I am totally knocked out by the excellent work ALA Emerging Leaders Team I did on creating screencasts to highlight all the wonderful features of ALAConnect. As Web Advisory Committee chair, I became the group mentor but my schedule and duties didn’t allow much mentoring – but I knew they were in good hands with ALA ITTS staff who offered support and guidance throughout the project. So please allow me to send them a public “WOOOHOO” on a job well done! Take a look at the screencasts. You’ll find a promo video, a video highlighting how to integrate Connect with […]
Categories Resources & Websites for Librarians
101 posts
Do not miss: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6634712.html Ten Essentials for Any Library Site A favorite of mine: Feedback The web site is an excellent venue to solicit ideas, concerns, compliments, and complaints, but don’t merely provide users with a form. Dedicate a section on your site to posting user feedback along with the library’s official response. Show your community that the library listens and has taken action, and use the opportunity to explain why a particular policy is in place or how certain decisions were made. This channel allows patrons to become more actively engaged with the library and feel that their feedback […]
Via Brett Kochendorfer Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. This means means more people engaging more deeply with your website — and with each other. In this video, Google Product Marketing Manager Mendel Chuang gives a short introduction to Google Friend Connect. Very interesting -especially the bit about ease of sign on via any number of services and adding the Friend Connect to your site takes no programming skills whatsoever. Looks like ratings, friends and comments can easily be integrated. Ways it might affect libraries: Folks will come to expect this […]
I’m a big follower of library websites. They are virtual representations of their physical presence and they also say a lot about a library’s innovation (or lack thereof). All this summer I investigated different libraries to see what they were doing and how they were designing their online presences as I redesigned the website for my employer, the A.C. Buehler Library at Elmhurst College. But it would have been great to know that I could have gone straight to one location to look at a plethora of library websites instead of Googling sites I knew of. Well – that one […]
5 Tips to Help You Live a Well-Balanced Life: http://www.divinecaroline.com Tip # 2: Learn Healthy Coping Strategies Living a balanced life means that it’s important to learn healthy coping strategies. We all get overwhelmed from time to time so we need to know how to deal with stress and issues as they arise. One way to do this is by recording stressful events, your reaction to it, and how you could have reacted in a journal. The whole piece is straight forward and useful. This might be good for some personal reading or for sharing with your team or department.
http://liswire.com/ Blake announces: I started a new site, LISWire – The Librarian’s News Wire (http://liswire.com), and I’m doing my best to spread the word. You can probably guess what the site is all about from the name, but there’s also 2 mailing lists, and a bunch of RSS feeds. Robin Blum and I are running the show and are looking for press releases and other news items of interest to librarians to get things going. You can sign up for an account and submit things you’d like to announce to the library world. I’ll be cross posting most announcements to LISNews for a little while […]
One of my goals for the summer is to get a handle on Drupal. I’d like to incorporate it into LIS753 Internet Fundamentals and Design at Dominican. I’d like to assign workgroups the task of creating a library Web site with the OSS app. How’s the learning curve folks? I missed this presentation, but luckily Ellyssa Kroski, who just got a great review for her book in LJ, put up “Drupal & Libraries” from CIL2008 at Slideshare – complete with audio track: http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2008/drupal-and-libraries-at-cil2008/ To get started, I’ll be listening and watching tomorrow in my office. Then, I’ll ask Blake for a […]
I recently had a Facebook conversation with Jeff Dawson, director of the Lester Public Library in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. I realized in our back and forth that his experience with creating and extending online presense for his library was the makings for a HOT TTW guest post: For example, the entire town knew I went to PLA (I think I left town as you were coming in… ). We are now running 2 blogs out of LPL, Blogging LPL is sustaining an average of roughly 3,000 hits a month and rising (I know my mom isn’t the only one looking […]
WordPress: Open source blogging/CMS. Blogging for a Good Book: Sample WordPress site (hosted). LibraryThing: Catalog your whole library online. Scriblio: Open source OPAC/CMS. Lamson Library: Sample Scriblio site. Drupal: An engine suitable to setup or build a content driven or community driven website. Modular design allows flexibility in design. Franklin Park Public Library: Sample Drupal site. Fish4Info: a next generation social alternative library portal. (See this for more info.)
It’s my belief that library users are expecting more from their web browsing experience. I’m not talking social networks, I’m talking interactive web design. These users are used to websites that allow for dynamically changing content (content that may not require a new page to load) and for a feeling of interactivity with the page. Dynamic content shifts on the page, animates, and morphs into something it wasn’t previously. Let’s look at some examples: Jeep: The rectangular information boxes nicely animate in and out upon click of the left or right arrows allowing for new information to nicely slide in […]