Credo Reference Blog

Credo Reference accepted an invitation to participate in the London Libraries’ “E-books marketplace” seminar at Swiss Cottage Library on Tuesday 23 February.  Representatives from 17 London libraries attended, most of whom were Credo subscribers, and all of whom are in different phases of embracing e-books.

Martin Palmer opened the seminar with an excellent account of how Essex Libraries explored and responded to the changing technologies and demands for e-books in the library environment, from the very early days to the huge and growing success that they now are at Essex Libraries.

Though Credo Reference is not an e-book platform, Anne Kail nevertheless found a theme that resonated.  Mindful that in these tough financial times usage and promotion are even more pressing than ever for librarians, Anne showed how Credo’s new Topic Pages tackle both those challenges and demonstrated how the library’s own e-books can be featured on the Credo page.

The event was wrapped up nicely with Tony White’s talk “E-publishing – a writer’s perspective” which he closed with a reading from one of his short stories – check it out at www.artistsebooks.org

Swiss Cottage Library

Some of you will know (or can find it in Brewers’ on Credo Reference) that Swiss Cottage refers not only to the library and the local area but originally to the ‘public house built in the style of a Swiss chalet. The original version was erected on the site of a former tollgate keeper’s cottage in 1803.  Today’s Swiss Cottage Library (pictured) is a branch library of Camden Libraries who are long time subscribers to Credo Reference.

Duart da Silva addressing the assembled crowd

There was a terrific, lively atmosphere at the Credo reception to celebrate the inclusion of the National Gallery images in the Credo Reference collection.

Perhaps the secret was the brevity of the speeches allowing our guests maximum time for mingling and enjoying the excellent food and drink:

Westminster Councilor Edward Argar lent an appropriate touch of gravitas to the proceedings and set the pace and a light-hearted tone with his brief remarks.

Louise Rice of the National Gallery gave us a witty whistle stop tour of the Gallery’s contents and its history, egalitarian from its beginning in the early C19 to today’s free public access to one of the world’s greatest collections of Western European painting.

Credo’s John Dove took up the baton and showed how the Gallery’s images would enhance the Credo search results, and Anne Kail crossed the finishing line with a preview of Credo’s exciting new Topic Pages, set to launch later in the year.

Or perhaps the lively hubbub of conversation that then followed over those excellent canapés and wine was down to the eclectic mix of Credo subscribers who came along – university and public librarians rubbed shoulders with newspapers, art editors, art publishers and professional institutions.

The inclusion of this prestigious collection is generating some excitement: “Credo’s Got My Attention, Again!” (From a recent Library Journal eViews column http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1100000310/post/730052273.html)

The Westminster Reference Library is right next door to the National Gallery so we were delighted when they offered to host our reception.  Our thanks go to the team who were there on the night and who all ensured that everything went so smoothly and enjoyably: Rossella Black, Alexandra Buccholz, Peter Collins, Owen Grey and last but by absolutely no means least, Duart da Silva who was a superb ‘master of ceremonies’ (pictured above).

View of the National Gallery

We recently had the pleasure of hosting Terry Winograd at the Credo offices. Terry is professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he directs the Interactivity Laboratory and the teaching and research program in Human-Computer Interaction Design. He has been on our corporate advisory board for a number of years and has always been helpful in terms of sharing his perspectives on best practices in user-centered design.

During our discussion, Terry discussed a number of important topics:
• Necessity of balancing feasibility, viability and usability when it comes to product development.
• Interviewing and observing as a means to uncovering creative new ideas that break the mold of how design problems were previously solved, e.g. pull-up diapers and soda packaged in fridge packs. This process involves starting from the core user pain points and abstracting from previous solutions.
• Expanding ideas through brainstorming. Often we too quickly begin pruning and weeding ideas. We need to be wild in our thinking initially to push the boundaries of what is possible. This brought out the distinction between divergent and convergent thinking.
• Necessity of develop safe environments where radical ideation is actively encouraged and not cut off prematurely.
• Importance of building “low fidelity” prototypes early in the design process to show users in order to gauge reaction and hone product direction.
• The challenges of balancing skilled usability versus learnability. Different user groups have varied needs when it comes to software design. Terry described how in game software design, users need to be able to get satisfaction quickly – in less than five minutes – and then, the game needs to get more complex as you go along.

