Tag: conference

Learning Web Analytics from the LITA 2012 National Forum Pre-conference

Note: The 2012 LITA Forum pre-conference on Web Analytics was taught by Tabatha (Tabby) Farney and Nina McHale.  Our guest authors, Joel Richard and Kelly Sattler were two of the people who attended the pre-conference and they wrote a summary of the pre-conference to share with the ACRL TechConnect readers.

In advance of the conference, Tabby and Nina reached out to the participants ahead of time with a survey on what we the participants were interested in learning and solicited questions to be answered in the class.  Twenty-one participants responded and of them seventeen were already using Google Analytics (GA).  About half those using GA check their reports 1-2 times per month and the rest less often.  The conference opened with introductions and a brief description of what we were doing with analytics on our website and what we hoped to learn.

Web Analytics Strategy

The overall theme of the pre-conference was the following:

A web analytics strategy is the structured process of identifying and evaluating your key performance indicators on the basis of an organization’s objectives and website goals – the desired outcomes, or what you want people to do on the website.

We learned that beyond the tool we use measure our analytics, we need to identify what we want our website to do.  We do this by using pre-existing documentation our institutions have on their mission and purpose as well as the mission and purpose of the website and who it is to serve. Additionally, we need a privacy statement so our patrons understand that we will be tracking their movements on the site and what we will be collecting. We learned that there are challenges when using only IP addresses (versus cookies) for tracking purposes.  For example, does our institution’s network architecture allow for you to identify patrons versus staff using IP address or are cookies a necessity?

Tool Options for Website Statistics

To start things off, we discussed the types of web analytics tools that are available and which we were using. Many of the participants were already using Google Analytics (GA) and thus most of the activities were demonstrated in GA as we could log into our own accounts.  We were reminded that though it is free, GA keeps our data and does not allow us to delete it.  GA has us place a bit of Javascript code on the pages we want tracked. It is easier to set up GA within a content management system but it may not work as well for mobile devices.  Piwik is an open-source alternative to Google Analytics that uses a similar Javascript tagging method.  Additionally we were reminded that if we use any Javascript tagging method, we should review our code snippets least every two years as they do change.

We learned about other, less common systems for tracking user activity. AWStats is installed locally and reads the website log files and processes them into reports.  It offers the user more control and may be more useful for sites not in a content management system.  Sometimes it provides more information than desired and will be unable to clearly differentiate between users based on IP.  Other similar tools are Webalizer, FireStats, and Webtrends.

A third option is to use Web Beacons which are small, invisible transparent GIFs embedded on every page.  This is useful for when Javascript won’t work, but they probably aren’t as applicable today as they once were.

Finally, we took a brief look at the heat mapping tool, Crazy Egg.  It focuses on visual analytics and uses Javascript tagging to provide heat maps of exactly where visitors clicked on our site offering insights as to what areas of a page receive the most attention.  Crazy Egg has a 30 day free trial and then it costs per page tracked, but there are subscriptions for under $100/month if you find the information worth the cost.  The images can really give webmasters an understanding of what the users are doing on their site and are persuasive tools when redesigning a page or analyzing specific kinds of user behavior.

Core Concepts and Metrics of Web Analytics

Next, Tabby and Nina presented a basic list of terminology used within web analytics.  Of course, different tools refer to the same concept by different names, but these were the terms we used throughout our session.

  • Visits – A visit is when someone comes to the site. A visit ends when a user has not seen a new page in 30 minutes (or when they have left the site.)
  • Visitor Types: New & Returning – A cookie is used to determine whether a visitor has been to the site in the past. If a user disables cookies or clears them regularly, they will show up as a new user each time they visit.
  • Unique Visitors – To distinguish visits by the same person, the cookie is used to track when the same person returns to the site in a given period of time (hours, days, weeks or more).
  • Page Views – More specific than “hits,” a page view is recorded when a page is loaded in a visitor’s browser.
  • User Technology – This includes information about the visitor’s operating system, browser version, mobile device or desktop computer, etc.
  • Geographic Data – A visitor’s location in the world can often be determined to which city they are in.
  • Entry and Exit Pages – These refer to the page the visitor sees first during their visit (Entry) and the last page they see before leaving or their session expires (Exit).
  • Referral Sources – Did the visitor come from another site? If so, this will tell who is sending traffic to us.
  • Bounce Rate – A bounce is when someone comes to the site and views only one page before leaving.
  • Engagement Metrics – This indicates how much visitors are on our site measured by time they spent on the site or number of pages viewed.
Goals/Conversion

