LibraryTechtonics

Thanks a whole lot, Mayor Menino

When the trustees of the Boston Public Library meet next week, they will decline to renew the contract of BPL president Bernie Margolis, in effect firing the man who has preserved and expanded the strengths of the nation’s oldest public library in the face of strained and diminishing financial resources.

Wow, I thought Mayor Giuliani was off his rocker for making ferrets illegal in NYC based on bad information, but this is just about on par on my Man Gone Wild scale. I can totally feel the love for libraries off this guy. >:(

But I thought *I* was your research bitch?!

The company bills itself as a “revolutionary search engine that does your research for you.” A student can ostensibly provide the site with at least 100 words from an outline, class notes, an assignment or just random thoughts. Ten to 30 minutes later you are supposed to get an e-mail notification that directs you to a custom Web page with the results.

“Researchbitch.com will do the research for you, but it will not write the paper,” the company cautions.

OK, OK, Researchbitch.com isn’t all that new (it’s so cute that the URL actually redirects to myresearchbot.com), and it’s not all that serious, especially given the user experience reported by the good folks over at Webware. Seriously, when will kids ever learn that all they need to do is call, email, or stop by the library (or have their parents do it, which I’ve seen too many times to count) and just give a librarian a few keywords to get us started?

I received an email today from Stephanie Gerding announcing that her book The Accidental Technology Trainer is now available for purchase.  I wrote some snippets for her a while back about the Geek Out, Don’t Freak Out classes and the Netguides program, and I can see from the table of contents that the Netguides program definitely made it in as a whole sidebar (w00t!).  I won’t know about the rest of the content until I get my hands on a copy.   Congratulations, Stephanie!

I like writing snippets for books, because I can help the author and contribute to the content of the work, without having to write an entire book.  While I always enjoy a good challenge, finding myself in the middle of NaNoWriMo and sinfully behind in my word count is a sobering reminder of why writing a whole book (on my own, anyway) just isn’t on my list, and puts me in awe of those who can actually do it successfully.

Today was quite the intellectual roller coaster ride, filled with moments of extreme brilliance and achievement, countered by moments of nose-down thinking, researching, problem solving, and bug fixing.

My mission: to rid our library of Public Web Browser, and replace it with a Firefox install that does exactly what I want it to. The ride actually started last Thursday morning; my library is open on Thursdays from 1-9p, but I’m there in the morning, which makes for excellent Do Stuff With Computers time.

Last week, I did some poking around, forming a plan. We have a few different flavors of computer configurations (all running Windows XP Professional SP2), but the general gist is that we have 4 “kiosk” machines, designed for web browsing with readers for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Acrobat Reader to aid in opening and printing attachments. Then we have the more full-scale workstations including Office 2003 Professional, web page and FTP software, various IM clients, Picasa, and a few other bits of software.

My priority with the computer configurations to create as normal a computing environment as possible, so that there is no “library way” versus “home way” or “office way” to do things. Locking too many things down, or creating too many dummy button systems for access really just confuses people, and makes teaching people how to use the technology ineffective.

That said, my dream install of Firefox would:

• Remove the full Bookmarks menu, as well as any menu items that referred to bookmarking, sending links via email, add-on and options management.
• Automatically refresh the browser every 10 minutes to bring it back to the library home page.
• Not allow users to install plug-ins.
• Show the user that, yes, your private information is being deleted, for serious.
• Anything that might make the user interface easier to work with.

Not a huge shopping list. I figured I could a good amount of the work with plug-ins, and I knew a Firefox plug-in for kiosk mode did exist. But in evaluating the R-kiosk extension as a solution, I found it entirely too limiting in its default setting, and not flexible enough in the alterable settings for what I wanted. After poking around a bit more, it looked like the solution was to use a combination of plug-ins and straight-out hacks.

I settled on the following plug-ins:

• Cutemenus2: Adds sassy little icons to the standard and context menus in Firefox, to give visual cues on what each command stands for. It’s a great help for inexperienced users, and it’s quick visual reference for get-in/get-out patrons.
• Auto Reset Browser: Refreshes the browser after a period of inactivity. I configure it to refresh after 600 seconds (10 minutes).

