October 15th, 2009 Brian Herzog
The 2009 annual conference of the New England Library Association starts this weekend in Hartford, CT.
I’ll be there for just Sunday and Monday, but I’m not sure yet which sessions I’ll attend. I’ll be blogging again this year, along with other attendees, so check out our notes at http://nelib.wordpress.com. Also, look for Twitter updates with the #nela09 hashtag*.
If you’ll be in Hartford, let me know or keep an eye out for me - I have no plans for Sunday evenings and always like meeting people.
*While searching Twitter to figure out what the hashtag would be, I happened to find
@NELAsecrets - anyone know about this? It led to
http://nelasecrets.wordpress.com and uses Twittermail for updates (a la
@alasecrets and
@alasecrets2009). I tried it, but it seems like
Twittermail is down and
unresponsive. Too bad - I’m full of secrets.
Also while searching, I found another NELA conference - but sadly, we just missed it.
Tags: 2009, annual, conference, libraries, Library, nela, nela09, nela2009, nelib, new england library association, public 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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October 14th, 2008 Brian Herzog
The New England Library Association’s 2008 Annual Conference starts this weekend, Oct. 19-21st. This year’s conference is in Manchester, NH, and there is still time to register if you’d like to attend.
To supplement the conference sessions for people who can’t attend, there will be a conference blog again this year. Last year, volunteers posted notes from the sessions they attended, and there were so many positive comments that NELA is doing it again. The blog is sponsored by Plymouth Rocket and is available at http://nelib.wordpress.com.
If you are interested in being a conference blogger, please contact Kathy Lussier at klussier@semls.org with questions or to sign up. Here’s a bit of an overview:
What do you need to be a conference blogger?
- Bloggers need some degree of writing ability and must feel comfortable posting with an online form (posting to a blog is as easy as sending an e-mail)
- You do not need your own blog, since NELA will be hosting the conference blog
- Bloggers can post about conference sessions, meetings or events. You can post notes from a session or write about what you took away from the session. We do ask that you commit to a minimum of two posts for each day you are blogging
- If you aren’t a blogger, but prefer taking photos, we have also created a NELA group on Flickr where you can post your conference snapshots. The group is available at http://flickr.com/groups/nela
Even if you aren’t going to blog, please do check it out and let us know what you think. The goal is to make this blog as useful as possible, and all comments and suggestions are appreciated.
And if you’re going, I hope you enjoy the conference. It’s always a great place to network with librarians, learning about what’s happening in the library world (such as Work Like A Patron Day), or attend a panel discussion (such as Library 2.0 For You).
I’ll be there, and if you see me, please say hi.
Tags: blog, blogging, conference, Conferences, libraries, Library, nela, nela2008, nelib, new england library association, public See Also
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