July 2nd, 2009 Brian Herzog
Speaking of embedding things into library websites, I wanted to highlight a book due out later this year.
In the interest of full disclosure, I contributed a chapter to this book. I don’t get any kickback from the profits (except for a free copy), but I am really looking forward to it.
Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data is written by librarians for librarians, on how we can expand our websites and web presence to better serve our patrons. Nicole Engard pulled us all together and edited the book.
More information about the book and authors is available at http://mashups.web2learning.net. It’s not due out until September, but just skimming the table of contents makes me pretty sure I’ll learn a lot from the other authors.
Writing my chapter made me feel like I was back in library school working on a paper, but I am glad to have done it. Plus, I’ll soon be able to tell people I’m a “published author.” People ask me why I became a librarian, and my answer is always the same: fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory.
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June 20th, 2009 Brian Herzog
This week’s question itself isn’t very exciting, but it does have two interesting features:
- a useful reference tool
- an example of a patron being absolutely positive about something, and still being wrong
When I got into work one morning, there was a note from the previous night’s staff. It said a patron came in just before closing, and since they didn’t have time to research her question, could I please do it and call the patron.
No problem. The patron had an exact quote (three sentences long!) from an April 2006 issue of USA Today, and wanted to read the entire article. The note also said the patron was absolutely sure the quotation was correct.
We don’t have USA Today in print back to 2006, so we rely on databases for this type of research. And I can never remember which databases index which journals and newspapers, so I reply on the Boston Public Library’s e-Journals By Title search*.
It told me which database(s) had USA Today as full-text for 2006, so I logged into that database through my library’s website (so our stats get credited for the use). In this case, it was Gale’s General Reference Center, and used their advanced search to narrow to the publication and timeframe.
I searched for a couple of the keywords in the quote, and got zero hits. I tried a few different keywords, and got zero hits. I tried the most general keyword in the quote, and got three articles having nothing to do with that quotation.
Hmm.
So I kept the timeframe but removed the publication limitation, re-ran the search for the first set of keywords, and this time it found four articles - none of them from USA Today, but all of them relevant to the quotation.
I called the patron and explained that I couldn’t find the quote in USA Today, but I did find articles in other newspapers that had to do with that same topic. She insisted that she had the quote exactly right.
I tried to diplomatically say that I wasn’t disputing she had the quote right, but just that I couldn’t find it. Perhaps, I suggested, it was printed in part of the newspaper that isn’t indexed in the database, such as the Letters to the Editor or a supplement. The patron considers this, then said,
Oh, that could be. [pause] Or, you know, maybe I read that one in the The New York Times. I bet that’s why I wrote “NYT” after it - I wondered what that meant.
One of the articles I found was from The New York Times. Not that it really matters - in fact, the patron got four articles instead of one, so she was happy. And the e-Journals By Title from BPL led me right to the database I needed, so I was happy.
So yay for efficiency, and yay for exceeding the patron’s expectation.
*in case you missed it, this was the useful reference tool - really, I love
this search
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June 18th, 2009 Brian Herzog
Even though I use Google for web searching most of the time, I do use other search engines, and I wonder how the results compare.
With the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, a Microsoft employee must have been wondering the same thing - so he created a neat Blind Search tool (and states this is not a Microsoft project).
Type in a search term, and Blind Search shows you the results from Google, Yahoo and Bing - but without telling you which engine produced each list. So without brand bias, you decide which results list includes the most relevant websites.
And the best part is the reveal, when you “vote” and see which search engine the results came from.
I played a bit, and surprisingly, Google didn’t always provide the most relevant results. As the creator states, this seems most useful as an observational curiosity, but it certainly is fun and interesting (or, it gives people a way to find pron three times faster).
via Closed Stacks
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June 16th, 2009 Brian Herzog
A quick recap of my experiment to both twitter and blog the CMS Day workshop last week: I didn’t like it.
And interestingly, while catching up with rss that night, I read Librarian by Day very nicely summing up everything I didn’t like about it.
Blogging a conference is how I take notes for myself during the sessions - I don’t know if it’s helpful to anyone else, but it is to me, and I put it out there just in case someone else is curious. But twittering a conference ultimately felt like a series of inside jokes that only people at the conference would get.
Don’t get me wrong - the conference was great, which is why I was trying to share it. So perhaps it is my lack of tweet skills, but it didn’t seem that 140 characters, without the context of the conference, is very helpful (other than a laugh or two).
I’m still new to this, so forgive me if this observation has already been made: it occurred to me that twittering is the metadata of life. I can describe the conference or what I’m doing at any random moment, but it’s still just a description of something else. Metadata absolutely serves a purpose, but when it comes to conferences, maybe the most useful tweets are those that point to resources available elsewhere (or that are humorous one-liners).
Or, perhaps more likely, I’m just doing it wrong.
Tags: blogging, conference, Conferences, libraries, Library, nela, nela-its, nelaits, public, twitter, twittering, workshop See Also
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June 12th, 2009 Brian Herzog
Today’s workshop is all about CMS - why use them, and what’s available. I’ll try to provide useful notes - also follow #nelaits09 and/or #nelaitson Twitter.
CMS Day: Building a Better Website with Content Management Systems
Drupal, Joomla, Plone, and WordPress
June 12th, 2009, Portsmouth (NH) Public Library
Keynote: Jessamyn West - Website 2.0!
