Connecting Librarian

Linda Burridge and I were the first presenters in this session. Our presentation – From Mess to CMS: the transformation of a library website, which is available on SlideShare.

Rachel Chidlow -Aging gracefully?: Reviewing and enhancing Information Commons services at the University of Auckland

Started with an introductory video about their Information Commons.

Technological changes and staffing model changes made, based on student feedback. They user focus groups, suggestions, etc. Get a lot of feedback from their Information Commons blog – seeks input on software updates, arrangements and more.

What has been changed? Software – more and more varied. Students are very forward in their requests, but library also seeks feedback from faculty. Try to offer the same software as the general software offered in departmental computer labs.

Access to recreational resources online is available but had been charged or offered at a lower speed. New model introduced a flat rate model and data limits with high rates for exceeding limits, which student’s readily accepted. Educational access is still free.

Upgraded university email service and introduced access to Google Docs and Gmail.  Implemented UserLock & PC Booking System, to help with the issue of multiple bookings, while still allowing access to Web 2.0 including social networks. Yet to implement a booking system – looking at MyPC and Pharos Sign-up. Trial of software changed studen’ts minds about it – they complained when it was removed. Software was helpful in giving trend and use information, which help them to determine future booking and use limitations.

13 FTE and 17 casual staff in the 3 Information Commons locations. Permanent staff have portfolio responsibilities, casual student assistants work on housekeeping roles and elsewhere as required.

Finished with a short video showing how busy it gets.

Mal Booth, Sophie McDonald and Belinda Tiffen – UTS – A new vision for universitylibraries towards 2015.

Technical issues – video, then animation, then Common Craft idea based video, showing what their 3 visions for the future of UTS which is getting a new library by 2015.

Firstv Video available on YouTube – UTS Library.  Lots of open spaces, natural light, funky furniture, impressive buildings, technology, collaboration space.
2nd video produced by students,outlining their vision of the future of the library.

Key points: social hub, everywhere all the time, mulitmedia, personalised services, collaboration, both happening in physical and virtual realms.  Mobile catalogue, exploring QR codes. ¾ of collection moving to storage – will change what they are and what they do.

Students content creators – need to provide multimedia content and facilities – encouraging it with competitions and YouTube channel. Encouraging playfulness and more open dialogue with library users – personal relationships.

3rd video – video blog entry from researcher in 2015. Talked about personal information consultants, worldwide collaboration, open access publishing, cloud computing, digital media. (quote at end , if you can type, you can make movies)

Researching in 2015 key points – collaboration, personal service, open acsess, support across research life cycle.

4th video with apologies to Common Craft – working in 2015.
Working culture key points: trusting open culture, flexibile visible and mobile, personal and connected, green aware and sustainable, creative and constantly evolving.

All their videos are available on YouTube – they have a UTS Channel.

In the first post, I revisited how we came to be building a new website and how we ended up with Drupal. And now to be continued ………

Initially learning Drupal was harder than I thought it would be. We couldn’t get our heads around how it worked, as it was so different to anything we had ever used before. We knew it would be challenging, particularly in choosing Drupal over Joomla, as it was known to be so. However, there were some frustrating moments early on, whilst we struggled with unfamiliar concepts.

Our plans to learn all about Drupal first and then build the website once we had, soon changed as we continued to struggle with the unfamiliar. In the end, we started transfering content over and learnt how to do things as we did so. When we came across something we didn’t understand, we looked for answers, in the books we had, on the Drupal forums, on other websites and on the odd occasion, from our ISP and more often than not, from my husband who has done work with Drupal.

As the new site continued to build, we became more comfortable with everything, the way Drupal was structured, how it all fit together and how to get everything working the way we wanted it to.

Of course, the things we wanted the most, the bling to make it all look lovely and appealing, were the hardest things to get working. It took weeks and trying out different methods and modules before we succeeded with the first of our trilogy of stumbling blocks – the Upcoming Events. Our new books images and events slideshow were the next and once we had the first, the second followed quickly. Our biggest struggle there was working out how Drupal works with images – the answer there: it doesn’t do it very well.

So anyway, it took 22 weeks from installation of Drupal on our web server to the point where we had a website ready for testing. We posted to the existing website, asking for users to check it the new website and provide us with feedback.

Our users were wonderful, happily giving us feedback, all which was constructive, encouraging and reaffirming of what we had built for them. Staff were also supportive and gave us some great suggestions and input. After a few weeks of leaving ourselves open to these responses, we closed down the test site and got ready for the official launch.

