If you visit the National Library’s homepage you can see the several lines devoted to the digitised Singapore collection which are available online. The only problem is they all open in hideous popups for which you need to be an acrobat so that you right click at the right time on IE before IE popup blocker deletes the popup. This has, no doubt, added more to the flexibility of my fingers ( mebbe I can now do a 360 degree rotation of my fingers now), but I do fear many others will not have such remarkable positive thoughts of such implementation.

I do know that NLB hires usability specialists to give recommendations. I guess there is many a slip between the cup and the lip and what gets churned out in the end are just trimphant opinions of a majority in the development team while the usability factors get erased.

I just called up the NLB and found out that I need to disable popup blocker in IE everytime I need to access the digitised content (no, they do not support Firefox access and they will feedback my request to put that on their website to the technical team). And forget about using firefox. I wonder what mac users will have to do. And the answer I get from them is that “it is designed in that way (to use popups) because we use PDFs and that is the only way”. And refresh the page every few minutes for the links to remain active. The ideas are so absurd that I was absolutely stunned to silence.

I cant tell you the anguish in my heart. A whole technical team designs the software and implements it without batting an eyelid for usability. This is precisely why e-governance will not work in singapore. You cant expect thousands of people to change their internet options and remove popup blocker. I cant emphasise more on how good the popup blocker is and how much it stops unsuspecting people from clicking and downloading some worms and virus.

I just hope RamblingLibrarian can do something about it and make the singaporean digital library a saner place.