We are grateful for the time Terry spent with us and appreciate the reminders about some of the core principles of user-centered design.

Credo Reference’s President, John Dove, recently gave two talks in England, one at SINTO and one at the University of Sheffield. Carl Clayton, Director of SINTO, has posted a great recap of John’s talk there on his blog. An excerpt from his blog entry is below.

Surprise me!
The first topic was “Surprise me!” and for this John mentioned a book he had been reading Reference services administration and management 1982. He explained that it was useful to go back to a book about reference services from a time before computers were used to extract some of the fundamental themes of providing a service.

Check out the full entry here.

Credo Reference’s President, John Dove, will be speaking at Sheffield Hallam University on Thursday, February 26th from 2:30-4pm. His talk will be entitled “Trends and Future Possibilities in the World of Online Reference”. Find the flyer and booking form here.

Credo Reference hosted the IRPG (Independent Reference Publishers Group) meeting last month at Midwinter ALA, and the discussion was certainly provocative. The panel, which included Todd Carpenter of NISO, Peter McCracken from Serials Solutions, Rolf Janke from Sage Reference and Ron Boehm from ABC-CLIO, was instructed to respond to a comment from Sue Polanka, of Wright State University and the No Shelf Required blog. Sue’s comment was:

One day I’d like to purchase/license all of my reference content, regardless of publisher, and load it on the platform of my choice for the best cross searching available. This platform could be an existing one, like GVRL, Credo, ebrary, EBL, NetLibrary, etc. or some shareware, something developed by libraries. Benefits to patrons and librarians include: Greater access, more content, single search interface for ease of use and discoverabilty, easy to implement in library instruction and on web sites. These systems need to have unlimited simultaneous use, 24/7 access, with no DRM or other restrictions on downloading or printing, the most multimedia available during today’s expensive economic times and an actual ebook price, up front, would be appreciated. (from her blog entry – Reference Publishers Debate Single Platform)

The response from the different constituencies represented was very interesting. Traditional, print publishing companies have many challenges to face in terms of moving their businesses forward and breaking the strangle hold that the infrastructure required for physically printing books has on them. There are many issues to be considered around standards, and cooperation between different publishers and vendors. Overall, it was an interesting discussion, and one that I think will only become more relevant as library budgets face cuts and libraries look to get the most value out of their dollars.

See my notes from the meeting here.

Credo’s Marketing Manager, Heather Blaine, and Product Manager, Nancy King, created a presentation for the MWALA Tech Showcase entitled “What we learned from Craigslist: Developing new ways to browse and explore online library content”. The focus of their presentation was about the different sites that influenced the redesign of Credo in Summer 2008, as well as the unique challenges that our primary subject matter, Subject Encyclopedias, present. They also talked about what we learned from information design, in particular, from Edward Tufte. The presentation was very well recieved, and I encourage everyone to check out the powerpoints (with annotation!) here.

Credo Reference’s President, John Dove, gave a talk at the November, 2008 Charleston Conference on “The Problem of the Common User Interface”. He has also created a paper based on that talk, entitled “The Semantic Web and Online General Reference – Are We There Yet, or Any Time Soon?”. From his abstract:

In this paper I propose an approach to applying the concepts of the Semantic Web to the area of online general reference for libraries. This is motivated by a belief that if content owners can prepare their content in an appropriate fashion for participation in online environments, then user interface developers can provide users with compelling capabilities that go across a very broad spectrum of library-acquired content. This will make that content far more valuable to users and will even mean that user interface developers working for one publisher would have ways of interacting with content from many other publishers and vice versa. This would open up a significant set of opportunities for innovation for the benefit of users, libraries, and the publishers who provide the content.

Find the full text of his paper here.