Along with our new hot drinks machine from Wittenborg came a box of mixed tea bags. The tea bags are nicely arranged in flavour compartments, which – in my view – is a really user friendly feature.
However, once in while someone puts lemon tea bags in all the compartments, making it look as if the box contains nothing but lemon tea bags. (Se photo documentation above).
What sort of person would do that? A funny person? A mentally disturbed tea hater? Kåre?
Update-update. Time is now 13:07 and we’re postponing the release. We have too much trouble talking to some backend services. Also some key players are not on the premises tomorrow.
Too bad, but better to be late than sorry…
Update. Time is now 10:53 and we have a potential showstopper. Nothing seems to be working in Internet Explorer 6 on the thin clients…
Tomorrow is deadline time. We’ll be releasing a new version of Statsbiblioteket’s search engine. The new version includes better looks and an improved request feature, amongst other things.
As you can tell from the photo, right now (8:07) the office is calm, but I expect things to be a bit more busy later.
I just updated Planet SB to fetch the list of blogs dynamically from 7trin.wordpress.com/deltagere. While utilizing some pretty ugly regular expression logic it does appear to work.
I can also add third party blogs not listed on the 7 Trin page, so if you have something please ping me. Keep in mind that I am trying to keep the Planet people-centric and with content generated in a SB context. If there is sufficient interest I’ll create an aggregation of third party feeds.
The Royal Library in Cph. recently did a number of usability tests of their new search engine called Primo.
The usability tests were recorded on video and can be seen over at DEFF’s wiki. I haven’t seen them all yet, but the ones I did see were quite instructive! Enjoy.
Please note that the clips CANNOT be downloaded for personal use. If you need to know more, contact Birgitte Munk at the Royal Library: bir@kb.dk
PS. Apparently DEFF are publishing the news about the videos on Monday on their website. I was just faster…;-)
Proud to announce that Summa won best demo award at ECDL 2008. We shared the prize with Plato. The winners were determined by vote from the conference attendees. Along with the honor came 500 euro (1000 euro split with Plato).
Always nice to win a ‘peoples choice’ award although we had the home court advantage.
Proud project leader with the diploma - complete with 'bullet hole' and all.
Nu har jeg læst første nummer af blokken – Statsbibliotekets nye nyhedsbrev for medarbejderne. Indholdet er fint for et første nummer. Det er letlæst og overskueligt og har et okay layout, der i hvert fald ikke skræmmer nogen væk. På sigt kan det være der kommer nogle lidt længere baggrundsartikler o. lign., men de skal jo lige finde formen. Alt i alt en lovende start.
Desværre var jeg lige ved at få automat-espressoen galt i halsen, da det gik op for mig at blokken benytter en distributionsform forankret i forrige århundrede. Man kan nemlig kun læse det som en vedhæftet pdf-fil i en email sendt til alle medarbejdere.
HVORFOR F…… er nyhedsbrevet ikke på nettet??!
Konsekvenserne er uoverskuelige. Hør her:
Som det er nu er blokken ikke særlig brugervenlig og lever ikke op til de forventninger man som moderne web-2.0-netbruger har til et digitalt kommunikationsredskab.
Så derfor, kære blokken-redaktion: Skynd jer at få lavet en en online-udgave af blokken – enten i form af en blog eller en Plone-side.
Og hvis I tøver, så tænk på at I har hundredvis af internet-enablede 7trin-deltagere siddende parat til at hjælpe jer med at gøre online-udgaven af blokken til en succes.
Tag ikke fejl. Jeg er ikke bare et brokhoved, der er sur over at jeg får for meget e-mail. Den interne kommunikation på Statsbiblioteket har længe haft det svært. Derfor er det vigtigste for mig, at der kommer til at opstå liv omkring og interesse for blokken – og at den ikke ender med bare at blive endnu en ulæst e-mail.
Michael, web-gruppen
mn@statsbiblioteket.dk
Tuesday we celebrated the open source release of Summa here at the office. Hans had made marzipan ring cakes (kransekage) and brought real Champagne (yes from the Champagne district in la France).
It was all real nice with speeches from the director and all the head honchos.
However, the real clue of the event was the Summa bomb.
Jens, who used to work on the team, but left for a job that paid better, gave us a small suitcase containing a bomb. The intended use was a bit unclear, but nonetheless Birte (boss leaving for a job with our sworn enemy in Copenhagen) took it with her.
A few hours later Aarhus Railway Station was closed due to a bomb threat. We have since learned that there was no connection between the two incidents, but the bomb is still nowhere to be found…
We are running an educational programme called 7 Trin at the library and I figured it would be fun to aggregate all the resulting employer blogs in a central place. As I am not really keen on setting up a dedicated server for this I figured it would be very web-2.0-ish to use Yahoo Pipes for this.
Its quite fun to work with Pipes acutally, but I think there is some caching problems with their RSS exports. Or maybe I’m just doing it wrong 
Excited? Then go to Planet SB : pipes.yahoo.com/kamstrup/planetsb
You can also grab an RSS feed from there.
UPDATE:
By the way – the room was packed when the 7 Trin introduction talk was held today so what does a geek do? Easy – watch the live webcast streamed on three different devices:
Especially note the cool Nokia N810 internet tablet that Nokia was so kind to donate to me when I was in Berlin this weekend
Gave a small talk today about the future of the OPAC at Gentofte Bibliotekerne. The talk was mainly about my ideas for future library services.
Primo, Arena and EasyOPAC all did presentations of their products too. However, they really didn’t provide any perspectives on the future of the OPAC, but rather tried to pitch their existing products the best they could – as such, they all gave presentations of their upcoming search engines (ARENA in offline slide mode).
Overall, it seemed that the audience was quite confused about what the differences between products were and especially how to choose between them. Also, the open source concept was a bit vague – especially when it came to the question about what you get with Summa and how much you have to do yourself to get up and running.
In addition, it was really striking to see how alike all the presented search engines were both in terms of page structure and layout, and in terms of content and addons. Clearly, people really have been stealing from each other along the way – mostly from Summa, of course – but I was still amazed to see how little difference there actually were between products.
On the positive side, though, I interpret this as a big pat on the shoulder to Summa: it shows that we have been making the right interface decisions.
Afterwards, I was told that the audience they had enjoyed my little talk and that it had been uplifting to hear things from a different perspective – a helicopter perspective, as one person labelled it.
I had also brought our Summa sweets along. Unfortunately, they had all melted on the train and were inseparable from the napkins in which they were wrapped. (Note to self: do not wrap Summa sweets in napkins). Luckily I could show them the sweets photo Jens took yesterday.
Download my presentation. (5 MB pdf). Its also over at SlideShare.
We now have a new logo for Summa. You can grab it in vector and bitmap formats over at wiki.statsbiblioteket.dk/summa/Press
We’re also in the process of producing t-shirts, flyers, mugs and all the merchandise that a proper open source project needs.
Here’s a Summa style mug:
Orange (#FF9933) and red (#FF0000) are the main Summa colors. Orange has for quite a while been the reoccurring colour in Statsbiblioteket’s websites. In Summa we decided to add red. Blod, passion, power…yeah.
