It's true, sometimes there's a reason for what seems weird that you
don't know unless you ask. Other times, there's no good reason for it
anymore, but nobody noticed because nobody asked.
But I'm actually suggesting something else too.
For instance, just for one example, one of your examples: "Did a
previous librarian have some regularly scheduled thing every Tuesday
afternoon, and that's why one section closes down early on Tuesdays?"
What I am suggesting is that, even if that librarian isn't "previous"
and the reason is still active -- there is a real cost to your users of
having confusing hours.
And it's additive, at first it seems "oh, we'll close half an hour early
Tuesday, what's the big deal." Then you add in "and open an hour early
on Wednesday for some other reason, except during January" etc. etc.
I am suggesting that The Library (whoever makes decisions) should think
carefully about whether idiosyncratic hours are really neccesary, or if
there's a way to avoid it.
Maybe that librarian's regularly scheduled thing could have it's
schedule changed, or maybe a sub could be found. Making these changes to
try and avoid idiosyncratic hours are going to be inconvenient and may
have a resource cost. Whether they are looked into or done, depends on
how much of a 'cost' decision-makers think there is to having
idiosyncratic hours -- is it worth it to change that regularly scheduled
thing to avoid idiosyncratic hours? It depends on how bad it is to have
idiosyncratic hours.
I am suggesting that many decision makers may be severely
under-estimating the 'cost' to our effectiveness of having idiosyncratic
hours.
Jonathan
On 11/27/13 1:36 PM, Joe Hourcle wrote:
On Nov 27, 2013, at 11:01 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
Many of our academic libraries have very byzantine 'hours' policies.
Developing UI that can express these sensibly is time-consuming and difficult;
by doing a great job at it (like Sean has), you can make the byzantine hours
logic a lot easier for users to understand... but you can still only do so much
to make convoluted complicated library hours easy to deal with and understand
for users.
If libraries can instead simplify their hours, it would make things a heck of a
lot easier on our users. Synchronize the hours of the different parts of the
library as much as possible. If some service points aren't open the full hours
of the library, if you can make all those service points open the _same_
reduced hours, not each be different. Etc.
To some extent, working on hours displays to convey byzantine hours structures
can turn into the familiar case of people looking for technological magic
bullet solutions to what are in fact business and social problems.
I agree up to a point.
When I was at GWU, we were running what was the most customized
version of Banner (a software system for class registration, HR,
etc.) Some of the changes were to deal with rules that no one
could come up with a good reason for, and they should have been
simplified. Other ones were there for a legitimate reason.*
You should take these sorts of opportunities to ask *why* the
hours are so complicated, and either document the reason for it,
or look to simplify it.
Did a previous librarian have some regularly scheduled thing
every Tuesday afternoon, and that's why one section closes
down early on Tuesdays? If they're not there anymore, you can
change that.
Does one station requiring some sort of a shutdown / closing
procedure that takes a significant amount of time, and they
close early so they're done by closing time? Or do they open
late because they have similar issue setting up in the morning,
and it's unrealistic to have them come in earlier than everyone
else? Maybe there's something else that could be done to
improve and/or speed up the procedures.**
Has there been historically less demand for certain types of
books at different times of the day? Well, that's going to be
hard to verify, as people have now adjusted to the library's
hours, rather than visa-versa ... but it's a legitimate reason
to not keep service points open if no one's using them.
... but I would suggest that you don't use criteria like the
US Postal Service's recommendation to remove postboxes -- they
based it on number of pieces of mail, and ended up removing
them all in some areas.
...
Anyway, the point I'm making -- libraries are about service.
Simplification might make it easier to keep track of things,
but it doesn't necessarily make for better service.
-Joe
* Well, legitimate to someone, at least. For instance, the
development office had a definition of "alumni" that included
donors who might not've actually attended the university.
** When I worked for the group that ran GW's computer labs,
some days I staffed a desk that we had over in the library ...
but I had to clock in at the main office, then walk over to
other building, and once the shift was over, walk back to the
main office to clock out. I got them to designate one of the
phones in the library computer lab as being allowed to call
into the time clock system, so I could stop wasting so much
time ... then they decided to just stop having staff over
there.