Considering how often the terms “goals” and “conversions” are used, we learned that it is important to realize that in web analytics lingo, a goal is a metric, also referred to as a conversion, and measures whether a desired action has occurred on your site. There are four primary types of conversions:

  1. URL Destination – A visitor has reached a targeted end page.  For commercial sites, this would be the “Thank you for your purchase” page. For a library site, this is a little more challenging to classify and will include several different pages or types of pages.
  2. Visit Duration – How much time a visitor spends on our site. This is often an unclear concept. If a user is on the site for a long time, we don’t know if they were interrupted while on our site, if they had a hard time finding what they were looking for, or if they were enthralled with all the amazing information we provide and read every word twice.
  3. Pages per Visit – Indicates site engagement. Similar to Visit Duration, many pages may mean the user was interested in our content, or that they were unable to find what they were looking for.  We distinguish this by looking at the “paths” of page the visitor saw.  As an example, we might want to know if someone finds the page they were looking for in three pages or less.
  4. Events – Targets an action on the site. This can be anything and is often used to track outbound pages or links to a downloadable PDF.

Conversion rate is an equation that shows the percentage of how often the desired action occurs.

Conversion rate = Desired action / Total or Unique visits

Goal Reports also known as Conversion Reports are sometimes provided by the tool and include the total number of conversions and the conversion rate.  We learned that we can also assign a monetary value to take advantage of the more commerce-focused tools often used in analytics software, but the results can be challenging to interpret.  Conversion reports also show an Abandonment Rate as people leave our site. However, we can counter this by creating a “funnel” that identifies the steps needed to complete the goal. The funnel report shows us where in the steps visitors drop off and how many make it through the complete conversion.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were a focus of much of the conference.  They measure the outcome based on our site’s objectives/goals and are implemented via conversion rates.  KPIs are unique to each site.  Through examples, we learned that each organization’s web presence may be made up of multiple sites. For instance, an organization may have its main library pages, Libguides, the catalog, a branch site, a set of sites for digitized collections, etc. A KPI may span activities on more than one of these sites.

Segment or Filter

We then discussed the similarities and differences between Segments and Filters, both of which offer methods to narrow the data enabling us to focus on a particular point of interest.  The difference between the two is that (i) filtering will remove the data from the collection process thereby resulting in lost data; whereas (ii) segmentation hides data from the reports leaving it available for other reports. Generally, we felt that the use of Segments was preferable over Filters in Google Analytics given that it is impossible to recover data that is lost during GA’s real-time data collection.

We talked about the different kinds of segments that some of us are using. For example, is Joel’s organization, he is using a technique to segment the staff computers in their offices from computers in the library branches by adding a query string to the homepage URL of the branch computers’ browsers. Using this, he can create a segment in Google Analytics to view the activity of either group of users by segmenting on the different Entry pages (with and without this special query string). Segmenting on IP Address also further segregates his users between researchers and the general public.

Benchmarking

As a step towards measuring success for our sites, we discussed benchmarking, which is used to look at the performance of our sites before and after a change. Having performance data before making changes is essential to knowing whether those changes are successful, as defined by our goals and KPIs.

Comparing a site to itself either in a prior iteration or before making a change is called Internal Benchmarking. Comparing a site to other similar sites on the Internet is known as External Benchmarking. Since external benchmarking requires data to make a comparison, we need to request of another website their data or reports. Another alternative is to use service sites such as Alexa, Quantcast, Hitwise and others, which will do the comparison for you.  Keep in mind that these may use e-commerce or commercial indicators which may not make for a good comparison to humanities-oriented sites.

