While much of my experience overlaps or translates, I have not worked in public libraries before. I am ridiculously, ecstatically excited. For all I thrive online, the thought of wandering stacks and teaching face to face makes me downright giddy. I’m eager to engage with a different kind of patron, collection, mission, everything—all of this on top of the adventure of moving, immersing myself in a fun, new city.

With this opportunity, I leave behind Walden University—but not without accolades. At the start of March I was awarded the Frondie, an employee of the month recognition in the library.

What the heck is a Frondie? Why, it’s a creepy Green Man statue/plaque/thingy:

My nominator colleagues said about me:

“I would like to nominate Meg for all the work she does and has done to make the website and guides be fantastic and seamless. Yes, there are working groups for these things but it seems that Meg has often done beyond what is expected.”

“Our successful, on-time launch of the library website re-design may have been neither without Meg’s involvement. She asked insightful, hard questions about the project, but also dedicated extra time to researching and drafting possible solutions to any issue she raised. Meg communicated with her colleagues throughout the project, both sharing progress from the team and collecting feedback from others. She has also stepped up to create resources and support for her colleagues, such as workshops on SnagIt image editing and the content and style guide.”

“Meg has a history of supporting her colleagues and helping us all do quality work (offering SnagIt image workshops, all the crazy work on the content and style guide, etc.) She has also had openness to being flexible to bring success to the library (think all the twists and turns of the website redesign). Once again, we are grateful to Meg for her adaptability and strong support of the team: just recently she has agreed to let us all experiment with her role as a liaison. In order to help meet the ever changing workloads from College of Health Sciences and RWR College of Education and Leadership, Meg is now flexing back and forth between the two schools and collaborating to take care of business. This pilot project is very important to all of us as we explore more ways to keep up with new programs and projects.”

“She doesn’t hesitate to call shenanigans and is great at providing detailed feedback with examples. She’s blazing a trail and taking us with her. Bravo, Meg!”

HOW MORTIFYING! I knew the Austin Public offer was coming—I was trapped in criminal background check limbo for nearly a month and half. Then I find out that people like me and think I do rad work! Can’t say I don’t feel a little guilty, but it’s equally awesome to be recognized and appreciated.

On my last day of work, my Walden colleagues presented me with this wondrous gift:

May my new colleagues in time understand me so well.

I celebrated the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom’s Sweater Vest Sunday at home in a snowstorm in kickin’ argyle. Why yes, I can rock a sweater vest!

Here I be in my staged-tidy cube in Walden University Library. Contrary to my pastiness in this photo, I did see the light of day this summer, I swear! But it’s been a breakneck speed, productive past several months, with two major accomplishments:

1. Website user testing

I’m on a team that has been developing a reorganization for the library website. The design will stay largely the same, but the current site has significant usability problems, mostly due to poor labeling and non-intuitive categorization—legacy decisions that leave us with loads of library jargon and way too many assumptions about user know-how.

Inspired by user experience discussions at MinneWebCon and Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy, I advocated for user testing and won—to my delight and terror. Without a user testing precedent in the library or elsewhere in the university as far as I could determine, I was on my own. Though some decisions were less than ideal, like using other staff as participants instead of actual students (it’s an online university, hey… can’t exactly post fliers by the washrooms), the pilot test proved most useful.

I designed and conducted the tests with input from two colleagues, also on the website team. We opted to get feedback on the existing site to confirm our suspicions about things that are confusing and to uncover new problems we hadn’t considered. The data collected was largely confirming but with plenty of the unexpected to keep it interesting.

Data was used to justify design decisions, to incorporate additional ones and to make a few emergency changes to the current site immediately—critical facepalms not fit to print. User testing overall was thrilling and embarrassing and yes, time-consuming, but at the same time so important, and despite the initial timesink, it wasn’t terribly complicated. With a process in place, future testing sessions can hopefully happen with greater frequency, and with our other user groups, like students and faculty.

