InfoSoup Development Blog

We will be having an InfoSoup Brainstorming Party on Wednesday, November 14th, from noon to about 2:30 p.m. at the James J. Siebers Memorial Library in Kimberly. (APL's meeting room was closed in preparation for their book sale, so thanks much to Barbara Wentzel for making her space available to us!)

We'll be serving lunch (not sure what yet, but may include pizza, soup, salad, and dessert or some combination of them) and beverages, and we'll make sure there are vegetarian options, as well.

If you are planning on joining us (and I hope you will!), please RSVP to me by Wednesday, November 7th, so we can make final arrangements for food. If you have any questions, please give me a call!

Thanks,
Beth

Here's my attempt at summarizing the things that came up at the Brainstorming meeting on November 14th. If I miss something you thought was important, be sure to add it in the comments!

Here's who attended: Beth Carpenter, Evan Bend, Holly Ledvina, Gerri Moeller, and Rick Krumwiede from OWLS; Jamie Matzcak from NFLS; Penny Habeck from SHA; Cheryl White from STR; Barbara Wentzel from KIM-LIT; Michael Nitz, Sara Kopesky, Barbara Kelly, Colleen Rortvedt from APL; Elizabeth Timmins from SEY; LIsa Hein from MAR; Carolyn Habeck from HPL; Dominic Frandrup from WAU; and Maggie Waggoner from KAU.

Topics of discussion:

• Community reviews feature is being worked on and should be ready by the end of the year.


• Need for accessibility tips for seniors (how to enlarge print in your broswer) - could be included in the help files or posted as a tip on the homepage; other accessibility enhancements are sometimes available from III, we'll keep this on our list.


• Holiday headers in InfoSoup are fun and look good. I will post to get comments on what holidays/events we should create headings for (rather than only developing them when I can't sleep!). See Holiday iSoup Headers to add your ideas in the comments.


• Would like "If you like this book, then you'll like..." feature. Led to discussion of III's next OPAC called encore and some of the "most popular" features it includes. Gerri and I would like to get encore in 2009, but it is expensive and will depend on being able to afford it. I will post encore examples for you to explore in a later post. For now, we could collect "If you like" lists from OWLSnet libraries and post them in the booklists portion of InfoSoup.


• Lots of discussion about the current booklists and how to make them easy for all libraries to contribute to. (Evan, please add anything you'd like to share about that in the comments.)


• Tagging was mentioned as being a good thing (saw it in encore example and liked it). We could work with LibraryThing to try to implement their LibraryThing for Libraries in our current opac, then see what patrons think of it.


• Adding things to WebBridge like All Music Guide, BadgerCat, series or booklist links. Evan will explore some possibilities and will post to the blog for you to explore and comment on.


• Need for series access - We will test displaying series info on the brief record. We could also create a "Looking for" page for series, mirroring the ones that already exist for movies, audiobooks, etc. We'll play around with these and post to the blog for you to take a look.


• A suggestion was made to post the RSS icon for BookLetters on the homepage, so people know we're keeping up with current technologies. This will be done ASAP.


• Discussion of adding AskAway to additional pages in the catalog, such as the Research Tools page. We'll explore some options.


• The need for patrons to be able to reset their own PINs. Gerri mentioned that this is an enhancement coming soon, so stay tuned!


• We will be working on a movies page and a music page, as time permits, to match the kind of thing we did for the Readers' Page and local history pages.


• We discussed the design of the Research Tools page. Evan will be playing around with the suggestions made: adding a little more descriptive text, posting highlights and tips...


• We discussed starting an InfoSoup Blog which would be fed into the homepage (the 3 homepages, actually). It would replace the column on the left of the homepage and would include similar items as are in that column at present: new booklist highlights, contest news, database highlights, search tips, etc. This will not only make it easier for me to update the 3 homepages more seamlessly, but would allow us to test how/if patrons will use a blog. An added advantage is that the blog could easily be fed into any OWLSnet library web site for live content about InfoSoup. I will create the posts as I already do on the homepage and will moderate comments, making it obvious that I am responding as "InfoSoup" rather than a particular library. If comments are obviously from a particular library's patron and requires specific follow-up, I will contact that library to have them respond. This will be a test and can be shut down if needed.

Yikes! Was that it? Help me out if you were there and fill in any details I missed. Thanks so much to everyone who attended and to Barbara Wentzel for hosting us at Kimberly and taking care of lunch!

Beth