whether looking at archives or showcase, especially in digital realm.

Expectations

Efficiency of storage and retrieval at Amazon (robotic system). Allows you to get something delivered the next day. Makes possible a kind of expectation that the web has. If we can make it happen for trivial things, we’re going to want to make it happen for important things.

It’s About the Users

If people can’t get to it or see it, why are we keeping it? Why is it important? It is no doubt difficult to provide access to physical objects, but doesn’t mean we cannot. We can simply talk about our collection and why we have them. It’s about keeping open a narrative space. We are the timekeepers.

Trust. Users. Delivery. -gov.uk

There is no (final) design, there is only reckoning.

It is everyone else that is letting us do this. We are held to a higher standard. We have to trust our users even if it’s not on our terms. No uniform motive. e.g. Add a random button Cannot assume either the same level of expertise. e.g. Making objects, first class objects that are URLs.

The proxies are important to get people in the door, to see the physical objects. The proxies also provide a broader surface for discussion and conceptualization. Not everyone also has the luxury of travel.

It’s about being present on the network, and allowing things to happen.

The unit of measure of what is important has changed. e.g. foursquare as building registry.

It’s Messy

Ultimately, we need to think about how we share things with people, and allowing people to interact with them. Keeping something safe vs. canonizing.

More notes on the Access 2012 live blog.

Access 2012 Pre-Conference: Learning Python

Today’s preconference session was a great way to force me to learn a bit of Python. The very basics were somewhat of a review since I read the first couple of chapters of the recommended book and I actually already knew much of it, but for those interested in knowing, here’s what we learned.

The Book

Much of the material can be found in Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey.

The Basics

We covered the basics including:

types (string, int, float)
arithmetic
concatenation
values, variables, expressions
arguments and basic functions
for loop

Read chapters 1-3 (and do the exercises) and you’ll cover it all.

Turtle World

Had some fun drawing with ‘Bob’ the turtle.

This is covered in chapter 4 of the book.

Conditionals and Recursion

We then covered the slightly less than basic of:

modulus
Boolean expressions
conditionals
recursions

See chapter 5 of the book.

At the End of the Day

Honestly, the session wasn’t exactly bad, but I think I would’ve learned more by being sat down and simply being told to follow the book. We didn’t have a bad instructor, but I would want to get more than just what the book tells you.

A simple example would be how to get the full list of functions in TurtleWorld for us to play around rather than just telling us the couple functions that are expected in the one or two exercises.

Overall, a good session if you’re a real beginning with absolutely no programming background, but I think that 90+% of the group would have benefited from a much faster pace session. Other than recursion, I noticed that almost all the other times, people around me were doing other things. So, good instructor and session, just too easy for many.

Going Google at Ryerson University: Sync’ing Work Back to Usual

I have found some things on the Going Google site a little incomplete, so I thought I’d supplement it with a blog post.

Set up your Google Token

This is really easy. Just sign into the Apps tab, click on Activate Google Token, and hit Activate. One important note,

you will not be able to see your Google Token again after activating it the first time (and you close the window).

So, write it down in a secure place in case you ever want to sync your accounts with anything else.

Sync Apple Devices

So which method you choose depends on what you want to sync. Both will sync mail and calendar, but for:

Notes use Gmail option
Contacts use Exchange option + Google Sync App (follow the instructions on the Going Google site)

I personally only read and reply to emails on mobile devices, so I chose the Gmail option so that I could sync Notes. Google provides instructions on using this method (it’s essentially the same process), and here are the details you need:

Name: your name
Address: full email address
Password: Google Token
Description: account display name on your device

Multiple Calendars

To sync multiple calendars, you can still do that using the Gmail option, but to change which calendars you want sync’ed:

sign into your Gmail account using a browser
then visit Google Sync for Apple to choose which calendars you want sync’ed

Getting Calendar in Thunderbird

UPDATE: If you’re having issues, it provides less integration into Thunderbird, but try ‘Google Calendar Tab’ which opens GCal like it would in a browser minus Settings/Labs.

I warn you now. Google Calendar in Thunderbird still has a number of issues. If you’re on a MAC, I suggest using Google Calendar in iCal instead. I prefer having everything in one client, so I’m willing to live with and report bugs when necessary, but who knows, I may change my mind.

