The Way Back Machine

So how did I spend Veteran's Day? Not terribly productively, I'm afraid. I did think a bit about some of the guys I spent time with in Iraq in 2003 but I didn't dwell on it. Instead, I kind of wasted time. I happened across a website yesterday called Internet Archive and came back today to see what I might find. This site has the potential to suck a lot of time from the aimless web surfer.

According the the website, Internet Archive is "building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public." In short, while the site provides access to a lot of cool stuff, the best part for me is what they call the "Way Back Machine"; it's a search that lets you see archived versions of websites. They claim to have 150 billion pages archived! Awesome.

So, I poked around a little and came up with a few interesting tidbits. Here's Google while they were still in beta on December 12, 1998:









I guess all search engines had to have exclamation points in the nineties. And did you know that the original URL was google.stanford.edu? I guess all the big search engines had to come from Stanford, too. Did you ever bookmark akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo? If so, you might have seen something like this site from October, 1996, two years after the company was founded:



I guess that was pretty high tech 13 years ago but it looks downright amateurish today. Though to be fair, both Google and Yahoo have remained relatively true to their earlier visions. Interesting how they've managed to simply rework something that worked to remain relevant without completely changing.

For a site that has completely retooled itself since the mid-nineties, take a look at this, from December, 1996:



Wow! I guess there really wasn't much focus on web design back then. This makes me marvel, really, at how quickly the field of web design has developed. Another interesting aspect of the archives is looking at how often a site was updated. On the White House site, 2004 had many, many more updates than 2003 or 2005. One might guess that that was a result of the presidential election.

I won't try to make too much sense, though, about how this site might actually have some intellectual value because I'm not a historian in any sense of the word. But it is fun poking around. I took a look at some of the old websites from libraries where I've worked and let me tell you we had some ugly ones!

Cleopatra's Sister

Over the weekend I reminded myself why I think Penelope Lively is the best author of whom many Americans have never heard. As an aside, the link above points toward Lively's Wikipedia entry; you can take a look at her official homepage, too, but she's a vastly better writer than she is at appreciating good web design. So, with apologies to Ms. Lively for that criticism, I just read her 1993 novel Cleopatra's Sister after remembering how much I absolutely loved her 1987 Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger (which I've read twice and listened to once).

Similar to Moon Tiger in that both novels feature very independent, female British journalists who visits north Africa and experience intense and unexpected love affairs, Cleopatra's Sister differs from the earlier novel in every other way. From a structural and narrative standpoint, Moon Tiger is more complex moving forward and back in time over several decades while recounting the protagonists memories from the perspective of several different characters. Cleopatra's Sister is a simple third person narrative describing events over the course of several days as they occur.

Basics aside, Lively demonstrates in Cleopatra's Sister her facility for telling a story both in a manner that reads very quickly while also providing fascinating and believable insights into the characters about whom she writes. Told essentially as two novels in one, the first half of the story represents character development of the two protagonists as revealed through their earlier, failed attempts at meaningful relationships. While the detail is impressive and the opportunity to understand these people, Lucy Faulkner and Howard Beamish, through the intimate details of their lives is engrossing, the first half of the novel does nothing to prepare the reader for the abrupt pace of the story in the second half.

Fundamentally a thriller, the remainder of the novel recounts the treatment of Lucy, Howard, and a plane of travelers as they are taken hostage after an emergency landing in a ficticious African country experiencing severe civil unrest. It is within this context that Lucy and Howard meet and fall in love. And it is within this context that the primary theme of Lively's novel is understood.

Cleopatra's Sister opens with the line: "Howard Beamish became a paleontologist because of a rise in the interest rate when he was six years old". Throughout the novel, the reader experiences the utter randomness of life. Similar to the psychotic Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men as he demands that a store owner "call" his own fate by guessing heads or tails on a flipped coin that has "been traveling twenty-two years to get here", the characters in Cleopatra's Sister experience entire lives that have developed not from careful planning but only due to one chance event after another. Ultimately not as brilliant as Moon Tiger, Cleopatra's Sister is still a wonderful read that would make for a fantastic book club selection, as well.

Under the Dome!

I admit to loving Stephen King. I don't care; I'm not ashamed of my horror-geekiness. And this is too cool:



A movie preview for a book! Under the Dome will be out on November 12th and I'm number two on my library's request list. Book review coming shortly thereafter...

m-libraries @ Internet Librarian 2009

A couple of the workshops I attended today dealt with what has become a very hot topic of late: mobile site design for your library.

Should your library have one? Well, according to one speaker today, mobile devices will be the world's primary method for accessing the Internet in 2020. Unless you really believe that your local community is not going to ride that wave, the answer is yes, your library needs to start thinking about a mobile site. And studies have demonstrated that a successful user experience on your site is positively correlated with having a site that is designed specifically to be accessed on mobile devices. You need one.

What should be on your mobile site? Not everything that exists on your "normal" site. That's the short answer. As explained in one of the sessions, mobile sites shouldn't be designed for browsing; the reality of Internet browsing on mobile devices today doesn't support a lot of browsing. Thinking about your mobile site from a transactional standpoint makes sense. You users will want to find library hours, check their account, search for a book, get directions. Another study cited in one of today's sessions explained that 75% of users are willing to wait no more than 8 seconds for a page to load. 1 in 5 will wait 20 seconds. What does this say about what you have on your mobile site? It says include as few graphics as possible. Do everything you can to speed up the load time. And, for that matter, because the screens are so small, a bunch of text will look very dense; use brief sentences.

How do you design your mobile site? There are so many different platforms from which users are accessing the Internet on mobile devices that it's extremely difficult to design in such a way that your site will render the same on each device. This fact reinforces the need to stick with a simple design; the less complexity, the greater the likelihood of consistent rendering across platforms. But the diversity of platforms in use also suggests that you get feedback from your users when you're planning your design. Find out what they're using so you don't just focus on a design that works great on an iPhone but leaves 95% (or more) of your users dissatisfied with your shiny new mobile site.