Event Tracking

Page views and visitor statistics are important for tracking how our site is doing, but sometimes we need to know about events that aren’t tracked through the normal means. We learned that an Event, both in the conceptual sense and in the analytics world, can be used to track actions that don’t naturally result in a page view. Events are used to track access to resources that aren’t a web page, such as videos, PDFs, dynamic page elements, and outbound links.

Tracking events doesn’t always come naturally and require some effort to set up. Content management systems (CMS) like Drupal help make event tracking easy either via a module or plugin or simply by editing a template or function that produces the HTML pages.  If a website is not using a CMS the webmaster will need to add event tracking code to each link or action that they wish to record in Google Analytics. Fortunately, as we saw, the event tracking code is simple and easy to add to a site and there is good documentation describing this in Google’s Event Tracking Guide documentation.

Finally, we learned that tracking events is preferable to creating “fake” pageviews as it does not inflate the statistics generated by regular pageviews due to the visitors’ usual browsing activities.

Success for our websites

Much of the second half of the conference was focused on learning about and performing some exercises to define and measure success for our sites. We started by understanding our site in terms of our Users, our Content and our Goals. These all point to the site’s purpose and circle back around to the content delivered by our site to the users in order to meet our goals. It’s all interconnected. The following questions and steps helped us to clarify the components that we need to have in hand to develop a successful website.

Content Audit – Perform an inventory that lists every page on the site. This are likely to be tedious and time-consuming. It includes finding abandoned pages, lost images, etc.  The web server is a great place to start identifying files.  Sometimes we can use automated web crawling tools to find the pages on our site.  Then we need to evaluate that content. Beyond the basic use of a page, consider recording last updated date, bounce rate, time on page, whether it is a landing page or not, and who is responsible for the content.

Identifying Related Sites – Create a list of sites that our site links to and sites that link back to our site.  Examples: parent site (e.g. our organization’s overall homepage), databases, journals, library catalog site, blog site, flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Internet Archive, etc.

Who are our users? – What is our site’s intended audience or audiences? For us at the conference, this was a variety of people: students, staff, the general public, collectors, adults, teens, parents, etc. Some of us may need to use a survey to determine this.  Some populations of users (e.g. staff) might be identified via IP Addresses. We were reminded that most sites serve one major set of users with other smaller groups of users served. For example, students might be the primary users whereas faculty and staff are secondary users.

Related Goals and plans – Use existing planning documents, strategic goals, a library’s mission statement to set a mission statement and/or goals for the website. Who are we going to help? Who is our audience?  We must define why our site exists and it’s purpose on the web.  Generally we’ll have one primary purpose per site. Secondary purposes also help define what the site does and fall under the “nice to have” category, but are also very useful to our users. (For example, Amazon.com’s primary purpose is to sell products, but secondary purposes include reviews, wishlists, ratings, etc.)

When we have a new service to promote, we can use analytics and goals to track how well that goal is being met. This is an ongoing expansion of the website and the web analytics strategy.  We were reminded to make goals that are practical, simple and achievable. Priorities can change from year to year in what we will monitor and promote.

Things to do right away

Nearing the end of our conference, we discussed things that we can do improve our analytics in the near term. These are not necessarily quick to implement, but doing these things will put us in a good place for starting our web analytics strategy. It was mentioned that if we aren’t tracking our website’s usage at all, we should install something today to at least begin collecting data!

