Business studies have shown that you lose about 50% of your potential
audience after 20 seconds' wait for a page to load and 90% after a minute.
In order to keep hold of your potential customers it's probably good policy
to "keep it small and keep it quick" and if they do have to wait for part of
the page to load it's probably an idea to make sure there's something else
there to keep them occupied, like some useful text, in the mean time.

We can't assume that everyone's going to have big, posh machines and nice,
fast lines. Why limit our customer base unnecessarily?

Steven

Steven Heywood
Systems Manager
Rochdale Library Service
Wheatsheaf Library
Baillie Street
Rochdale, England OL16 1JZ
Tel: 01706 864967
Fax: 01706 864992

World Book Day
http://www.rochdale.gov.uk/living/libraries.asp?url=worldbookday




> ----------
> From:         Chris May[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Reply To:     Chris May
> Sent:         14 March 2002 12:34
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: Demo geographical front-end to cultural collections
>
> Dear All
>
> It would be really nice to have a debate about the issues Humphrey
> Southall
> would like to raise here, but unfortunately like Trevor Lockwood who also
> wrote, I had difficulty in accessing the BL demo.
>
> As webmaster of a site which is trying to get people to come to our small
> not-yet-registered aviation museum (with its strong feeling for place, I
> may
> add) and pay at the door, I am constantly reminded by colleagues on our
> charitable trust Board that the front page must appear quickly, and give
> basic information. The visitor can look further at the "wealth of detail"
> within if so desired.
> .
> As an aside on what we mean by "quickly"  I was told by professional party
> political workers that the life of a leaflet thrust through a door
> averages
> 5 seconds from pick-up to bin. And that's something you can read!
>
> You may object that seekers after truth will be prepared to wait longer,
> especiallyas they have some idea of what they are waiting for.  I wonder.
> All too often site addresses change, and a pause is the only indication
> that
> the house is empty.
>
> It would be so simple to have a front page with no Java and no
> photographs,
> whichwould load in seconds even on a 286, list the contents and advise on
> the file sizes. One is quite used to seeing sites which give options of
> "text-only" "no-frames" etc.Therein lies your competition.
>
> Going back to the BL demo, I gave up after 10 minutes when my win386.swp
> file had grown to about 30mB and my resource meter was behaving oddly,
> but then I don't have an ISDN line, just an antique 56k modem on ordinary
> old BT.
>
> Chris May, Bristol Aero Collection
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Humphrey Southall <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 9:40 PM
> Subject: Demo geographical front-end to cultural collections
>
>
> > Dear All,
> >
> > Many projects within nof-digitise are creating place-specific content,
> but
> > how do we create a SENSE of place?  Obviously, if a collection comes
> > entirely from a single small area, some kind of sense of place may be
> > created simply by looking at it.  However, most projects cover areas
> larger
> > than most people's notion of a place -- a neighbourhood or locality, but
> > certainly not a whole county let alone a whole region.  Sense of place
> must
> > therefore be partly about selection within a collection.
> >
> > However, it is less than obvious that simply providing some kind of
> > geographical search engine, within a single site or via some kind of
> > programme-wide portal, is all we need.  Some very old ideas from
> geography
> > say that places are defined by site and situation;  by the land they sit
> > on, and the other places that surround them.  In this sense, place is
> about
> > context as much as content, and we need to PRESENT our content
> > geographically, not just provide a spatial search engine.
> >
> > ... all of which leads into some work the Great Britain Historical GIS
> > project has been contributing to.  James Macgill of GBHGIS and Colin
> > Chinnery of the British Library's International Dunhuang project have
> > created a demonstration system that presents one vision of how a
> > geographical front end to the BL's content might look.  A version of
> this
> > demonstration is now on-line at:
> >
> >
> http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/geotools/blpilot/MapKiosk.html
> >
> > Please note that address;  although it may look like part of the BL
> site,
> > it is hosted at Leeds University and nobody is saying the BL will
> > necessarily create such a system for itself, as part of its work for
> > NOF-Digitise or otherwise (so please do not circulate this address
> widely,
> > or link to it).  However, a presentation of the demonstration system to
> BL
> > staff a few weeks ago seems to have created considerable interest.  NB
> the
> > system now on-line is slightly cut down from the system shown
> > internally:  a base map showing relief features ran off an overseas site
> > and had to be removed for performance reasons, and some excerpts from
> the
> > National Sound Archive raised IPR issues.  This means you can no longer
> use
> > the system to locate recordings of wrens singing, and then compare the
> > songs of English, Greek and Taiwanese wrens.
> >
> > The demonstration system is hopefully fairly self-explanatory, but it
> was
> > constructed using GeoTools, an open source toolkit for geographical
> > visualisation of which James Macgill is the principal developer (see
> > www.geotools.org).  Geotools is written in Java, so there are some
> > restrictions on what browsers it will run within.  However, it has been
> > written very carefully to use a limited "lowest common denominator"
> subset
> > of Java, and we would claim it should run on just about any desktop PC
> > unless you have tried really hard to find a SERIOUSLY obsolete
> > browser.  The GBHGIS site itself is being designed so that reference
> > enquiries will not depend on the use of GeoTools, and it is hard to
> imagine
> > anyone wanting to do interactive graphic visualisation on a mobile
> > phone.  It would be useful to have some feedback on compatibility;  did
> it
> > just run?
> >
> > The "BL" demo system enables users to select material by location and
> time
> > period as well as type -- you can zoom in on particular areas, and
> narrow
> > the time period via a "timeline" bar.  This obviously depends on
> including
> > metadata over and above Dublin Core.  This is an area where there is a
> good
> > deal of development work currently going on.  Programme participants may
> be
> > interested in a meeting I am organising within the Social Science
> History
> > Association meeting this October, on "Metadata for Time and Space".  So
> > long as no-one drops out, this will include presentations on the
> Alexandria
> > Digital Library's Gazetteer Content Standard, the Electronic Cultural
> Atlas
> > Initiative's Timemap extensions to Dublin Core, English Heritage's
> > Timelines time period thesaurus, the Federal Geographic Data Committee's
> > standards, and a round table covering work in progress to add geography
> to
> > the Data Documentation Initiative's standard.  At this point I have to
> add
> > that the meeting is in St. Louis, Missouri -- but the real focus of most
> > standard setting work is the US, and unless we interact with US projects
> we
> > cannot expect to have much impact on these processes.  I find it
> irritating
> > that we have been specifically forbidden to use NOF funds to attend such
> > meetings, and a bit humiliating that I have only been able to get so
> > involved through US bodies funding my travel.
> >
> > Geotools, incidentally, is ahead of any similar open source project
> > elsewhere in the world, compares well with commercial alternatives which
> > generally involve Windows-only plug-ins or ActiveX components, and
> provides
> > a significant part of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative's
> technical
> > infrastructure.  Being open source, anyone can use it free of charge,
> but
> > it is a toolkit so you will need someone to bolt different tools
> together
> > into an applet.  ECAI's Timemap Viewer (see
> > http://www.archaeology.usyd.edu.au/timemap) is a general purpose and
> > ready-assembled applet built from GeoTools.
> >
> > Best wishes,
> >
> > Humphrey Southall
> >
> >
> >
> ======================================================
> > Humphrey Southall
> > Reader in Geography/Director, Great Britain Historical GIS Project
> > Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
> >
> > Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
> >
> > GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
> > Home office:  (020) 8853 0396
> > Mobile:  (07736) 727928
> >
> > Web site:  http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/gbhgis
> >
>