Unfiltered Access

For further reading, the Free Range Librarian has some other good writing tips.

A former colleague of mine had an email signature that was meatier than any message that it was attached to. It filled nearly an entire printed page of text. Some may dismiss this as an eccentricity, but it is much more sinister and pervasive. Signatures of this sort have real and palpable effects on the people who we serve each day. A good email signature helps our recipients connect easily with information that matters to them. A bad signature, on the other hand, forces readers to dredge.

How does a bad signature look?

• Name: Who are you?
• Title: What are you?
• Organization: Where are you?
• Phone: Good. Give your recipient one alternative way to contact you while away from a computer. Only one.
• Fax: How often do your use your organization’s fax machine? If your recipient wants to fax something, first mention your “paperless office” standard citing environmental concerns. If they still want to fax something, ask them politely to scan it send it electronically. When there are no alternatives (and only then), include the fax number in the body of your message.
• Email: There is no need for this, as it is already included in any email. It’s like standing on the sidewalk outside of your house, pointing at the mailbox, and saying repeatedly to the air “I live at 123 Main Street.” Passersby already know this, now they just think you’re weird.
• Mailing Address: Do the people you email send a reply letter via postal service? Leave it out.
• Organization URL: This makes sense if your organization is web-based or if you are reaching out to someone who is unfamiliar with what online resources are available. In most cases, your recipient probably has the URL bookmarked already.
• Organization Tag Line: Working With You, For You, YOU! or similar. Let your message and actions reflect your organization’s brand, not your signature.
• Witty Quote: Your witty quote may not be so witty for others. It may even be offensive depending on who said it. Scrap it.
• Have a Nice Day!: Cheesy and impersonal (as it is in a pre-constructed signature template that is attached to every message you send). Use “Sincerely” to close your message instead.
• Company Logo: This just wastes space and inflates the size of a message drastically.
• WARNING – This message is for YOU only! : Duh. This really becomes painful when this 10 sentence disclaimer is attached to not only the original message, but also to each reply. This is usually added by the mail server and is not part of the signature, but is still an annoyance to the the recipient.

How should good signatures be done?

• Name/Title
• Organization
• Phone

That’s all.

I attended a private school for my secondary education, and it is in the classrooms of this supposedly unbiased, spiritually-charged institution where I first encountered censorship. At the time, I thought nothing of it – I even embraced and participated in it. The teacher knows best, right? Upon reflection, knowing what I know now, I find this activity to be pervasive, dangerous, and squelching of critical thought among most students today, whether they attend public or private institutions. I do not intend for this post to be a thorough analysis of my personal views of censorship, but rather a call for change.

I can understand eliminating supposed pornographic or non-literary items from the curriculum, but I will never understand editing the classics simply because some words may be offensive to some readers. I sat in the classroom just like any normal day, and I was handed by my teacher a black magic marker. Copies of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were then distributed, and we were given a list of words deemed offensive by either my teacher or the administration. “Damned” and “hell” were among the offensive words. As the entire class read page by page, round-robin around the room, we were instructed to cross out any of the “offensive” words that we encountered with the magic marker.

Looking back, this activity had 2 different effects on the students who were forced to participate in this inexcusable activity. First, censorship draws attention, warranted or not, to the text being censored. I would not have had a second thought about the words were were blacking out if not instructed to search for them.

Secondly, censoring any text simply to accommodate a certain variety of person gives the reader a false sense of the literary world and demeans the value of literature that we should be fighting to protect. I guarantee that several of my classmates to this day still cringe when they see an “offensive” word and reach for their magic marker – perhaps while even reading Marlowe, Shakespeare, or J.K Rowling. Students of this sort cannot survive in college, let alone the real world. All text has merit, and we should have a thick enough skin to step outside of the text and evaluate it critically. The reader does not have to like a text in order to appreciate its worth.

We must understand that the words themselves have no meaning, they are just ink on white paper that is bound into what we agree to address as a “book.” It is the meaning that we assign to the words that generates a personal reaction and triggers our natural instinct to question, enjoy, and critically discuss a work, literary or not. We do not have to agree with our interpreted meaning, we simply have to have an open mind to viewpoints that may be differing from our own.

I gave the following summary presentation to my library’s management and Web development team. It is difficult to condense three days of information into a 20 minute presentation, but I think I hit all the highlights.

So what have I learned from CiL 2009? We have a lot of work to do, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Whether your library’s Web site or other interactive resource, thought must be given when developing the UI and (more importantly) content. Conducting usability studies, evaluating all available solutions, and making timely design decisions are all necessary, but more importantly, the user experience must take forefront throughout the decision and design process. Before one decides what ultimate solution will wow the user base, it is just as important to explore poor design decisions made by others as to not suffer the same unnavigable fate.

Jeff Wisniewski (Web Services Librarian, University of Pittsburgh) presents several pitfalls to avoid when overhauling your library’s Web presence and resources. I provide my commentary.

Pitfall 1: Spending too much time on design. Instead, use some free resources, and spend most time on great content and services.

Design is important. It spills your library’s brand onto the expanses of the Internet, and permeates the tacit connection that patrons have with your organization. Design, however, should never take priority over content. A Web development committee could spend weeks discussing the advantages of using 1Ems versus 1.2Ems for a H3 tag, or could spend time overhauling a link directory and developing training resources to not only help patrons navigate your site, but also productively manage their lives online. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, as whatever you come up with has already been done by another library. Maybe they even did it better.

Pitfall 2: Only looking at other library sites for inspiration.

Your patrons don’t use other library sites. They use Amazon, Facebook, Twtter, Google, CNN, Digg. These sites flourish not only from their design decisions, but also from the services that they offer. This ties in very closely with Pitfall 1, as it reinforces the notion that content is everything. Library sites should follow established and widely used conventions to ensure patrons can find the content that they need.

Pitfall 3: Trying to reach too much consensus.

Project committees serve a valuable purpose, but over-evaluation can stop a design project in its tracks. Quickly pick a design and let the Web Developers make it happen.