University libraries nationwide are attempting to make scholarly research easier, whether with browser extensions or iPad applications. For technologies in the testing stages, though, low usage or lack of support can lead to an early demise.
MIT Libraries has created a place to for these tools after they’ve come face to face with the grim reaper—its Beta Graveyard.
Remlee Green, user-experience librarian at MIT, developed the site to remember search tools that have been discontinued.
“The spirit of experimentation is in trying new things,” Green said. “Even if it wasn’t perfect for us, there are some positives in those tools. We try to find out what works in something that’s broken.”
A headstone-esque screenshot on the site is accompanied by an epitaph commemorating the life of the particular beta.
The resting place is occupied so far by two applications: iGoogle and Facebook tools for searching the libraries’ Web catalog and collection of online journals and databases.
The plan is to annually add betas to the graveyard that either fail or have been surpassed by another superior technology.
Ken Varnum, Web-systems manager at the University of Michigan Libraries, said his institution’s practice is making unsuccessful betas harder to find on its Web site. MLibrary Labs, its testing affiliate, has experimented with betas for a little more than two years.
“We’re not as active developers as MIT, but it’s an example we might want to emulate,” Varnum said. “It’s brave they don’t hide their failures, and leave it so others can build on it.”
2 Responses to MIT Libraries Creates Final Resting Place for Failed Apps
nowviskie - August 31, 2010 at 3:32 pm
“The importance of failure” has been a watchword in the digital humanities community for many years, since John Unsworth (then director of UVa’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) published an important essay under that title, asserting that a digital project that “can’t fail and doesn’t produce new ignorance… isn’t worth a damn.” (Digital humanities is the community of practice in which the University of Virginia Library’s “Scholars’ Lab” — my department, which functions as a digital center and R&D unit embedded in a research library — participates.) Libraries are the laboratories of humanities scholarship — and therefore should be fostering a culture of experimentation and not only exposure of risk-taking and failure but careful analysis of the results of that activity. With my colleague Dot Porter, I’ve recently conducted a broad survey of over 100 digital humanities projects — many of them based in research libraries — that experienced periods of difficult transition or suffered serious decline. Our project is called “Graceful Degradation” and we reported preliminary results at Digital Humanities 2010 in London this summer: http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-722.html One aim of our study is to help project leaders and institutions get past the impulse to put a good face, for promotional reasons, on failed experiments. You don’t advance knowledge by sweeping your missteps under the rug. So I applaud the MIT Libraries’ foregrounding of failed or retired experiments! More digital humanities centers and digital library labs should follow suit.
remlee - August 31, 2010 at 4:40 pm
In case anyone’s interested, the MIT Libraries have a criteria for moving things in and out of beta: http://libstaff.mit.edu/uig/betas.htmlAnd we’re working on revamping the betas page to include other web widgets, as well as betas in the physical realm. So stay tuned…