June 10th, 2010 Brian Herzog
In 2008, Chelmsford started a town-wide history project, to index the historical records in all the various locations around town. We’re still chugging along, and a volunteer found something interesting in the library’s archives.
This check for $1.50 was written by the treasurer of the North Chelmsford Library Association to the ALA Publishing Board in 1919. The back of the check is interesting, too. We’re still discovering things in the archive, so I’m hopeful we’ll be able to figure out what this check was for.
There’s three more things about this, if you’re interested:
- The signature on the check is Stuart MacKay, brother of Anna C. MacKay, who the Anna C. MacKay Branch Library in North Chelmsford is named after. North Chelmsford has been, and is now, very supportive of the library, and I like this continuity of history. Also interesting that he was working on Christmas Eve.
- Also uncovered in the archive are circulation records from the early 1900’s - including every book each patron checked out. An interesting philosophical question is this: at what point do library records go from being a matter of patron privacy to a matter of historical record or curiosity?
- For our indexing project, we’re using Past Perfect, and will be providing access through Past Perfect Online (but nothing’s been uploaded yet). Until that’s ready, we’re using a Google Custom Search Engine to index all the existing online resources we could find. It works well enough for the time being, and I know this is going to be a long-term project, but I’m looking forward to having a real index available.
Neat, huh?
Tags: ala, american library association, archive, check, chelmsford, digitization, historic, history, libraries, Library, preservation, project, public, town, town-wide See Also
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October 2nd, 2008 Brian Herzog
Most of the talk about ALA’s new website redesign has died down, but I noticed something this week I want to comment on.
On the whole, I think the new site is a vast improvement over the old one. And with any new site, I understand they’re still shaking out the bugs, and dealing with lots of dead links.
But: for my previous post, I wanted to find information from the ALA about library activity rising in time of economic trouble. A search on Google linked to something sounding exactly like what I was looking for on the ALA site. However, the link was broken.
By searching the ALA site itself for the title displayed in the Google results, I ultimately found the article’s new location. Which is fine, but I have to say I am disappointed with the new website’s 404 page.
When the 404 “Page Not Found” page loads, the most dominate thing on the page is the search box right in the center. So of course I clicked on this to search for the page I wanted. But - surprise - it’s not a functioning search box. It’s just an image of what the search box at the top of the page looks like. Of course the text above this image tells you to use the one at the top, but who reads? I don’t - especially when a dominate image draws my attention away from the text.
So ALA, how about making the search box in the center a functioning search box, instead of just teasing us? It would add utility to the page, and make the 404 page incrementally just that much more user-friendly.
But otherwise, I think this is a pretty good 404 page, as far as they go. It customized and nice-looking, and gives some tips for finding what you’re looking for. It also includes an email address to contact a person for help, which is great. I think I only noticed this because I talked about library website 404 pages before, and gave my library a fancy-pants 404 page.
I don’t understand why it doesn’t show up all the time, but maybe that’s in the works, too.
Tags: 404, ala, american, american library association, association, error, libraries, Library, missing, new, page, pages, public, redesign, revamp, website See Also
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