2. A comprehensive style guide for all library content

The new website requires loads of revised and new content, the majority of which will be pushed through LibGuides, of which we already have a ton. A metric ton. An expletive ton, and honestly, sadly, they’re all over the place when it comes to consistency.

Consistency is quality—inescapably. But with incomplete guidelines and several librarians producing content, the guides as a whole lack cohesion.

Now was my chance to reign in our over 2,500 guides, exploiting my English degree and proofreading background to the fullest. After investigating the university style guide and APA style (the university-wide standard), plus considering deeply the merits of common use and sense (e-hyphen-mail? really?), I created a content style guide governing every aspect of content creation, including:

• Grammar, spelling and usage
• Screenshot creation and specs for annotations (call-out boxes, arrows, highlighting, etc.)
• Link names and image descriptions (“alt tags”) that are mindful of screen readers to ensure all content is ADA compliant, or as close as we can get given tech constraints

The style guide applies across all platforms: the main site, LigGuides, LibAnswers, the blog, Facebook, YouTube, and all things to come. With the help of an instructional designer colleague, instructional best practices are included throughout.

The style guide is a thing of beauty—and was a wonderful exercise in choosing the fights worth having. I tend to lean toward the minimal. Serial comma?—hate it. But I let it go and let it inside. Two spaces instead of one between sentences? I knew enforcing a rule either way would cause a war, and didn’t even bother.

But killing the capital “I” on internet? Now that’s worth fighting for.

YES. YES. I UNDERSTAND.

Though the two other contractors and I are not currently working on guides, we were happy to join the nursing liaison Augsburg librarian to give the Mayo folks the LibGuides rundown, covering pros and cons, best practices, guide organization ideas and more. I’m intrigued to see what they come up with — the subject matter is more technical and the audience much different from the largely undergrad-focused Augsburg guides, and might range from high-level physicians to medical students to laypersons seeking consumer medical information.

Following the presentation, we were treated to lunch and conversation. I’ve never worked in a medial library, and it was fascinating to hear firsthand from information professionals at one of the best medical practice and research communities in the world — everything from database access issues to painstakingly detailed search notes on reference questions, necessary for review in medical publications.

We also had tours of the History of Medicine Library, housing rare medical texts with stunning 15th century anatomical woodcuts (a pet interest of mine), and the carillon bells in the tower of the Plummer Building. Resident carillonist Jeff Daehn even hammered out a few tunes for us, as we cavorted along the tower with the stone guards and eagle/gargoyles overlooking the city and the Mayo complex.

I do, however, look for opportunities to dig deeper—to be a librarian, not a blogger, and add research value, not regurgitate the web. My recent post, Premature Burial Device Patents, was one such opportunity. As keen to explain the search process as share the information, I fear I may have gotten a tad too library science enthusiastic for the audience. So I figured I’d elaborate more here. In short, gasp! massive, wondrous patent classification system! And Google Patents is a bit broken yet still manages to be reasonably awesome.

Inspiration struck for this post when one of those skim-friendly web lists came down the deathwire—10 Horrifying Premature Burials. This is not typical DeathRef fodder. It’s ad-laden, the photos are cheesy and the references, scattershot vague. But it did get me thinking—premature burial was a genuine fear, rational or not, around the turn of the twentieth century, and inventors of the time were up to the task. Be that task cheating death and saving lives or exploiting the fear of paranoid Victorians, who knows. But the patents for such devices poured in—plans and designs for spring-loaded escape coffins and electrical systems that detected corpse movement then triggered alarm systems above ground, to name a couple.

As government documents, US patents are in the public domain, and I wondered if they are online. I started with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which, sure enough, provides patents online—full text (and full text searching) starting in 1976 and image-only patents since 1790. I couldn’t get the image plug-in to work, however (arrrrrghgh!) and search is impenetrable. All this data was at my fingertips but I couldn’t quite grasp it.