Step 1: Install Lightning

The Lightning add-on page actually gives the newest stable version of the add-on (for Thunderbird 16), but the newest official release of Thunderbird is 15, so head over to the Versions list and find Lightning 1.7. Install it according to the instructions (using the Install Add-on from File option in the Add-ons settings).

Step 2: Install Provider for Google Calendar Add-on

This step is actually optional depending on what method you want to use. Google Calendar now supports using CalDAV in Thunderbird, but it’s marked as experimental.

Just search for Google Calendar in the Add-ons tab and install from there.

Step 3: Add your Calendar

If you chose to install the Provider for GCal add-on:

Open your Google Calendar
Click on the Settings link located in the box at the right of the page.
Click on the calendar you want to use with Thunderbird Lightning or Sunbird.
Copy the link from either of the two XML buttons shown at the bottom.
In Thunderbird: File > New > Calendar > On the Network > Google Calendar
For Location, paste the link, but change https:// to https://

For more information, visit the Provider wiki page.

If you chose not to install the add-on, follow the instructions from Google.

Testing Needed

So, I’m going to be using Thunderbird, and hopefully it’ll work out, but there are one or two things I wish it had already (like popup reminders for events others created). It is supposed to work better than through CalDAV. I’ve heard iCal has pretty good integration though so I might still switch to that if I’m unhappy with GCal in Thunderbird.

Getting Staff on Board and Using a CMS: Moving to WordPress

The hardest part of moving any website is getting staff trained and changing their workflow to actually use the CMS. We previously had a static HTML type site, so everyone would email changes to one or two people. It was a big shift to suddenly have people take care of their own content.

As part of the training session, I briefly reviewed why we moved the website to a CMS and more importantly, how it benefits our patrons. It covered the usual, shifting resources and staff time, less maintenance, keeping content current, etc.

Tutorials

I found the best WordPress tutorials for staff were the WordPress.com support articles related to creating content. The only differences come from the plugins that are installed, but in our case, this only affects the “Upload/Insert” section above the editing area.

We also have access to lynda.com video tutorials, so I suggested the relevant sections (5 + 6) of the WordPress Essential Training.

I also wrote up a short blurb on how to check for broken links in a more visual way (and for our non-WordPress pages). I basically referred them to install and use LinkChecker (a Firefox plugin).

Content Guidelines

In addition to training staff on the actual CMS, I wrote two sets of guidelines for them to follow.

General Guidelines on ‘Writing for the Web’
Using WordPress to Make Content Accessible (to come in a future post)

To make it easy for staff to use, I wrote it as a page on the intranet (with anchor links for a short table of contents), and also made a PDF version for them to easily print it off.

Making Staff Responsible

I think the most important step in shifting web content management from a single team to the entire staff is assigning responsibility. If no one “owns” a page, it will not be regularly reviewed. If you assign ownership, at least it increases the chance of that happening. Here are the short blurb I wrote on staff’s responsibility of content:

Page Ownership Responsibilities

While you may delegate the task of creating or updating content on any page you own, you are ultimately responsible for it. This includes:

Content is up to date

Content, especially audio/visual, conform to Accessibility Guidelines

Copyright is cleared for all content (if applicable)

Transferring ownership when needed (long term leave, end of term)

Please Note: When links are found to be broken, you will automatically be notified via e-mail. However this is not a full-proof system as many broken links will not be “marked” broken. See the ‘How to Check for Broken Links’ page for more information.

Assigning Ownership

We explicitly mention that editing of pages can be delegated, because we decided that librarians would be responsible for pages. We identified and changed each page’s author to the librarian who would become the owner.

We still have about a dozen pages outstanding in which our team maintains as needed, but we also expect that staff may edit it if they find mistakes.

The Result

So far, it’s been fairly successful (yay!). While I get calls on occasion for help, staff seem to be finding it easier to use than Drupal (which we have for our intranet), and most seem to have no problems using it.

Content on a lot of pages are being updated, though as always, it really depends on the owner. One of the problems is that we migrated the existing pages, and there’s a lot of overlap in information, which we really need to consolidate. So, making the website better as a whole will take a bit more time, but at least content is now being updated on a more regular basis.