When Websites Change

I went on to Amazon today and discovered to my dismay that they'd changed their site design again. And I was planning on blogging about something else today, but that just had to be addressed: dealing with change and the web.

We've all been there. You get to know a site well. You know how to find what you want in the wink of an eye. Everything's all good. Sure, it might be a bit dated, but it's like an old pair of jeans: ragged in a few places, but familiar and comfortable as all get out.

Then they change it.

Suddenly, you don't know where anything is. You're lost in a sea of "Huh?" And the feeling you have more than any other is frustration. You've been betrayed by your old, friendly site. How could they do this to you?

This is something you see happen all the time with Facebook. As soon as they make one tweak, thousands of people are up in arms. "Bring back the old Facebook!" There are groups formed that promise that if they get enough people signed up in them, Facebook will have to go back to the old design. Of course it never works out like that.

And from a big picture perspective, it's easy to see why. All you have to do is look at old versions of your favorite sites (Amazon or eBay or Facebook or Google), and you see how dated they look. How silly and unmodern. But if we never let those small changes--and yes, even big site redesigns--take place, then that's what would happen. Our favorite pages would become stagnant, boring, and unusable.

So my message today is simple: change is good. Yes, it can be frustrating, and yes, occasionally some sites get it wrong and have to revert to the old, but in the end, it's a learning process, and the web gets stronger for it.

Now if I could just find what I was looking for on Amazon . . .

Mantor Monday

Welcome, new students and faculty!

Are you ready to untangle the Mantor Maze? We're all geared up (and dressed in spiffy library staff t-shirts) for two sessions of our library orientation activity, today at 1:15 and 3:00.

With it's bewildering staircases and multiple floors, Mantor can be a confusing place to navigate. The Mantor Maze activity is a fun way to explore the building, learn about the resources available to you here, and of course - meet the friendly staff! Oh, and did I mention candy and prizes? Master the maze, and you will be showered with rewards.

And if you get lost in the attempt, we will come find you, and we will still give you candy. It's all win!

A reminder about library hours - we return to regular academic year hours - open weekends and evenings -, on Wednesday. We will be closed next Monday in observance of Labor Day.

Review Friday: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This book is one of my favorite recent looks at the world of science. (And it's available in our Discoveries collection, found in the Browsing Room opposite the Access Services desk of the library.)

The first question on your mind is probably "Who is Henrietta Lacks?" The initial answer - that she was a poor African-American woman who was treated for cancer at Johns Hopkins in the early 1950s - is probably not too exciting.

But what if I told you that she, in a very pragmatic way, helped with the following?

• testing the 1952 polio vaccine, which protected millions of children.
• proving that we have 23 chromosomes, helping with the diagnosis of a wide range of genetic conditions.
  
• providing the initial spark for scientists to figure out how to keep a single cell alive and grow a line of cells from it (used for everything from in-vitro fertilization to cloning).
• offering ideas for creation of anti-cancer drugs now in clinical tests.
  

What did she do? Her cells were taken to create a cell culture that has become the longest-lasting human cell line used in biological science, long known as the HeLa line.

Here's the thing, though: she didn't give informed consent. (She wasn't even asked, which was common at the time for everyone.) She died in poverty. Her extended family, many of whom are still alive, continued to live in poverty, unable to afford the technological advances that her tissue helped doctors create. They spent many years not knowing what that cell culture meant, or what she'd contributed. And for decades, her very name disappeared from the record.

Henrietta's story is about a lot of other things. What right do we have to our own tissue, even after it's removed from our bodies? What does it mean to be an informed health consumer? What does access to health care really mean? What is the intersection between personal choice, research, and commercial profit? And what should happen if - like Henrietta Lacks - our cells turn out to have some unusual quality?

Rebecca Skloot takes this complicated story and makes it readable, interesting, and compassionate as she begins by figuring out why the HeLa culture was called that and winds up diving deeply into the life of the Lacks family (to help them find answers). It's a fascinating read, with clear language that's friendly to the non-scientist, and it's sure to get you interested in other questions of bioethics, health care access, and science.

If you'd like to learn more, Rebecca's website has lots more information, including an extensive FAQ (and a movie is in the planning stages.)

9/11 Ebook Collection

In recognition of the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11, ebrary is offering free access to a collection of relevant ebooks. A press release from ebrary states: "We hope that this collection provides a valuable resource to anyone hoping to learn or understand more about this tragic event, or reflect on it's world impact."

