The Well and the Cathedral

It’s been more than a month since my last post for good reason. I decided to move on from the public library, mostly because my work there was holding me back from doing better work for my clients. My business is now more official and I’m orienting my work in a direction that best uses my skills and experience. I’m excited for all of these changes. The past month has been busy; I tied things up at the library (except for an occasional class I volunteer for), I went to the beach, and now I’m set up for a greater capacity and better quality.

I had a great time on Tuesday at Tech Connections 2.0.0.9. The speakers had completely relevant and interesting things to say. As my daily work at the library usually consists of 75% desk time, it is really lovely to bring some ideas and theory to praxis. It’s also nice to see what other people are doing and how they’re doing it. I also met some great librarians doing great things.

I also had the pleasure of meeting a fellow I’d connected with over the internet in person. We were able to talk about some of the nuts and bolts of web work. He had some interesting things to communicate; I’m getting excited about all the possibilities. I have a big potential project in the works, but it’ll be a month or two before I’m in a position to work with it.

Since I changed my website a few months ago, I decided I need some new business cards with my new email on them. I’m really stoked to be ordering these today- from a letterpress! They’ll be beautiful. The telephone wires will be embossed.

It didn’t take long working the desk before a person came looking for a book based on its appearance. I think the first time this happened it went something like:

“There’s this book I’m looking for. It’s for school. The cover is kind of… Salmon colored.”
“Ok- was it a story or was it a book about facts?” (This is code for “Fiction or nonfiction?”)
“Um, I think it was a story. The cover was… I guess… More orange than pink.”

This is a pretty regular occurance at the fiction desk. It turns out that people search the internet in much the same way. These studies, as reported in MIT’s Technology Review, shows that when people want to revisit a page they’d seen before, they do not go through the browser history. And when they do search for the previously visited webpage, presenting users with images of previously visited webpages give them just enough information about the look and feel of the page that they can more easily find it again. Also in the article is a reference to pollination:

Spool says that the ideas behind the prototype history tool are likely to filter into consumer products in a very different form. “What we’re seeing here is the first piece of the pollination process,” he says.