The entire staff of ShipIndex.org, plus support staff (ie, a spouse), will be headed to Boston in mid-January, for the American Library Association Midwinter conference. We’re going to be meeting with librarians, site users, content providers, and others, to talk about what works and what doesn’t work on the current site, and how to improve it. We know our users have great ideas about what else we could do; we want to collect and record as much of that as we can. We’ve done only a little bit of this in the past, and it has paid back big dividends, so we expect that with up to 20 separate interviews, we’re going to get a lot out of the experience.

If you’d be interested in joining us, please send me a note and we’ll set up a time. It’ll take under an hour of your time – we’ll meet at a wifi-enabled coffee shop near the Boston Convention Center (note: not the Hynes Convention Center – and location suggestions are greatly welcomed), and ply you with coffee, pastries, and our undying gratitude. We’ll spend a few minutes showing you the site, then ask you to use it yourself, and give us your feedback. We’ll discuss your thoughts and ideas, which I think will be the best part. It’ll take about 45 minutes, total.

We’ll be doing these every hour, on the hour, Friday through Sunday (the 15th, 16th, and 17th), from 9 through 5, with a break for lunch. If you’d be interested in participating, please drop me a line at peter at shipindex dot org and we’ll see if we can make it work.

Peter