In Library Week 2009, we quietly launched our new website, with little fanfare (allowing for Murphy’s law of course) but with great results. We have continued to receive positive feedback from our users and as expected, have continued to refine and tweak the new site. There are still some bugs to be ironed out and there is a continual update process required with Drupal, but its not onerous.

Next step is to add some more features and to get some other staff editing and adding more content to the site. We will also do some more investigation into how the website is being used and by whom.

It’s been a challenge and an awesome learning process, which at times has been so incredibly frustrating, but ultimately very rewarding. Its not been easy, but with the resources we were able to find – print, personal and online, we have done it. A very satisfying result all round.

In the process of completing this largish (for me) project at work, I thought it would be good to get down in some logical order, a bit about the project, what we learned, what was hard/easy and what we would change.  It will take more than one post to get it all down, so I appreciate your patience as I get this serial out into the cloud.

Off to a cautious beginning in November 08, culminating in the launch in the last week of May 09, my partner in crime and manager at work – Linda and myself have built our new library website, using Drupal – an open source content management system.

First off, some quick explanations.  Drupal is a content management system (CMS) – a software package that enables the user “to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” (Drupal 2009)  CMS’s can be used to organise many different types of digital content, but ours was to be used for the library website.  Drupal is also open source, which means the software is free and there are many modules which can be used with it, which have been developed by the programming community around the world.

But let’s start back at the beginning.  Our library website was long past due for an overhaul.  It needed a new look and a bit of content reorganisation.  Some of the dross needed to go and we needed a bit more glam.  The website hadn’t had any more than a minor tweak and small additions since 2005 – a long time in web terms.

We had been looking to use a vendor product which would enable us to have a combined OPAC and website, but unfortunately that didn’t work out as hoped and so we had another look at our options.  We narrowed them down to two, either in-house development using a content management system or purchasing an out of the box CMS.  It was agreed that it would be done in-house and Linda and I began looking at our options for open source CMS’s.

There were many options there also, but again we narrowed our choices down to two – Drupal and Joomla.  Both had a lot going for them – including compatibility with Web 2.0 tools, WYSIWYG functionality and much more. We opted to go with Drupal, mainly because it had a large library user base in the US which we could use for inspiration and help and for the access to local support from our ISP. It didn’t hurt that my husband, a computer programmer was also using it to develop a website.

So having made the decision in November 08, it was time to get started.  We developed a timeline of learning about Drupal, developing the new website and moving the content over.  As with many projects, the plan was revised a few times and although the project never worked the way it was planned in terms of what activities happened when, we were pretty much right on the dot for the timing of it all.

Our next step was to work with our ISP – Vicnet, to get Drupal installed and ready for us to start building the new website.  They were incredibly supportive and helpful throughout the whole process and got us out of a couple of interesting situations which could have been very problematic.  Initially, we had at the software installed on our part of one of their webservers, but when we needed a more current version of PHP to make things happen, it moved to one of their development servers.

And we were off and running.  Problem now was – how do we use this thing?  It was installed for us, we had IP access and log-in details, but very little clue about how to work with this software.  The clue that I did have came from working with the blogging software Word Press, on both my blog and Libraries Interact – thank goodness for that experience alone!

So we did what all clever librarians do in these situations, we looked for resources to help us learn about this wonderful new toy we had to play with. This ended up being mostly a decent book with great instructions on how to do various tasks, a great series of online videos and Drupal forum posts.

That’s enough for this post.  Stay tuned for the next enthralling episode, where we really get down to the nitty gritty of building the website.

A project from Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Patron needs were changing, the library profession was changing as was library service. Device evolution put pressure on staff who were uncomfortable with the new technologies. Needed to adapt staff, services and website to meet the changing needs of their community.

Wanted more than a site, wanted a portal, a customisable experience that enabled them to access the same services that they would experience in the virtual library. Wanted people to enjoy and dwell in the space, so the experience needed to be multi-faceted. Wanted to be able to draw in new audiences and that would allow them to partner with more community organisations.

They wanted to integrate web content, catalogues, databases, news and events, calendar features, branch info, and web 2.0 tools. Also wanted to know what their users wanted, they were just guessing. Put out an RFP to help them to develop the site and get a CMS in place to manage it all.

