Google Analytics and Oracle UCM - not playing nicely

Have had a couple of staff report this to me over the last week - but was having trouble replicating the problem. We have an A-Z button on our home page that had this link
http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/libcomp/az/index.htm?utm_source=LibcompHomePage&utm_medium=Button&utm_campaign=A2ZButton

I'm using GA to try and track the usage of the button to determine whether it's the best use of that screen real estate.  It's always worked but now it hides the jump to navigation and the dynamically created listing, showing only the H1

But if you remove the GA tracking code and go to http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/libcomp/az/index.htm it works just fine.  I've used lots of GA tracking on home page links for over a year now and I've never seen this behaviour before. Can't find a mention of it elsewhere in the blogosphere. I don't have time to play with it so all I can do is remove the tracking code and worry about it some other time. Would love to hear if anyone out there knows more.

Little things add up in web pages

I fear the content audit of our site is making me a tad obsessive - little things are starting to stick out and I want to hit them with a hammer. 

I'm seeing many example of pages being renewed without any obvious review of content and little things are annoying me, like this line in a big page.

Wikipedia has a very good section on Australian Copyright law. See Wikipedia Online.

Why would you append 'Online' to Wikipedia? Is there a print version? The link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Australian_Copyright_Law doesn't work any more (but not obviously, an auto link checker wouldn't pick up that the intext anchor to Australian_Copyright_Law no longer exists, because the general copyright page in Wikipedia is still there, no error 404).

Then there's the question of the link text's relationship to the actual link.  If your link text is 'Wikipedia Online' then the user expectation (and Google's) is that the underlying link will be to Wikipedia Online, not some sub page. If you're linking to an item on Australian Copyright Law, then that's your link text.

On the plus side I'm a fan of linking to in-depth explanations on sites better equipped to provide current accurate content rather than trying to maintain our own bowdlerised versions of information, especially when the bulk of users won't have any interest in seeing that sort of detail.

My other plus is that the phrase 'check out this ' hasn't been used. I hate that phrase.

I have problems with the pseudo-review phrase 'very good'; would we link to a 'very bad' Wikipedia article?  Are we confident the Wikipedia article will remain good?

So I ended up with:

See Wikipedia for more on Australian Copyright law.

That's about 60% of the text we started with, and no loss of meaning.

The tough thing for us is not only acquiring editing and writing for the web skills, but finding the time to apply them. I hope with this example (yet another in a long series of nags) you might spare five minutes on the next page you review and see if you can improve it even a little.

A gold star if you can  give me an example of where you've used Steve Krug's 'cut out half of the words, then cut out half of what's left' method!

Usability in Real Life

Maybe I'm too immersed in usability considerations, but I see usability issues in almost everything, from television advertisements for 'Johnson's IGA' that don't tell you where it is to keyboards that are impossible to ctrl-alt-del with one hand.

So this morning I see this poster for the Cairns Festival:

and can't help but wonder ...

"What sort of steel pan can go on a grand parade and requires a work shop?"

A misstep we in libraries can make when we write from our perspective and not our (typically novice at researching) users.  The assumption that what is familiar to us is familiar to all is common, and takes a mental commitment to even acknowledge.

So next time a CMS page is due for review pretend you've never worked in your library and see what does and doesn't make sense.

* Yes I found out what it was (I am a librarian, in spite of the denials). A steel pan (more correctly steelpan is what I know as a steel drum (originating in Trinidad and Tobago)

Image courtesy of WikiCommons

If the poster maker had just included one creative commons licenced image, I wouldn't be writing this blog post.

Discovery Tools in all 39 Australian Universities [Part 2]

Well, that didn't take as long as I thought.

The tally of Federated Search/Discovery Layer tools in use in all 39 Australian universities looks like this:

Not sure that the increased popularity of Primo in non-law teaching universities is causal or not.

Even with universities using the same platform there is not a cookie cutter approach. The use of the tools varies widely in terms of content and presentation.  University of Western Sydney for example, keep their catalogue records out of Summon and use Aquabrowser to visualise the catalogue search results.  The University of Ballarat presents both Metalib 'interfaces' as two separate services: Quicksearch across generic databases and federated searches across databases grouped by subject.

A Tally of 'Meta' Search Tools in Australian Universities

I was passed a list of the discovery tools/federated search engines in use in 29 of Australia's 39 universities (I think the common link is that they all offer Law Degrees, and yes I will hunt down the remaining 10 when I get a chance).