  1. Share what we are doing with our colleagues. Educate them at a high level, so they know more about our decision making process. Be proactive and share information; don’t wait to be asked what’s going on. This will offer a sense of inclusion and transparency. What we do is not magic in any sense. We may also consider granting read-only access to some people who are interested in seeing and playing with the statistics on their own.
  2. Set a schedule for pulling and analyzing your data and statistics. On a quarterly basis, report to staff on things that we found that were interesting: important metrics, fun things, anecdotes about what is happening on our site. Also check our goals that we are tracking in analytics on a quarterly basis; do not “set and forget” our goals. On monthly basis, we should report to IT staff on topics of concern, 404 pages, important values, and things that need attention.
  3. Test, Analyze, Edit, and Repeat. This is an ongoing, long-term effort to keep improving our sites. During a site redesign, we compare analytics data before and after we make changes. Use analytics to make certain the changes we are implementing have a positive effect. Use analytics to drive the changes in our site, not because it would be cool/fun/neat to do things a certain way. Remember that our site is meant to serve our users.
  4. Measure all content. Get tracking code installed across all of our sites. Google Analytics cross-domain tracking is tricky to set up, but once installed will track users as they move between different servers. Examples for this are our website, blog, OPAC, and other servers. For things not under our control, be sure to at least track outbound to know when people leave our site.
  5. Measure all users. When we are reporting, segment the users into groups as much as possible to understand their different habits.
  6. Look at top mobile content. Use that information to divide the site and focus on things that mobile users are going to most often.
Summary

Spending eight hours learning about a topic and how to practically apply it to our site is a great way to get excited about taking on more responsibilities in our daily work. There is still a good deal of learning to be done since much of the expertise in web analytics comes from taking the time to experiment with the data and settings.

We, Kelly and Joel, are looking forward to working with analytics from the ground-up, so to speak. We are both are in an early stage of redeploying our website under new software which allows us to take into account the most up-to-date analytics tools and techniques available to us. Additionally, our organizations, though different in their specific missions and goals, are entering into a new round of long-term planning with the result being a new set of goals for the next three to five years. It becomes clear that the website is an important part of this planning and that the goals of our websites directly translate into actions that we take when configuring and using Google Analytics.

We both expect that we will experience a learning curve in understanding and applying web analytics and there will be a set of long-term, ongoing tasks for us. However, after this session, we are more confident about how to effectively apply and understand analytics towards tracking and achieving the goals of our organization and create an effective and useful set of websites.

—

About our Guest Authors:

Kelly Sattler is a Digital Project Librarian and Head of Web Services at Michigan State University.  She and her team are involved with migrating the Libraries’ website into Drupal 7 and are analyzing our Google Analytics data, search terms, and chat logs to identify places where we can improve our site through usability studies. Kelly spent 12 years in Information Technology at a large electrical company before becoming a librarian and has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering.  She can be found on twitter at @ksattler.

Joel Richard is the lead Web Developer for the Smithsonian Libraries in Washington, DC and is currently in the process of rebuilding and migrating 15 years’ worth of content to Drupal 7. He has 18 years of experience in software development and internet technology and is a confirmed internet junkie. In his spare time, he is an enthusiastic proponent of Linked Open Data and believes it will change the way the internet works. One day. He can be found on twitter at @cajunjoel.

2012 Eyeo Festival

Tuesday June 5th through Friday June 8th 2012, 500 creatives from numerous fields such as, computer science, art, design, data visualization, gathered together to listen, converse, and participate in the second Eyeo Festival. Held in Minneapolis, MN at the Walker Art Center, the event organizers created an environment of learning, exchange, exploration, and fun. There were various workshops with some top names leading the way. Thoughtfully curated presentations throughout the day complemented keynotes held nightly in party-like atmospheres: Eyeo was an event not to be missed. Ranging from independent artists to the highest levels of innovative companies, Eyeo offered inspiration on many levels.

Why the Eyeo Festival?
As I began to think about what I experienced at the Eyeo Festival, I struggled to express exactly how impactful this event was for me and those I connected with. In a way, Eyeo is like TED and in fact, many presenters have given TED talks. Eyeo has a more targeted focus on art, design, data, and creative code but it is also so much more than that. With an interactive art and sound installation, Zygotes, by Tangible Interaction kicking off the festival, though the video is a poor substitute to actually being there, it still evokes a sense of wonder and possibility. I strongly encourage anyone who is drawn to design, data, art, interaction or to express their creativity through code to attend this outstanding creative event and follow the incredible people that make up the impressive speaker list.