–Slides & Links
- Old style web maintenance: people give content to one person who updates the site (bottleneck) - relies on ftp and requires expertise
- New style (with CMS): everyone can update all the time - quicker and more efficient, and doesn’t require heavy-duty tech skills
Your website doesn’t need to be special and unique, just useful to your patrons. Timesavers like CMS software, and good ideas that other libraries are already doing, are your friends. You can include a calendar, catalog, links and databases, programs, “about us” and local history, contact info - every has these things, and you can too.
Static v. Dynamic content (the C in CMS): dynamic content means websites are built on the fly by pulling information from multiple places
What is a CMS (content management system)
- creation of content - lets the right people do it
- management - easier to get info out (and remove it when old)
- distribution - send out (or bring in) via rss
- publishing - much easier, and more standards compliant
- discovery - you learn, everyone learns
All cms share similar tools: themes, calendars, rss feeds, blogs, uploading images/files - don’t get too hung up on these. All have online demos/versions to try out. There are also user communities that offer development and support.
Drupal
Paige Eaton Davis, Minuteman Library Network
- Using Drupal for staff intanet
- Goals was to facilitate communication (which staff wanted), web 2.0 features (rss, comments, etc), calendar, printer-friendly versions (because it will be a source of documentation for member libraries)
- Why Drupal? free, open-source, large community support, robust and room to grow
- Install was kind of techy, so not completely smooth and flawless - but they managed with little knowledge + documentation
- “Drupal is a very elegant and yet very hairy beast”
Getting it going:
- Drupal Core contains a lot of core functions (do not hack core modules)
- Also lots of contributed modules to extend capabilities - two good ones: Content Construction Kit (CCK - lets you define different kinds of content types [blog post, calendar event, etc]) and Views (allows tweaking of content output). Others in use are Calendar, Minutes module, Signup, Interest Groups
- One challenge with Drupal is learning its terminology
- Great thing is that menus are dropdown and easy to universally manage from one location
- Themes: use standard, customized, or borrow one http://themegarden.org/drupal6
- Lots of support online, plus O’Reilly books, Library Technology Report
Kate Sheehan, Dairen Public Library
- Kate’s not a coder - has used Wordpress, but now specializes in content
- Lots of thought when into architecture of Drupal site - used it to pull all sorts of library content (static pages, multiple blogs, etc) together into one place and organize it logically and usefully
- Staff did struggle with terminology until they got away from using blog terminology
- Community: patrons can contribute to website and catalog (using sopac, which is a Drupal module) - anyone can create an account to participate
- Using tags to specify age range/reading levels for kids, which helps both patrons and staff
- Website has content pulled in from other sources (flickr, et. al.) so policies had to be reviewed on licensing, citing and the technical how-to aspects - they try to use a lot of photos to make things more interesting
- Found that using Google calendar for events was easier than Drupal module
Joomla
Randy Robertshaw - Tyngsborough Public Library
- Chose Joomla because it is very easy to learn and has a low learning curve
- Randy is only librarian in his library, so he does all the maintenance himself
- View website as real electronic branch - staff contributing to it is same as creating book displays or answering questions in the library
- When considering Joomla, only look for v1.5-native components
- Lots of for-pay modules, which can be $5-20, and are professional looking right out of the box, instead of spending time reinventing the wheel - http://extensions.joomla.org and http://joomlacode.org
- Prefers Google calendar to events module - uses rss to feed events to homepage. Others are JcalPro and Eventlist - but prefers “outsourcing” tools like gcalendar and flickr (using iframe) to embed content back into library website
- Joomla allows multiple themes, so children’s site can look different from adult portion
- One plugin is a PDF indexer - lots of others - some simple, some complex
- Content can be timed, so it will automatically go up and come off - is also archived to use later use, and stats show on each post on the backend
More considerations
- Remove copyrights for programs
- Review the reviews of extensions before you choose them
- Stay away from “beta” software (no release schedule)
- Make sure to cache your website so you’re not hitting the database every time
- Is CMS search engine friendly? Always a problem with dynamic content
- Security and backup of CMS and website and content
- Use distributed content lets you share the work among staff but make things easy and centralized for patrons
- Always keep an eye on development - Joomla is available now, but things always change
Resources:
Plone
Rick Levine - C/W MARS
“Home on the Web” [pdf] project uses LSTA grant to enable small MA public libraries that currently have no website (or were part of the local government website). Goals were kept simple and cheap - single template, promote databases & local programs, forms-capable, “harvestable” calendar (for down-the-road state-wide zip code based calendar).
The Plinket program offers a lot features, and creating library websites is quick. The time investment comes in creating content - which is where time should be spent.
Backend input forms, content types, and management is very simple - does provide security levels to control what people can do and what html code they can use.
Examples: Bolton Public Library and East Brookfield Public Library and Thayer Memorial Library (uses fanciest features in iframes)
WordPress
Theresa Maturevich, Beverly (MA) Public Library
Chose WordPress because it was free, NOBLE offered some support, staff had some knowledge of it, large community base (easy to search for answers online), lots of free themes and plug-ins and widgets, easy to customize.
Wordpress.com vs. Wordpress.org - wp.com is hosted and has limitations, whereas wp.org is downloaded and installed on your server. .org offers more features and control, but you’re responsible for backups and maintenance
Don’t need a lot of tech background, but some html helps. It’s easy to modify page templates to customize or use different theme for kid’s page. WP lets you use hierarchy (using Parent and Child) to make website look like web pages and less bloggy.
Can use multiple blogs (news, events, book reviews, etc) and keep them separate. Posts can be automatically posted (but not deleted), and they use comment moderation to check before they go live - and people do expect answers.
Resources
Tags: 2009, cms, content management, libraries, Library, nela, nelaits, nelaits09, nelib, public, spring, workshop See Also
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