Getting a (Second) Life
I feel a bit like Gulliver. Even learning how to walk and talk in this new world takes some learning and practice. On my first attempt to get into SLIS and other libraries in Second Life, somehow I landed in the faculty offices area of SLIS. The video tutorial was very helpful in taking the picture and feeling more comfortable moving around.
From here, I went over to the Kansas State Library. I’ve never been to Kansas before. The great horned owl sitting on the wall was very cool. Is he the library’s mascot?
The library space is appealing, with views to the exterior giving a feeling of openness. In the room shown below, I was able to open the “Oceans of Kansas” (who knew?) website. By clicking another image, I could read press releases about a student writing contest recently conducted by the Kansas Center for the Book. This Second Life library seems like a three-dimensional website.
Feeling a bit more comfortable navigating, I found out how to get to the main SLIS campus, where I changed clothes for the next part of my journey.
I found my way to the Career Information Center.
I noticed several information booths with posters about events and presentations. Will there be job interviews in Second Life? For hiring managers wanting to create a short list of candidates, that’s an intriguing alternative to the telephone screening interview. Not to mention that it could provide valuable information for job seekers.
To wrap up my exploration tour, I went to the Sustainable Living Library being developed by the Colorado Association of Libraries.
While it seems they have just started setting up the infrastructure — for example, wind power generation is all set up — this location gives an idea of how one can prototype a new kind of library, where others can virtually walk through and envision how this library would look and feel if built in real life.
This is one Second Life library that I’ll return to and follow its development. It seems a perfect blend of new virtual and physical technologies. It’s also a fitting end to my three-campus tour, where I didn’t spend an ounce of gasoline or jet fuel for my travel.
Perhaps because I did my tour on a holiday weekend, I didn’t encounter many other folks in the Second Life places I went. That was OK for me, because I like to explore and get oriented on my own before starting a conversation.
Why are libraries in Second Life? This brief tour showed several possibilities, including expanding outreach, providing library users with additional portals to information, gaining more opportunities for professional interaction with other librarians around the world, and prototyping designs for new libraries.
To me the most important purpose for library professionals to have experience in Second Life is to exercise our intellectual curiosity and innovation. The reason libraries haven’t died as a result of the internet, but instead have evolved and thrived, is that librarians have these essential traits. The successful library professionals have moved out of their previous comfort zone and traveled into new worlds.
Lights, Camera, Action
Still working on how to embed a Flickr badge in the sidebar. Meanwhile, take a stress break by
viewing this short nature video. Better yet, go outside.
Gimme Access
“Technology is accessible if it can be used as effectively by people with disabilities as by those without.” (Thatcher, 2008) In designing an accessible website, we must consider people who use talking browsers, screen readers, text browsers, small devices, and pointing devices other than a mouse, and who may have specific needs for text sizes and colors to be readable.
A usable website supports “effective and efficient computer-human interactions” (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2006, Chapter 2), so people will make the best use of their time on the web site, will not become frustrated, and will find the information they need in a timely fashion. An accessible website can be used by humans with a wide range of physical and intellectual abilities. By combining usability with accessibility, a website can be used effectively by many more populations than would be possible otherwise. Accessibility is a step toward narrowing the digital divide.
Interestingly, some of the same web design techniques address both usability and accessibility. These are some techniques I plan to use to increase the accessibility of my Web pages:
- Use headings to structure content. By using the H1, H2, etc. attributes for – and only for — topic headings, I will allow typical users to scan the text for needed content and will also enable keyboard navigation by headings. Along with the headings, I will take care that the text content is in a logical order, so a screen reader will read it in the correct sequence. One feature of this logical order is to place the main navigation links at the top of the page, where they are read first by screen readers.
- Include meaningful alternative text. The alt attribute for images or the longdesc attribute for charts allows text to state the function of an image or to show that the graphic contains no relevant information.
- Use ems or % in the CSS to control font size. As Krug (2005, p. 178) points out, specifying the font size value in ems or %, rather than points or pixels, makes it possible for site viewers to use the browser text size controls to make the text larger if needed for visibility.
While there are many other techniques to increase accessibility, such as including a hidden “skip to content” link and ensuring high contrast between text and background colors, the three techniques listed above are simple but powerful ways to make a web site conveniently accessible to everyone.
References
Krug, S. 2005. Don’t Make Me Think. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Press.
Thatcher, J. 2008. Web Accessibility for Section 508. Retrieved October 16, 2008 from http://www.jimthatcher.com/webcourse1.htm#tutorial
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 2006. Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines. Retrieved October 16, 2008 from http://www.usability.gov/guidelines
Plugging In
I added the following three plug-ins to this blog:
Quotes Collection.
http://srinig.com/wordpress/plugins/quotes-collection/ .
