by Rachel Resnick
On Wednesday, May 27 Nicole Engard and Steven Cohen presented useful tips, tools, and tricks you can use to provide more value to your library website, work more efficiently, and make life easier. “What the Hack?!? Essential Library & Life Hacks” was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Library Association, College and Research Division, and held at the Haub Executive Center at Saint Joseph’s University.
Nicole Engard is known as the “Open Source Evangelist” at LibLime, a provider of open source solutions for libraries. Her website, “What I Learned Today,” keeps the library community updated on web technologies. She has edited Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways To Deliver Library Data, which will be published by Information Today in September. Steven Cohen is Senior Librarian at Law Library Management, Incorporated. He is the creator of the “Library Stuff” blog, also published by Information Today, and is the author of Keeping Current: Advanced Internet Strategies to Meet Librarian and Patron Needs, published in 2003 by ALA. Both presenters have been named in Library Journal’s “Movers & Shakers” list.
Nicole’s portion of the program was dedicated to library hacks. While originally a hack referred to an enhancement to a program (before the negative connotation concerning security breaches arose), the term has also come to mean anything that can help you be more productive or more efficient, or simply a way to get something done smarter. A hack can be a shortcut, tool, or idea. Today’s college students expect dynamic delivery of information and services, and get their news from multiple sources—websites, blogs, microblogging utilities—which they then share on social networks. If you’re not on their radar, your information, no matter how useful, won’t get to them. Hacks provide a simple way to provide dynamic content: that is, content that is automatically populated on your site, requiring just a small amount of effort to function. One way to add content to your site is to bring it in from other sources. An Application Programming Interface (API) is code that enables you to retrieve content from other sources and use it for your own purposes. You could use the New York Times Best Seller List API to populate your website, or you could use the ISBN matching provided by Library Thing to link to the cover art and other related book information. Many sites provide their APIs for free, encouraging their visitors to use their data for other purposes. Some are simple, and some require programming knowledge.
Related to the API is the mash-up, in which content from two or more sources are used together to create a new service. Most people are familiar with map-related mash-ups. A mash-up being worked on at Temple University that has not yet been publicly unveiled includes a map of all buildings, departments, and services, so that anyone searching for Financial Aid, for example, will be able to find the building that that service is housed in on the map, learn its exact address, and discover what other services are provided in the same building.
Another useful resource is Yahoo! Pipes, which enables you to mix RSS feeds. You can combine RSS feeds from various publishers to create one large Table of Contents feed for the journals your subscribe to, or a subset thereof. A Yahoo! Pipes user called DereikBad has created two feeds: a very complex one for library literary journals, and another, simpler one for substance abuse journals <http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=5MBNu6Y3rXFeg9.vwwc1gw–>. Check them out to see what sources he combined to create the feeds. Note: you will need a Yahoo! email address and password in order to log in to create a pipe. If your OPAC provides the ability to create RSS feeds for searches or new books, you can use that as well to create a pipe with another RSS feed. And while I haven’t experimented with this, Nicole indicated that your users can then be alerted to your information via SMS (Short Message Service) on their cellphones. A Computers in Libraries article by Judy Fagan provides an excellent explanation and evaluation of Yahoo! Pipes.
Another way to add dynamic content to your website is to take advantage of social bookmarking sites. Suppose you save resources on delicious.com; then you can provide a feed for the entire set, or for specific tags. Here is the RSS URL for everything I have tagged as Reference: <http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/RachelLibrarian/reference?count=15>. I put that into the “Widgets” section of my blog, and it’s available on the left side of the screen (if you scroll down) <http://rachels101blog.blogspot.com/>. So instead of blogging about every new resource that I add, I just add it to my delicious.com account, and my blog is updated automatically.
Another useful tool is LibX, a browser plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer that provides direct access to your library’s resources. The plug-in enables your users to search Google Scholar or use OCLC’s xISBN service, and then determine whether the resource is available in your library. The LibX plug-in has other uses as well.
It’s also a good idea to be where your users are. So YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and other social networking sites are good to use to update your users on upcoming events or to share information about past events. You could use Flickr to populate your site with photos of events or staff, and Twitter to provide updates on library hours or to comment on a live presentation. There is a LibGuides plug-in for Facebook, and you might also be able to put a search box for your OPAC on Facebook. LibGuides is a knowledge sharing system used to create multimedia content, share information, and promote library resources.
For those of you seeking to put your library on your users’ mobile devices, check out the M-Libraries page of the Library Success: Best Practices Wiki http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=M-Libraries. You will learn which libraries are active in mobile librarianship and how.
Steven’s presentation ran more like SLA’s “60 Sites in 60 Minutes,” and he did indeed present about sixty resources. These could be used for work or leisure. Steven noted that many hacks worked on FireFox as extensions and bookmarklets, although the more doodads you download, the slower the browser runs, so sometimes it’s a tradeoff. But you don’t necessarily have to add them to your browser; you can also just go to their respective sites to run them. There are applications to make URLs smaller if space is at a premium (as when you post a tweet on Twitter), to sign into a site when you don’t want to register your personal information, to create PDFs from other document types, to create RSS feeds for sites that don’t provide their own, to block advertising, and more. Here are a few hacks that I regularly use: tinyurl, page2RSS, and downforeveryoneorjustme. Steven uses these to: get good deals on eBay (Auction Bloopers), log into the Southwest Air website to ensure that he gets a good seat (Refresh Every), and download all of the resources linked from a page at once (Download Them All). A few new ones that I intend to try include PDF me Not (to view PDFs without waiting for Adobe to open), PDF Escape (to annotate PDFs), Ping.fm (to update all of my social networking sites at once), Media Convert (to convert any file type to any other file type), and more. And where does Steven learn about such great new tools? From a social networking site, of course: He checks the tools tag on delicious.com for new hacks he can use to make his life easier. You can, too.
I have only touched on a few of the hacks that Nicole and Steven recommended. You should examine the resources below (and those that they link to) to discover which ones are right for you. Happy surfing!
Pennsylvania Library Association: http://www.palibraries.org
Nicole Engard’s slides and links: http://www.web2learning.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/pala-hacks-printable.pdf
Nicole Engard’s blog, “What I Learned Today”: http://web2learning.net
LibraryThing for Libraries: http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/
Yahoo! Pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com
Fagan, Jody Condit. 2007. “Mashing up Multiple Web Feeds Using Yahoo! Pipes.” Computers in Libraries 27, no. 10: 10-17. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts, EBSCOhost (accessed June 1, 2009). http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lxh&AN=27432934&site=ehost-live
LibX: http://libx.org/
LibGuides: http://www.springshare.com/libguides/
Steven Cohen’s presentation links: http://www.librarystuff.net/palalifehacking
Hacks and other tools on delicious.com: http://www.delicious.com/tag/tools
Hi Rachel:
Thanks for the great writeup. I had a blast in Philly.
Steven