I went to the Eyeo Festival because I like to seek out what professionals in other fields are doing. I like staying curious and stretching outside my comfort zone in big ways, surrounding myself with people doing things I don’t understand, and then trying to understand them. Over the years I’ve been to many library conferences and there are some amazing events with excellent programming but they are, understandably, very library-centric. So, to challenge myself, I decided to go to a conference where there would be some content related to libraries but that was not a library conference. There are many individuals and professions outside of libraries that care about many of the same values and initiatives we do, that work on similar kinds of problems, and have the same drive to make the world a better place. So why not talk to them, ask questions, learn, and see what their perspective is? How do they approach and solve problems? What is their process in creating? What is their perspective and attitude? What kind of communities are they part of and work with?

I was greatly inspired by the group of librarians who have attended the SXSWi Festival which has grown further over the years. There are a now a rather large number of librarians speaking about and advocating for libraries in such an innovative and elevated platform. There is even a Facebook Group where professionals working in libraries, archives, and museums can connect with each other for encouragement, support, and collaborations in relation to SXSWi. Andrea Davis, Reference & Instruction Librarian at the Dudley Knox Library, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, has been heavily involved in offering leadership in getting librarians to collaborate at SXSW. She states, “I’ve found it absolutely invigorating to get outside of library circles to learn from others, and to test the waters on what changes and effects are having on those not so intimately involved in libraries. Getting outside of library conferences keeps the blood flowing across tech, publishing, education. Insularity doesn’t do much for growth and learning.”

I’ve also been inspired by librarians who have been involved in the TED community, such as Janie Herman and her leadership with Princeton Public Library’s local TEDx in addition to her participation in the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar. Additionally, Chrystie Hill, the Community Relations Director at OCLC, has given more than one TedX talk about libraries. Seeing our library colleagues represent our profession in arenas broader than libraries is energizing and infectious.

Librarians having a seat at the table and a voice at two of the premier innovative gatherings in the world is powerful. This concept of librarians embedding themselves in communities outside of librarianship has been discussed in a number of articles including The Undergraduate Science Librarian and In the Library With the Lead Pipe.

Highlights
Rather than giving detailed comprehensive coverage of Eyeo, you’ll see a glimpse of a few presentations plus a number of resources so that you can see for yourself some of the amazing, collaborative work being done. Presenter’s names link to the full talk that you can watch for yourself. Because a lot of the work being done is interactive and participatory in some way, I encourage you to seek these projects out and interact with them. The organizers are in the midst of processing a lot of videos and putting them up on the Eyeo Festival Vimeo channel; I highly recommend watching them and checking back for more.

Ben Fry
Principal of Fathom, a Boston based design and data visualization firm, and co-initiator of the programming language Processing, Ben Fry’s work in data visualization and design is worth delving into. In his Eyeo presentation, 3 Things, the project that most stood out was the digitization project Fathom produced for GE: http://fathom.info/latest/category/ge. Years of annual reports were beautifully digitized and incorporated into an interactive web application they built from scratch. When faced with scanning issues, they built a tool that improved the scanned results.

Jer Thorp
Data artist in residence for the New York Times, and former geneticist, Jer Thorp’s range in working with data, art, and design is far and wide. Thorp is one of the few founders of the Eyeo Festival and in his presentation Near/Far he discussed several data visualization projects with the focus on storytelling. The two main pieces that stood out from Jer’s talk was his encouragement to dive into data visualization. He even included 10 year old, Theodore Zaballos’ handmade visualization of The Illiad which was rather impressive. The other piece that stood out was his focus on data visualization in context to location and people owning their own data versus a third party. This lead into the Open Paths project he showcased. He has also presented to librarians at the Canadian library conference, Access 2011.

Jen Lowe
Jen Lowe was by far the standout from all of the amazing Ignite Eyeo talks. She spoke about how people are intrinsically inspired by storytelling and the need for those working with data to focus on storytelling through the use of visualizing data and the story it tells. She works for the Open Knowledge Foundation in addition to running Datatelling and she has her library degree (she’s one of us!).

