Sinister things afoot in the building of books

With more of the dreaded continuation, we further the tale of a vague work related collection of random words…

<voiceoverman>previously in Owens head, he explained how the classic library was a great place to read vintage pornography, have a bit of a sit down and maybe borrow a book to read. Something sinister was afoot with the new interweb style library service. We return to the action as Owen tries to build some suspense and tries to remember what the hell he was talking about</voiceoverman>

In the awesome real libraries (don’t forget to save your local library) you can do allsorts of illegal things (read books you haven’t paid for, borrow CD’s and DVD’s, Photocopy things without expressed or implied permission, and if you’re a member you can take items out of the building and do as you please with them for a set period of time, no questions asked)

And if you visit the new magical online library, you won’t be able to find anything but if you do, you can only read it on the screen and you have 12 seconds, printing out to read on the toilet is punishable by death, and if your computer isn’t set up with the right software and plugins your shit out of luck.

Who are to blame for this stupid state of affaires?

It’s the publishers (and the distributors) of the content, Before I go on about publishers hating everyone, http://www.sapienspublishing.com/ are the exception that proves the rule, Back to the scheduled rant…

In my thing that happens between waking up and having a pint (work I think its called) my challenge is to get my lovely end users reading stuff we have in our library via our website, the process goes a little like this

1. Find the uni’s website
2. Enter your search in the wrong search box
3. Find the library website
4. Enter your search in the same wrong search box
5. Find the right search box and enter search
6. Have to log in to see the results
7. Get a massive list of things you don’t want to read that matched your book title search
8. Find the book half way down the page, and click the link
9. Get asked to login again
10. Get sent to some random American website which shows you loads of exciting metadata about your book
11. Try 15 different links on the page to get to the book (most of them will accuse you of being a terrorist and demand money or they will eat your pets)
12. Find that the link you wanted was being blocked by the popup blocker, fix that small problem and then..
13. Get a tiny popup window (which doesn’t resize) that has a strange plug-in showing your book in a 300pt font that will only let you print the current view

By the time you’ve done this, you’re grumpy, slightly tipsy, and thinking “I could have phone the author and had them read me the important bits” and not feel like I’m a criminal.

Even from the librarian side of this it sucks:

• we have to pay a small fortune for the content
• we can only let a select few see what we have, let alone read the stuff (ie make us jump through hoops and piss off our customers)
• yay! we get totally useless stats (you have had 50,000 searches this month, what they searched for we won’t tell you and you have no hope of knowing who searched for what but 12 people managed to find and read some articles in this journal so we will invoice you another fortune for the honor of letting people read something we didn’t pay the author for, he’s still tied up in our sex dungeon because they looked at another publisher)
• awesome branding options circa 1997 (changing the colours and adding a logo doesn’t a branding make)
• make sure that we have to have about a billion different guides to using the content providers websites, anyone would think they hate customers

Are publishers/search aggregators evil?, who can say but the very biased evidence i made up does seem to prove it.

Next time on the world of beery… I’ve found someone who is more of a control freak and enjoys making fools out of everyone

to be continued …..

A Vague work/library post

As many of you know, I spend a lot of my time being grumpy in a library trying to make a website not suck, it’s an uphill struggle because it’s a library website.

in a standard disclaimer here is some background fact

1)   I was a rubbish student

2)   I didn’t go to the library when I was a student (maybe why I failed)

3)   I think I know everything (which is why I failed at being a student)

4)   I’m mostly right, most of the time (in my head anyway)

5)   I never learnt to read (my parents didn’t want me to get car sick)

6)   I really don’t care about content, the delivery of content is the fun part

7)   I am really quite lazy

8)   I know the odd bit about websites and the internet (trust me, I’ve been doing this for a while)

9)   I have an ego slightly larger than a moon

10)  I am a shambrarian, and proud of it

So I’ve covered the bases: I know nothing about libraries, I can’t read, I’m a borderline sociopath and rather good at computer stuff.

On with the show, as they say. The problem with library websites (in a huge generalization of everything) is the content and the audience

The audience for an academic/public library (or library website) is

a)    Students (the ones that eventually pay for everything)

b)   Academics (the ones that write things to get students)

c)    The public (random people, potential students and potential academics)

90% of the students just want to do the assignments then get on with doing studenty things

99% of the academics want to get back to sleeping in the overstuffed armchairs in their offices

2% of the public may want to read newspapers, photocopy stuff, use the internet or borrow a book to read  (the rest want to move books about the shelves and get chocolate on the computers)

Now with a physical library (be it academic or public) you can still go in and read anything you want even if your not a member, be it a well read copy of the very hungry caterpillar, a 1985 copy of the times, a random copy of ‘bastards monthly’ or a bongo magazine from the 70’s

With the new ajax/facepalm/crowdsurfer powered web5.2 beta electronic iConnected e-library the barrier to access isn’t the doors with push written on the pull side, the grumpy security guard that needs 300 forms of photo id to let you in the building or the random opening times its something a lot more sinister ….

To be continued…….

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