In mid-April, Amazon EC2 services had a small problem. Apparently, a large swath of its cloud computing environment had such substantial trouble that a number of customers had server issues. A number of high-profile sites, including Reddit, Evite, and Foursquare, went down when Amazon experienced issues in their US East 1a region (Justinb 2011).…

The author recently created a presentation using HTML5 based on a tutorial put together by Marcin Wichary. The example presentation is part proof-of-concept, part instructional piece, and it is part of a larger site on HTML5 and how one can use it to create rich Web-based applications. The more he delved into HTML5, the more he found that it was…

Intranets should provide quick and easy access to organizational information. The University of Alabama Libraries' intranet was only partially satisfying this basic expectation. Librarians could use it to find forms, policies, committee assignments, and meeting minutes, but navigating the libraries' intranet was neither quick nor easy, and it was…

Libraries today face an increasing challenge: to provide relevant information to diverse populations with differing needs while competing with Web search engines like Google. In 2009, a large group of libraries, including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, joined with Innovative Interfaces as development partners to design a new type of…

Discovery tools are the next phase of library search systems. Illinois State University's Milner Library implemented EBSCO Discovery Service in August 2010. The authors conducted usability studies on the system in the fall of 2010. The aims of the study were twofold: first, to determine how Milner users set about using the system in order to…

Library intranets require flexibility and efficiency and enhance the internal communication and collaborative nature of creating and organizing the institution's information. At the University of Houston Libraries, the focus was on public services, so little attention was given to the intranet--the tool every department relied on for quick access…

The days of top-down communication and controlled internal messages at a library organization are--or should be--behind us. Modern libraries must be fluid and flexible organizations with equally nimble internal communication infrastructures in place to keep up with the fast-paced environments that have been created in these organizations. As is…