The process:

• discovery – internal constituent focus groups, customer focus groups, competitive research, best practice analysis, recommendations, wire frames
• strategy – mini portals (subjects, demographics, branches), CMS which now has 200 contributers and includes blogs, RSS and mobile CSS, event functionality, audience segmentation, enhanced search functionality, ended up with an out of the box CMS (Ektron) integrating with their III catalogue, Federated Search (Webfeat), text messaging, email (Exact Target), Online Store (CT Pro), Digital Assets (Fedora), Fundraising (e-commerce)
• design – focus groups wanted inspired, functional, intuitive, accessible, integrated, efficient, integrated, energetic, supportive, innovative, realistic, scaleable
• development – created subject and demographic portals, which dynamically pulled in events from the calendar and incorporated blogs and a relevant link collection, have segmented audience email – subject interest and geographic relevant info sent to patrons, sent 90,000 text messages for holds/overdues etc.
• launch/promotion – through print advertising, radio advertising, newspaper features = results blog readership up 40%, homepage visits up 64%, then named Ektron site of the year.
• evolution – platform defines the functionality, think ahead to where the web is going, memberships are the driving force behind web 2.0, libraries as a prime mover in new technology, additional features – metadata, federated search, geomapping, data portability.

So here I am now in New England (sounds so romantic) at Darien Library. Check out the photos I have on Flickr about their current building. They have just broken ground for a new library building, which will be similar to the new Princeton Library with 3 levels, but not quite as big. The inspired building project was written up in a Library Journal article “Library Buildings 2004 – Great Libraries in the making.”

Despite having an overcrowded building at present, with offices in closets and more, they are doing some great things, including a lot of technology based and virtual services. I met with Kim Gabert, Emily Weiss (recipient of the Louise Parker Berry Fellowship) and Mary Freedman from Reference Services and talked about their website, blogs, email newsletter, RSS and IM Reference. John Blyberg left Ann Arbor and starts here on May 1st (I’ll meet him at CIL!), so things will get even more exciting!

At present Kim as webmaster uses Dreamweaver, but John will help them institute Drupal as their content management system, so changes are coming. Darien hosts their own website on a Linux server, as well as those of over 60 local organisations. Talk about building community!

Their newsletter, Connections, which is available online, is emailed out to their users using “Constant Contact“, which is also used for their children’s newsletter. They will look at introducing RSS feeds from the Connections newsletter homepage in the near future.

They have 10 blogs, which are all linked from their homepage, as well as being linked from a combined page with a one line summary of each of the latest posts. They use Movable Type for their blogs on Books, Music and Movies, from the Director, Childrens, Teens, Technology, Front desk, New Building, Events and Community Matters. Each blog has a librarian author, with the exception of Music and Movies which is shared between two reference librarians. They usually post weekly and all their blogs are usually in their top 20 website hits, with the Music and Movies the most visited. Comments are rare, excepting on the Events blog when they poll their users as to which of 3 movies they will show in the next fortnight. A post from each blog is incorporated into the Connections newsletter, which then entices people to go back to the blogs, thus enhancing their readership. Their blogs tap into a wide range of librarian expertise and knowledge whilst enhancing the librarians skills and sharing the load of blogging.

Darien offers IM reference using Meebo online. They have also incorporated a Meebo widget into their website, so users can access the service from within Darien’s website, without having to use an external webpage or software. There are a few issues with this – remembering to login daily and the fact that it can only be logged into on one PC, so sometimes they have to juggle logins to answer incoming IM requests. They receive about 4-5 IM queries a month and about 20-30 email requests. They were very innovative and hosted an AOL IM chat room on Oscars night to discuss the outcomes – did some very heavy promotion and had a lot of staff involved in the discussion, but they believe they had 1 Darien resident attending. They are not doing SMS reference at this stage.

They offer downloadable audio, which started slowly, but is taking off. They use Overdrive through the iConn state consortia and Recorded Books, which is easier for the librarians to use and has more titles. They are offered for download remotely, as there is only one PC in the library that it can be done on and that is usually used just to show people how its done.

They also offer Playaways, which are self-contained audio books. They have the content and player all in one small device. They have about 200+ titles covering adult, childrens and teen fiction and non-fiction, which are very well used. (previous weekend there was only 1 on shelf). Each one is issued with a spare battery and disposable headphones.

Judy Sgammato took me through their Technology Center and tech classes. Their Center has 12 PCs, portable and large sized scanners, B&W and colour printers – using print management software. They circulate laptops, digital cameras, digital video camcorders and MP3 players and have headphones, a zip drive and portable floppy disk drives for use with their Technology Centre PCs. They offer classes on Microsoft products, Photoshop Elements, podcasting, Dreamweaver and more. The center is available for public use outside of classtime with timetables of available times and the availability of assistance posted outside the room on a weekly basis.