You will see a randomly displayed quotation on the sidebar of the blog. After installing the plug-in, I can enter favorite quotations into a form. Then a randomly selected quotation is displayed whenever you open the blog. You can also click “next quote” to see a new quotation. So far I have entered seven different quotations and will add more as time permits. Please enjoy the “Thought for the Day”!
Daily Dilbert.
http://www.greftek.net/blog/software/grf-dilbert/ .
I also added the “Daily Dilbert” comic as the second item in the sidebar. It displays a graphic and a link where you can view today’s current Dilbert comic strip. It was fairly easy to install. With this and the other plug-ins, I noticed that the installation instructions are not up-to-date with the current WordPress interface. So, for example, when instructed to go to the “Presentation” section of the Dashboard, I had to figure out that it is now named the “Design” section.
On this and the Random Quote widget, I customized them by replacing the default title with my own title.
- As an aside, while I sometimes think Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams is losing his edge and getting too far out from reality, the strip for October 5, 2008 is. so. true.
About Me
http://samdevol.com/about-me-widget-for-wordpress/
Lastly, I added the About Me widget. It is the third item in the sidebar. That seemed useful to to give a face to the blogger. I had a problem with this widget in that the instructions show an editing screen with features to format the text and add images and links. All I got was a plain text entry field. I will leave it that way for now and investigate further if time permits.
Now that I have done this three times, I feel fairly confident with the process of adding plug-ins. The first time was scary, but it became easier with each practice. I actually feel comfortable with FileZilla and PuTTY. Now I just have to learn the intricacies of the various plug-ins I may wish to add.
Styling
CSS Zen Garden
The CSS Zen Garden experiment — changing only the CSS file and not the HTML — came out better than I expected.
I did change one item in the HTML file: the name of the external style sheet referenced, to make sure it was using my customized external style sheet.
To get my bearings, in the CSS file I replaced the background images of each main section and div with a different background color so I could visualize their positions on the screen.
- The resulting page looks like this
I adjusted the sizes and positions of two boxes (divs) by changing the margin-top, height, and width. I changed H1 and H2 spans from display:none to using a color attribute, and noticed that the text displayed where it did not before. I finally “got” how to put an image in the Container div and make that the background image of the page. I found that I had to declare a width for the main text divisions, to keep them within a reasonable width and not be covered up by the links bar on the right side.
Just by doing those simple things, I got a result that actually looks close to some published commercial websites I’ve seen. After seeing how it looks with color blocks for main areas, I like the color-block design look. I’ve seen other websites that did this with tables, but css is more flexible.
Although the result so far is a “masterpiece in progress” rather than a finished masterpiece, it is going to be useful. I will use it as one of the mock-ups for my final project website, as I get feedback from the client group on various designs and color scheme possibilities prior to actual development.
The experiment is located at:
http://senna.sjsu.edu/kneufeld/mason/zengarden/zengarden-sample[1].htm
Mini Web Site
I’m pleased with how the mini website with its liquid design has turned out. This one is overall more successful than the CSS Zen Garden experiment described above, I think because I started the html and css from scratch rather than modifying someone else’s. It is a three-column layout, and I learned that I had to make all three column divisions float:left in order to get them lined up. I also learned that I needed to keep careful track of my images. I wanted to not repeat any images, and when I was almost done I realized I had used the same image in two places. This was only a problem because it did not meet my own “style guide” for the site.
The mini web site home page looks like this
I used the information in Castro chapter 12 as a basis for creating the navigation buttons. Can’t wait to learn how to create dropdowns or flyouts for sub-topics. On the Admissions page there is a table. I used the CSS Table Gallery for ideas, but simplified the design and added my own colors. It was useful to see how to create ids for odd and even rows of the table, to apply different styles to them.
For the visual design, I was aiming for a “natural, homespun” look to contrast with the look of the CSS Zen Garden page shown above. I used GIMP to create the canvas-like background image. This mini web site will also be one of the mock-ups for my final project.
The mini web site home page is located at:
http://senna.sjsu.edu/kneufeld/mason/personal_page6.html
Go, Library, Go
a program of the Contra Costa County Library
Planes, trains, buses … Does the thought of being on public transportation without a good book to read fill you with dread? The Contra Costa County library has recently made strides in solving that problem by installing an automated book lending machine at the Pittsburg (CA) BART station. With traffic and commuting being one of the major issues in this county, the library’s attention to transit commuters seems like a smart move.
book lending machine at Pittsburg BART station
The machine at the Pittsburg transit station, made by Swedish company Distek, has been dubbed “Library-a-Go-Go.” The same technology is being rolled out by other California public libraries as well to serve people in remote areas. Three cheers to the Contra Costa County library for being first in the US to try this innovative approach.
Test Blog 