The 9/11 titles will be available through the month of September.

To view the collection, click here.

Facebook Privacy Gets an Upgrade

One of the great things about competition is that it helps the consumer. When companies compete, we win. Case in point? Facebook and Google. As you know, Google finally came out with a social network that actually works: Google+ And they're doing their darndest now to differentiate themselves from Facebook and prove to everyone why they should switch over to Google's offering.

The only problem for Google, of course, is that Facebook can sit back and watch what Google does well, then imitate that on their own site. In some ways, it's like Facebook didn't get a competitor, they gained a free R&D branch of their company.

Just take the recent development of Facebook tweaking their privacy settings. Google+ had some privacy settings that ended up being admired by many (namely, the ease with which users could choose what information was available to whom on Google+). Then again, Google also has some privacy settings which people don't like at all (being forced to use real names, for example). So what did Facebook do? It casually adopted some of the things Google had figured out worked.

Gee, thanks.

Some people are making fun of Facebook for doing this, but in the end, it's just good business. They have the high ground, and as long as they keep being open to change and willing to adapt, that's a very difficult thing to lose. (But it can be done--just look at Internet Explorer.)

My advice? Don't be too in love with any one online offering. If/when Google+ beats the pants off Facebook, I'll make the switch. For now, I haven't been blown away, and I'm still happy with FB. But only fanboys get so enthralled with a service or company that they ignore better products elsewhere. In the end, competition means innovation, and innovation means the consumer wins.

So by all means, FB and Google, fight on.

Mantor Monday

The 2011-12 academic year is almost here...and we're ready! We've been busy updating computers, setting up new equipment, and welcoming new staff. Tomorrow, Tuesday the 23rd, the library will be closed for the day. Library staff is flying the coop for an all day retreat: food, fun, and team-building at Pineland Farms.

Next week, the year kicks off at Mantor with our Orientation activity for incoming new students on Monday, August 29. We piloted "The Mantor Maze" - a treasure hunt that has students learning about the library's resources as they travel our three floors, mezzanine, and basement in search of clues - back in June with Summer Experience students, and it was a big hit. We've tweaked it a little bit, based on feedback from the trial run, and we're excited to see if the changes make the Mantor Maze experience even more fun for all.

The library has been running on our summer hours schedule, but will resume "regular" hours on August 31. Those hours are:

Monday - Thursday 7:45 am to 11:00 pm

Friday - 7:45 am to 5:00 pm

Saturday - 9:00 am to 5 pm

Sunday - 11:00 am to 11:00 pm

Time's Top 50 Websites

Time Magazine just released its yearly "50 Best Websites of 2011" list, and it got me thinking. There's such a variety of websites on the list: everything from hipmunk (a new airfare search engine that utilizes a cool graphical interface to display flight results) to Khan Academy (a new teaching tool that just might revolutionize the way our country approaches education). I follow technology fairly closely. I read about upcoming trends, explore new websites, and generally do my best to keep up to date on anything that might affect universities, libraries, students, or librarians. And yet many of these sites were new to me. As in, I'd never heard of them.

Why is that?

The answer is simple: there's just too much information in the world today. There's so much information that even the best tool for keeping on top of it all and sorting through it (Google) isn't up to the task of actually finding you the best information. Don't get me wrong--Google (and other search engines) does a fine job at finding you information.

It's just that there's a difference between information and the best information.

I don't know about you, but when I search Google these days, a lot of the same sites keep cropping up into the top levels of my results page. Wikipedia. About.com. eHow. Things like that--unless I'm searching for a specific website, like the home page of a company. The problem with search engines is that they so often give you what's popular--they give information that's "good enough." But things can be so much better when you get really valuable information.

There's a famous quote by Donald Rumsfeld (which he got made fun of for making), but it applies in this situation:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

 When you know what you don't know, then it's fairly easy to go out and find it. When you don't know what you don't know, no amount of googling will help. If you don't know a website exists, you can't very well search for it--you have to rely on finding it through other means. Means like Time's top 50 list.

But with so many different great websites coming out each year, the top 50 list approach turns into a revolving door--you see a great site one moment, then forget about it when the next great site is presented to you.

Ideally, that's where information professionals step in. People whose job it is to know what's out there and how to get to it. People who can identify a problem and know where to find the solution, all in one fell swoop.

This post has sort of rambled on by this point, so I'll wrap it up by encouraging you to get out there and explore the internet--check out the top 50 list. And support your local librarian. :-)