Then there was the issue of menu customizing. At first, I thought I’d go with the Menu Editor extension, which is really easy to use. However, if I wanted to hide the ability to access the Add-Ons management utility from regular users, and I hid it using the extension, then I wouldn’t be able to get back to it, ever (funny thing, after talking it through to myself out loud, I had to try it to see if I was right, and I was, resulting in uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox to fix it).

My solution: userChrome.css. Believe it or not, much of the menu rendering and other features in Firefox are controlled by a style sheet. I used the elements & IDs page in the MozillaZine wiki and these instructions to help me figure out the best way to format and customize my Firefox style sheet, and it worked like a dream. This way, reactivating a menu that has been hidden is as easy as commenting out the “don’t show me” command in the style sheet and restarting the browser.

The tough bit was locking everything down so it couldn’t be changed browser-side. We have Deep Freeze Enterprise installed on all of the computers, so worst case we can just restart the machine to take it back to it’s original configuration. However, my greater concern is the consistency of the user experience: what if someone installs a plug-in or extension that confuses the patron using the machine after them? What if it creates a user expectation of a behavior at another machine?

Now, I could use about:config, which allows you to edit all sorts of features in Firefox (type about:config, just like that, into the address bar in Firefox, and you’ll see what I mean), but disabling something in the about:config doesn’t lock it down. For instance, I set extension installs to “disabled,” and instead of a blocking message when I tried to install a plug-in, I got a friendly, helpful message telling me that I needed to enable the feature, as well as a handy enable button.

Not what I was looking for. I needed something stricter, firmer, with a clear neon NO! on it, but, you know, polite and diplomatic.

More nose to the grindstone research later, I came up with a series of handy posts from a fellow in the UK who was locking down Firefox for schools. It’s kinda geeky, and requires playing with code, but the instructions he followed are fairly easy to understand (especially if you read them carefully, out loud if you need to), and the stuff he did with it also makes sense for what most libraries would want to do. The lockPref("xpinstall.enabled", false); bit was the pay dirt of this exercise, but I was able to lock down a bunch of other stuff so that, just in case someone actually accessed the Options box, they wouldn’t be able to edit it.

By the end of the day, I had the 4 kiosk machines working almost like I wanted them to. I’m still researching a way to have the Firefox window pop back open as a fresh browser just on those kiosk machines; tomorrow is another day ;).  I’ll get to all the other machines in the library over the course of the next week, now that I have the process down to 2 plug-in installs, 2 file copy/pastes, and a small text change in another file, totally perhaps 5 minutes per machine.

Shiny!

So what took all day? I didn’t check email all day, and I really didn’t even touch my desk, so where did all the time go? Well, there was updating the Firefox install on the machines, removing the dreaded Public Web Browser (explaining that is a whole other post entirely), letting people play with it, tweaking it, and just a whole lot of trial and error. And, say, breaks for lunch and snacks, and other work conversations and sundries.

I’ll post some screen shots tomorrow, but in the meantime, questions/comments are welcome!

Yes, I missed a post yesterday. So much for lucky #7. But that’s OK, #8 will totally make up for it.

For serious.  I made a wicked mad dash this morning to remedy the fact that I am sorely behind in my NaNoWriMo word count, and while I didn’t catch up with my daily backlog, I did break 5,000, so I feel like my novel still has meaning.  I now have that Jamaican bobsled team push I need to overcome what I feel is impossible.  I mean, who really needs snow to learn how to bobsled, right?  I can button-mash a novel in 30 days, even if it kills a few brain cells.

However, the day has taken it’s toll, so I’m going to bed in lieu of a “more real” post.  Besides, with my daily output, I’m sure you’re all two steps from an unsubscription, so consider this a skimmer.

I think the moral of the story is a work-life balance makeover I’ve been working on lately.  To that effect, I am keeping up with my NaBloPoMo commitment, it’s just not as fancy today.  Consider it beta, with improvements to follow.

P.S. Bonus points to anyone who gets the subject joke.