Anyway here's the graph:

Next Summon Upgrade August 2

Andrew Nagy from Serials Solutions advises that the next fortnightly Summon upgrade is due August 2 (US Pacific Time I imagine) so we should see it next Wednesday. As usual there should be no interruption to service availability.

Enhancements

• Improved Search Results Design – Availability message will now be more accurate for non textual items including print materials. Subject terms are now links to a new search for records with the subject term. Record display has been streamlined to allow for more records to be displayed on the screen.
• Summon Mobile – The Library Catalog filter will now be available if you have enabled it in the Administration Console. ISBN numbers will no longer be converted into a phone number for iPhone and Android devices. Availability message for catalog records now links to the OPAC. Entire record is now clickable, rather than just the title – enhancing usability.

Newly Indexed Content

• Cambridge Histories Online – This collection includes over 280 volumes from historical subject areas.
• Cambridge Collections Online - The Complete Cambridge Companions is a complete collection and as two sub-collections comprising the Cambridge Companions in Literature and Classics and the Cambridge Companions in Philosophy, Religion and Culture.
• British History Online - A digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust.
• The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) - the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (O.R.), management science, and business analytics.

Cary Gordon on Library Web Site Design and Management

In a response to a question posted to Web4lib on Library Web Site design and management by Michael Schofield, Cary Gordon from The Cherry Hill Company offered the following observations from his experiences. Reproduced with permission (Thanks Cary!).

---

I have been building websites and web based applications for libraries since 1994 (yipes), and I have some opinions, none of which should shock anyone. Here are a few:

1) Most library home pages are much too dense. I have worked on a few sites that started as elegant designs, then became unusable as more committees got involved.

1a) Lesson from 1: Committees are fine, but it helps to have a single person at the top who will guard the flame.

2) Landing pages should address a specific set of user needs. If you have users with conflicting or disparate needs, create separate landing pages for them.

3) There is some confusion between usability and user experience (UX).

You can have a fabulously usability standard compliant site and still deliver a terrible user experience.

4) Build your site for the users you have, not the user you would build, if you could. You know what they want. Really, you do.

4a) This is not to say that you shouldn't highlight great resources at your library, just that you should not let them get in the way of someone trying to find out when you are open.

5) Building a site that is friendlier to different kinds of devices than you think you need is probably a really good idea.

In an ideal world, we would be able to figure out what we need from logs and analytics. Unfortunately, these tools can't usually tell  us about what we don't have. Likewise, if you don't have a mobile friendly site, the user agent count isn't going to reflect the amount of traffic your site would get, were it friendlier to those clients.

I think that it is a good idea, albeit sometimes disappointing, to limit the scope of a new site to what you can maintain. To me, it is better to not have a feature than to have a feature that is disused or out of date. It doesn't bode well to go to an event calendar on a library website and see that the last entry was two years ago.

I think that these items can help:

1) Commit a specific amount of dedicated staff time to maintaining your website.

2) If possible, use a content management system that is set up in such a way that contributors and editors can concentrate on content rather than code. In other words, Ruby on Rails, which is great, is probably not a viable choice unless you have strong RoR resources on staff.

3) Unless you have staff with nothing else to do, if you do not have dedicated IT staff, have your website hosted by a reliable company.

There are reliable hosting companies starting at about $10/mo, and fully managed hosting available from about $75/mo.

4) If you use a CMS or other software, invest staff time, and money, if necessary, in training, and make sure that the training is appropriate to what you are trying to accomplish.

5) Don't lock in to any more dedicated workflow than you really need or can support in practice.

I started coding sites by hand, moved to external content management systems (like Fusion), server side includes, bespoke CMS in ColdFusion and Java, and eventually to Drupal. I think that Drupal is a great solution, because it is built by its community and the strong peer support from its library user community.

Drupal is not, of course, the only solution, there being over 1,000 competing systems. As I asserted earlier, I think that most libraries should use a content management system. That would include Drupal, WordPress, SilverStripe and many others. I personally prefer free and open-source solutions to commercial products and products that have broad adoption to those that get little play. I like to look at the ratio of sales staff to programmers and support. Of course by those standards, the big ILS products look scary.

Virtual servers are an interesting topic, but I think that it is more important to broach the question of whether you plan to do your own system administration or not. We run our own data center in downtown Los Angeles (with a small branch in San Francisco), and will probably continue to do so for a while, but it seems pretty clear that eventually, it will be more economical to move this to "the cloud."

For us, this will really be a bottom line focused change, since we will still need a system administrator on staff, and we only spend a tiny amount of time on-site, with most of that devoted to equipment upgrades and replacement that we wouldn't need in the cloud.

Thanks,

Cary

---