Monday 12 June 2017

The user experience of online research in public libraries ...

The Madeleine Smith case has got under my skin, not so much as a 'did she do it?' type of event but as a vehicle for investigating how some things happened, such as how the news travelled around the world/

Currently I'm using the digitised news reports in Trove and PapersPastNZ to look at how the news of the case got from Britain to Australia (interestingly it seems also to have been big news in America, and that's something else I need to follow up on).

There's also the interesting question as to whether Wilkie Collins, the well known nineteenth century author of detective stories ever met Madeleine Smith.

It's not completely improbable - after acquittal Madeleine Smith move to London and later met and married George Wardle, who was William Morris's business manager, and given the literary and artistic circles both moved in it's possible, but it's equally possible that if they did meet, Wilkie Collins did not realise that Madeleine Wardle was the one and only Madeleine Hamilton Smith, though as a lawyer he was well aware of the case, with echoes being found in Lydia Gwilt's account of the poisoning of her husband in 'Armadale' and also in 'The Law and the Lady'.

However, this is not really what this blog post is about. It's about working in public libraries.

Most, but not all of my background work has been carried out in Albury public library - J goes to a life drawing workshop at Albury art gallery on a Sunday afternoon, and because she takes portfolios, paper and other drawing materials with her, all of which are fairly bulky, I usually drive her and drop her off outside the gallery and then go park the car.

Now Albury, while a fine town, is not the most scintillating place on a Sunday afternoon, so I've taken to taking copies of the digitised newspaper articles and my notes to Albury Library and working on them there for a couple of hours.

I usually take a computing device of some kind as well as good old pen and paper - I keep my notes in Evernote as well as copies of the digitised articles, and of course having a browser means being able to check things. Albury library provides free wi-fi that's reasonably zippy, nice big tables to work on and spread out, so it's a nice sunny place to work - the only downside is that they don't provide power sockets.

So, for the first few weeks I took the Alcatel Pixi tablet and keyboard combo that I used to use for work, that had more than adequate battery life, and that was pretty good - evernote client, firefox as a browser, the wikipedia app on the desktop and Markdrop to write notes and same them to Dropbox.

All good, and perfectly usable.

But yesterday I took my old macbook air with me. It's six years old, and apart from a single stuck pixel on the screen, works fine. Battery life is not its strong point - it never was, but I reckoned that fully charged I could get a couple of hours out of it.

On this occasion I took it because I wanted to write up a lot of my scribbled notes and annotations and the keyboard is simply a lot nicer to type on than the Pixi's bluetooth add on - I was using TextWrangler to write up my notes in Markdown, so nothing exotic - just straight forward characters and markup.

And the experience was a revelation - not because of the keyboard but because how well the Apple environment coped with the library's wifi hotspot and managed the sign in process - recognising it as a hot spot, opening a nice sign in window in reponse - simple and seamless, unlike android's sometimes painful sign in via browser - let's guess which tab to use.

Otherwise the experience was fine, but it was the apple slickness that made it a seemingly simple operation.

Now probably next time I go I should take a different machine, the obvious one being my Xubuntu netbook which also has a nice editor (or being linux, several nice editors, but these days I prefer gedit to kate). After all everything I'm doing simply involves an editor and a browser (and admittedly google print on one occasion), but it would be interesting to try and compare the user experience.

And it's the user experience that's key here, not that you can't do the same thing on a different platform, but just how pleasurable the experience is and how high a bar it is to getting work done

In the ideal world, I ought to compare a windows machine as well as just linux, which is kind of a minority sport.

However, while I've been thinking of getting myself a small Lenovo Yoga (or its Dell equivalent) to sort of replace the Air and its poor battery life, the tax refund fairy hasn't come calling yet, and I don't have highly portable small format machine to compare.

J's HP laptop might be a possibility, but it's a bit of clunker to carry round and it's currently stuck on Windows 7, so I'm afraid that the only comparison at the moment will be with linux...

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