IUG in Denver on Sunday

The Innovative Users Group (IUG)–for libraries using Innovative Interfaces Inc.‘s (III) integrated library system–meets in Denver starting today. I’ll be there on Sunday, and am looking forward to hearing Casey Bisson talk about his > Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0″>Web 2.0 catalog, and generally trying to learn more about designing less-sucky front ends for Innovative catalogs.

I also want to try and learn a bit more about the enhancement request procedure. The preliminary ballot for enhancement requests is out. It is marked “confidential information for customers of Innovative only,” so I can’t quote it here without checking that everyone knows the secret handshake. I don’t think I’m divulging any trade secrets if I say that it seems to be missing the forest for the trees: why request the ability to make this or that minor change on the search results screens, when what we should be asking for (IMHO) is for fully-editable templates for those pages? How about asking for valid XHTML pages? But I’m a newbie in this group, so I’ll try to avoid acting like a know-it-all jackass. There may be a perfectly good reason for this approach.

Our catalog redesign

A few months ago, I led a group here at my library to redesign our catalog, TIGER. I planned to blog about it at the time, but was a little discouraged when I realized that I had broken a few of the forms, causing us to have to revert those few pages to our old version. It wasn’t a big disaster, and I generally behaved in accordance with Dorothea Salo’s recent advice on TechEssence.info on how to fail gracefully (my favorite quote from that post: “It’s okay to say ‘wow, I completely didn’t expect it to die like that!’”), but I wan’t up for celebrating.

Plus this is very much a lipstick-on-a-pig redesign. It’s still the same old OPAC underneath, even though it has CSS formatting and most of the search pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

I did try an add a few grace notes to the catalog, including Web 2.0-style big fonts on the search boxes and highlighting the location, call number and status on item screens, as the usability testing I did on our catalog last summer showed me that students would find the correct item in the catalog, but not notice where it was located or if it was already checked out (I haven’t done another round of testing yet to see if my highlighting helped at all).

But anyway, I’ll be at the IUG thing on Sunday, so if you will be, too, let me know in the comments and we can try and meet up if you want.

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