Wikipedia’s safety coffin article directed me to this marvelous page at USPTO. This was it—everything I wanted, as far as I could tell, in barely human-readable format. The 27/31 intrigued me the most is that what I think it is? sure enough—classification numbers.

Like most classification systems, the United States Patent Classification System is at first glance amazing. I wanted to swan dive into classes, wallow in all its sprawling facets. But I’m sure upon deeper inspection, it’s driven many a patent librarian or poor legal assistant insane. For my domain of interest:

Bingo. Keywords got nothing on a calculated brain putting things in their places. But what to do with this cumbersome interface?

Enter Google Patents (GP). With a search and view structure much like Google Books, GP has mined all of USPTO’s content and delivers it much more digestibly. All those image-only patents I couldn’t get to work are now slick PDFs I can preview in-browser, see as copy-pastable HTML or download as PDFs. Everything is also now full-text searchable (unlike USPTO’s pre-1976 black hole).

Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t make searching for the patents any easier. In the About GP page, it states:

I’m assuming word frequency and fields play a part. For instance, “coffin” mentioned a lot in a patent, especially in important fields, will increase its relevancy ranking. Great. But there’s so much that happens with web search ranking—a critical mass of users, search optimization, incoming and outgoing links, even domain extensions—that simply aren’t a part of a pile of patents, many of which have faulty information (whether an omission on Google’s part or from the start when extracted from USPTO). Fields are transposed, the inventors becoming their inventions. Other fields are left blank. Words are misspelled and other typos abound, likely from bad OCR.

In other words, Google Patents is familiar, clean and comforting, but keyword searching is still crap.

If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you may have better luck but not necessarily. Advanced search allows you to search by patent number, inventor, date and so forth. You can also search by classification, US and international, which initially thrilled me, but my magic numbers 27/31 for life signal devices rounded up only a handful of results, none of them relevant (like the martial arts uniform top or “duck on the rock” kids’ game). Out of curiosity, I tried searching for other classification numbers: some results appeared relevant while others, again, were way off.

I’m stumped. USPTO can easily retrieve patents based on classification—if they’re using the same data, why can’t Google? Searching by patent number also retrieves a lot of irrelevant results in GP. Despite specifying a field search, it still seems to be doing a keyword search. Many patents refer to other similar patents (including their numbers) to explain how this new one compares or deviates, which can be helpful if researching the evolution of an invention or process. But extraneous, completely different items end up in the mix, too, which frustrates and impedes.

Because I couldn’t generate a list of what I wanted in Google Patents, I used the USPTO 27/31 list to grab the patent numbers which I then searched for in GP to compile a list of life signal coffin devices for the DeathRef post. These are linked to the easy-to-view and use (once you find them) GP patents.

As the titles of these patents are often similar or vague, I annotated a few of them with quotes from the patents. This is where the plain text view came in handy—for easy copy and pasting. But what really blew my mind is the clipping feature found in the upper right:

With Clip you can select with a bounding box any part of a PDF then immediately grab the embed code for the image and presumably do whatever you want with it. I threw a handful into the DeathRef post. These patents have marvelous line drawings—I had planned to download PDFs or take manual screenshots, resize as needed, upload them to the blog then link back to the PDFs. The clipping feature did everything automatically and instantly. Wowza!

I don’t know whether Google takes a snapshot of the image and stores it somewhere, or if the code is a script that generates the image on the fly based on the bounding box parameters—I think it’s the latter. While it’s always good practice to have local copies of images in case something happens to ones stored elsewhere (beyond your control), this is a slick feature I haven’t seen before, from Google or anyone else. I suspect it’s the absence of copyright that makes this possible more so than newly discovered technical ingenuity, but still—so handy, so cool.

In conclusion, I love what Google Patents is doing but arughg! it could be so much better. I have a hunch making improvements on providing access to something in theory already available is of pretty low priority, however—and it does say it’s beta, so *deep breath* I can settle down. And in the meantime, be excited. For all the endless ventures and questionable agendas of the Google Empire, this one seems pretty innocuous—and neat.