Web Magazine for Information Professionals

Welcome to Ariadne, Web Magazine for Information Professionals

Feature articles from the most recent issue

Ariadne is being retired

We have had a steadily reducing number of relevant submissions to Ariadne over the last few years, and have made the decision to close the journal. No new submissions will now be accepted, and issue 78 will be the last issue we put out. Thank you to all our contributors and supporters over the years.

In issue 78 of Ariadne, we have articles covering a range of topics:

Jason Cooper has documented the process used to migrate Ariadne’s hosting platform from Drupal to Hugo & git.

Makerspaces are a popular addition to libraries, both academic and public. Heila Pienaar, Isak van der Walt and Sean Kruger describe how the University of Pretoria Library built a Digital Scholarship Centre on the success of the Library’s Makerspace. They show how such a centre can be established, how it can fit with inter-disciplinary work and how Makerspaces and Digital Scholarship Centres overlap.

Helen Singer and Jane Bilson provide an explanation of how the University of Hertfordshire followed ‘Guided Learner Journey’ principles by embedding resources in their VLE. This will be of interest to many academic librarians looking at how library reading lists can be leveraged to make more impact and improve the student experience.

Over in the USA, Kathryn Gucer presents a case study of how Agile methods can improve web site usability testing. This was based on her experiences working with the Animal Welfare Act History Digital Collection at the USDA’s National Agricultural Library. They used a low-cost, in-house Agile approach and she explains how this testing method allowed them to quickly home in, and correct, usability problems and misconceptions in the design of the collection’s new web user interface.

We also have a couple of event reviews to round out this issue: Dan Towns tells us of his experience Figshare Fest 2018 where he joined many Institutional Repository and Research Data Managers. Meanwhile Richard Goodman provides a conference report from Educause 2018, the large educational techology conference held in Denver, Colorado, USA.

Students building a robot in the Makerspace at the University of Pretoria