Jonathan Harris
Jonathan Harris gave one of the most personal and poignant presentations at Eyeo. In a retrospective of his work, Jonathan covered years of work interwoven with personal stories from his life. Jonathan is an artist and designer and his work life and personal life are rarely separated. Each project began with the initial intention and ended with a more critical inward examination from the artist. The presentation led to his most recent endeavor, the Cowbird project, where storytelling once again emerges strongly. In describing this project he focused on the idea that technology and software could be used for good, in a more human way, created by “social engineers” to build a community of storytellers. He describes Cowbird as “a community of storytellers working to build a public library of human experience.”

Additional people + projects to delve into:

Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of the Google Big Picture data visualization group. Wind Map: http://hint.fm/wind/

Kyle McDonald: http://kylemcdonald.net/

Tahir Temphill: http://tahirhemphill.com/ and his latest work, Hip Hop Word Count: http://staplecrops.com/index.php/hiphop_wordcount/

Julian Oliver: http://julianoliver.com/

Nicholas Felton of Facebook: http://feltron.com/

Aaron Koblin of the Google Data Arts Group: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/ and their latest project with the Tate Modern: http://www.exquisiteforest.com/

Local Projects: http://localprojects.net/

Oblong Industries: http://oblong.com/

Eyebeam Art + Technology Center: http://eyebeam.org/

What can libraries get from the Eyeo Festival?

Libraries and library work are everywhere at this conference. That this eclectic group of creative people were often thinking about and producing work similar to librarians is thrilling. There is incredible potential for libraries to embrace some of the concepts and problems in many of the presentations I saw and conversations I was part of. There are multiple ways that libraries could learn from and perhaps participate in this broader community and work across fields.

People love libraries and these attendees were no exception. There were attendees from numerous private/corporate companies, newspapers, museums, government, libraries, and more. I was not the only library professional in attendance so I suspect those individuals might see the potential I see, which I also find really exciting. The drive behind every presenter and attendee was by far creativity in some form, the desire to make something, and communicate. The breadth of creativity and imagination that I saw reminded me of a quote from David Lankes in his keynote from the New England Library Association Annual Conference:

“What might kill our profession is not ebooks, Amazon or Google, but a lack of imagination. We must envision a bright future for librarians and the communities they serve, then fight to make that vision a reality. We need a new activist librarianship focused on solving the grand challenges of our communities. Without action we will kill librarianship.”

If librarianship is in need of more imagination and perhaps creativity too, there is a world of wonder out there in terms of resources to help us achieve this vision.

The Eyeo Festival is but one place where we can become inspired, learn, and dream and then bring that experience back to our libraries and inject our own imagination, ideas, experimentation, and creativity into the work we do. By doing the most creative, imaginative library work we can do will inspire our communities; I have seen it first hand. Eyeo personally taught me that I need to fail more, focus more, make more, and have more fun doing it all.

LITA Mobile Computing Interest Group meeting at ALA Annual Conference 2012

I attended the ALA Annual Conference 2012 and was up bright and early to get to the 8am Sunday morning session from the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Mobile Computing Interest Group (MCIG) session. It included four presentations on a variety of different topics plus Q&A and some time for more general discussion. Below is my summary of the presentations and discussion. (The presentation slides are available at ALA Connect).

NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt
– Anne Burke, North Caroline State University (Slides)

Anne spoke about the way NCSU have revitalised their traditional induction sessions by offering a mobile scavenger hunt to help introduce students to navigating the library and asking librarians for help. They hoped to improve student engagement, foster confidence and introduce students to emerging technologies by using iPod Touches to deliver a scavenger hunt which they worked through in groups. Although they looked into existing solutions such as SCVNGR and Scavenger Hunt with Friends, these were either too costly or relied on geolocation which can be a problem for small areas like libraries.

Their chosen solution uses Evernote (one account for each iPod Touch, and a master one for staff) and a Google spreadsheet alongside a set of questions on paper. Students record their responses via the iPod Touch (either as text, photo or audio) as they move around the library, and staff can keep an eye on progress. When students return, they are shown a slideshow of photos from the groups, given their scores, and prizes are given out (chocolates). Any questions which appeared to cause problems are discussed as part of the feedback also. NCSU use these for an one-hour instruction sessions and are currently looking into offering a self-guided version. Further details are available on the NCSU library website.