On 11/27/13 9:25 AM, Sean Hannan wrote:
I¹d argue that library hours are nothing but edge cases.
Staying open past midnight is actually a common one. But how do you deal
with multiple library locations? Multiple service points at multiple
library locations? Service points that are Œby appointment only¹ during
certain days/weeks/months of the year? Physical service points that are
under renovation (and therefore closed) but their service is being carried
out from another location?
When you have these edge cases sorted out, how do you display it to users
in a way that makes any kind of sense? How do you get beyond shoehorning
this massive amount of data into outmoded visual paradigms into something
that is easily scanned and processed by users? How do you make this data
visualization work on tablets and phones?
The data side of calendaring is one thing (and for as standard and
developed as the are, iCal and Google Calendar¹s data formats don¹t get it
100% correct as far as I¹m concerned). Designing the interaction is wholly
another.
It took me a good two or three weeks to design the interaction for our new
hours page (http://www.library.jhu.edu/hours.html) over the summer. There
were lots of iterations, lots of feedback, lots of user testing. ³User
testing? Just for an hours page?² Yes. It¹s one of our most highly sought
pieces of information on our website (and yours too, probably). Getting it
right pays off dividends.
I don¹t know if you¹d find it useful (our use cases are not necessarily
your use cases), but I ended up writing up the whole process as a blog
post
(http://blogs.library.jhu.edu/wordpress/2013/07/anatomy-of-an-hours-page/).
-Sean
‹
Sean Hannan
Senior Web Developer
Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
On 11/26/13, 6:41 PM, "Barnes, Hugh" <[email protected]> wrote:
Great edge case, thanks for sharing that one!
I think currently that could only be _encoded_ as a separate opening in
the CSV file for loading into the database, which won't work because of
my assumption. There simply isn't a way to express it. The relevant
fields for the load file are startdate, enddate, opentime, and closetime,
the last two being formatted as only "hh:mm", so it's assumed they relate
to each single day in the range.
However, I edited a "closes" field value directly in the test database,
and to my surprise it rendered sensibly. I would have thought it would be
rejected by a validity test I have which checks that the day portion of
the start and closing datestamps are the same [1].
I can't justify spending time on this in the near future, since it's a
use case we are unlikely to need here. However, I'll log an issue, or you
may. Thanks again.
Cheers
Hugh
[1] https://github.com/LincolnUniLTL/calibr/blob/master/lib/app.php#L113
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Bohyun Kim
Sent: Wednesday, 27 November 2013 11:28 a.m.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
Hugh,
Thanks for sharing. A quick question. If a library opens past midnight,
does that count more than one opening a day or no?
~Bohyun
On Nov 26, 2013, at 5:04 PM, "Barnes, Hugh" <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi folks
I took a calendar script posted to this list by Andrew Darby some time
ago and made some changes. I don't think there is any of Andrew's code
left, so I've rebranded it with an acknowledgement. (If I had my time
again, I might have coded it from scratch rather than built it over
Andrew's script, but that's somewhat academic.)
The whole scoop is in the readme on Github:
http://github.com/LincolnUniLTL/calibr
TLDR: With PHP, MySQL, some fiddling and data entry, you can publish a
library opening hours calendar on your website in more than one language
if you wish. It's a little quicker to enter common period patterns than
it used to be in Google Calendar. The output is more accessible,
customisable, multilingual, semantic, and hopefully more extensible
(iCal etc) than previously.
Here's a branded reference implementation:
http://library2.lincoln.ac.nz/hours - it won't necessarily reflect the
latest version.
Use it, improve it, feed back, or log issues right there on Github if
that works for you.
Many thanks to Andrew for providing the foundation!
Cheers
Hugh Barnes
Digital Access Coordinator
Library, Teaching and Learning
Lincoln University
Christchurch
New Zealand
p +64 3 423 0357
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