February 26th, 2008 Brian Herzog
For the first official Swiss Army Librarian post, I wanted to mention a few things about my new home.
I upgraded from Wordpress v2.0.1 (which is what herzogbr.net/blog ran) to v2.3.3, and a lot had changed - but happily, most of the changes were for the better. The major outward change is the new theme, but my real goal was to update my code. Now, it’s all css-based, and the only code that doesn’t validate properly is the flickr badge.
It took a lot of behind-the-scenes fiddling to make this transition happen (Chris, my thank you gift on the way). On my About page I list all the plugins I’m using, and a few other technical details. I also fully explain “why Swiss Army Librarian?,” in two parts, but I’ll just summarize here:
- I’ve had a Swiss Army knife ever since college, and I use it all the time. Most people who know me couldn’t image me without it
- If I had to summarize the job responsibilities of a librarian, “swiss army knife” comes pretty close. We’ve got to be ready to handle any request that comes along, and be prepared with whatever tool is needed for the job at hand
During the migration, I found I really enjoyed playing with Wordpress plugins and pages. It has gotten me excited to start seriously using Wordpress as a CMS for a full website, and not just a blog. My library is looking to update the way we manage our website, so I’m going to be pushing and pulling Wordpress to see what it can do.
Alright, that’s that. I’d appreciate hearing what people think of the new look, and if you have any tips or tricks on using Wordpress as a CMS. And now, back to the regularly scheduled postings…
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Posted under Technology, Websites | 3 Comments »
December 18th, 2007 Brian Herzog
You know how you mean to do something, and know you should do it, but you never get around to it? Well, that’s me with learning Drupal.
But my friend Kyle (that’s Kyle, in the hat) isn’t a slouch like me. He actually went out and bough a Drupal book to learn from (while I, on the other hand, sit about twenty feet away from one every day, but have yet to crack it).
Anyway: my library uses Adobe Dreamweaver to manage our website. But dealing with static html pages is cumbersome, and stands as a large barrier to getting more staff contributing (easily) to our website. So, using a tool like Drupal would be a great improvement - not just for site management, but also in usefulness for our patrons.
I’m getting there. I’m also looking at expanding our Wordpress installation, from running just our blog to containing our entire website. Or, we could use Joomla. Or Scriblio. Or Plinkit. Part of the problem is the myriad of tools to choose from.
And Kyle’s no help. He writes:
One thing that I have been looking into for one of my clients is Omeka (http://omeka.org/). Omeka is a wiki/cms solution for museums and libraries to catalog information in an online format. It is being developed at George Mason University specifically for historical institutions.
Another tool. But from what I can tell (using it is invitation only, at the moment), it is neat, and they’ve got some interesting sites running it. I’m going to watch it and see where it goes.
I know I’ve been talking about these CMS tools for awhile, but perhaps that’s what new year’s resolutions are for. We will migrate the website to a new platform by the end of 2008. Ah, we’ll see.
Oh, and one more thing: I recently read that there’s a new drupal4lib group. Maybe with a support group, it’ll actually happen.
cms, drupal, drupal4lib, joomla, kyle, libraries, library, omeka, public, scriblio, wordpress
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August 23rd, 2007 Brian Herzog
The Unshelved comic strip is generally pretty good, but this particular strip (and the next few days) really made me laugh.
As a librarian and a web designer, I can certainly relate. But increasingly, based on what I’m hearing at various meetings around the region, the budget itself isn’t the real issue - it’s staff and time. Either libraries have a staff member who knows how to maintain a website but doesn’t have the time to do it, or they have someone willing and able time-wise, but who doesn’t have the actual skills necessary to maintain a good website.
What librarians I know keep asking for (in desperation, in some cases), is an easy and quick way to update content on their website.
They don’t necessarily want to outsource, don’t want to heap all the responsibility onto one staff member, and also don’t want to spread around responsibility (because that usually diminishes the quality and coherentness of the site).
CMS tools like Joomla and Drupal keep getting talked about, as do blog software like WordPress. There’s a growing buzz about Scriblio too, but no one seems to know enough about it to view it as anything but a distant glimmer. Libraries in my consortium are considering moving from Frontpage to Dreamweaver, which seems to me to be more of a lateral move than an actual improvement.
All of these have a learning curve, plus time and effort to migrate/recreate the existing website. Which I think is acceptable, if the library knew that maintenance, once there, will not require a great deal of knowledge or time.
Library 2.0 tools are great, as they save the patron’s time and let them get a better web experience without requiring a lot of web-savviness. But saving patrons effort usually means the library is doing more work, and a lot of us, again, don’t have the time or skill to integrate these tools into our websites.
And this is just websites - online catalogs are a whole different story.
Errg. A solution? Anybody?
</frustration>
cms, libraries, library, overdue media, public libraries, public library, unshelved, web design, website, website design, websites
Tags: cms, libraries, Library, overdue media, public libraries, public library, unshelved, web design, website, website design, Websites See Also
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