Gimme! The mobile app development project at Scottsdale Public Library
– Aimee Fifarek and Ann Porter, Scottsdale Public Library (Slides)

Aimee and Ann shared their experiences of developing a mobile app using a grant fund. Unusually, Scottsdale Public Library received funding before deciding what sort of mobile app they wanted to produce. They established a project team bringing together technology staff and tech-savvy staff from across the library in order to get investment from a variety of different areas first, and then brainstormed ideas with the team. They also wanted to ensure whatever they built was valuable to their customer base so they employed consultants to research user needs. The consultants also then developed the app and supported implementation.

The mobile app they chose to produce, Gimme!, is a book recommendation system which combines catalogue details with book recommendations from library staff. A number of different systems are used to achieve this – they use the Goodreads API with Feedburner (which they get from their library catalogue) to combine reviews with the descriptions and book covers (using the ISBN to link it together). Gimme! works across all devices, you can try it out at: http://gimme.scottsdalelibrary.org/

Before the first Connection: A marketing campaign for a Law Library’s Mobile Application
– Terry Ballard, New York Law School, Mendik Library (Slides)

Terry spoke about how the New York Law School had wanted to get ahead of the curve by implementing a mobile app. Having investigated a number of options, they chose to use a third-party solution, Boopsie. However at the time it didn’t offer support for course reserves. They spoke to Boopsie about this and arranged for Boopsie to develop this additional functionality (at no extra cost as they were aware that other libraries would be interested in this feature as well). They also wanted to integrate a Google Custom Search on mobile, so they spoke to Google and were able to add this option. Although the usage of the mobile app has so far been relatively low, the number of search sessions via mobile has stayed relatively high since the launch.

It’s time to look at our mobile website again
– Bohyun Kim, Florida International University Medical Library (Slides)

Bohyun presented a really interesting overview of the current state of mobile websites for libraries. To set the context, she gave some figures about mobile web usage in US – more mobile devices are now shipping than desktops, and over the last 5 years AT&T mobile web use has grown by 20,000%! As devices and mobile web capabilities have improved, the way we expect to use mobile websites is changing. We are spending more time accessing the web via our mobiles instead of desktop and are doing more detailed tasks such as research and shopping. Bohyun looked at the mobile websites which Aaron Tay reviewed in 2010 and revisited them to see how they had changed. It was really interesting to see the changes, many of which were common to most websites:

  • Research tools being added (or made more prominent), often with a search bar at the top of the mobile website
  • Additional functionality for library transactions (view the library account, course reserve, renew books and other items on loan)

Design had generally simplified and moved towards websites that look similar to native mobile apps, though there were different approaches. For example, some library mobile websites had moved from a list to icons, whilst others have moved from icons to a list! Bohyun concluded that it is no longer relevant to have a companion site for mobile with minimum content – the mobile site should aim to deliver the same functionality as the main website. She emphasised the importance of an environmental scan to see what others are doing, and to research your target audience to understand their needs and expectations and commented on how to market your mobile service more effectively.

Discussion

The four presentations were all excellent and we had lots of Q&As so discussion was dispersed throughout, but we also briefly discussed the general topic of responsive web design. This followed nicely from Bohyun’s presentation as it is evident that there is no longer a clear cut difference between what we expect from a mobile website and what we expect from a desktop website. Add to the mix the tablet market and its varying sizes, and it is clear that responsive web design is a useful approach to take. Fortunately, there was a presentation at the conference later that day on responsive web design and you can view further information and a copy of the presentation online.

As last time, I found the mobile computing interest group session really interesting and encourage anyone interested in mobile technologies in libraries to follow the future discussions and webinars from LITA MCIG.

About our guest author: Jo Alcock is a Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University (UK), who attended ALA Midwinter and Annual Conferences this year as one of the 2012 ALA Emerging Leaders. She is currently working on a JISC-funded project, the M-library support project, as part of the JISC Mobile Infrastructure for Libraries programme. Jo tweets as @joeyanne and blogs as Joeyanne Libraryanne.