Librarian by Day

Aubri Keleman, Teen Services & Web Coordinator, Whatcom County Library System

Tao Gao, Live2Create Interactive

Aubri -

Rumba with Joomla

What is a cms and why is it wicked cool?  The webmaster doesn’t have to do anything

Pre-redesign

• collect stats
• review your brand
• collect photos – tell a story
• focus groups
• set explicit goals in priority order

redesign questions

• do staff and leadership know why a new website is needed
•  which cms is best for us
• what can we afford money vs time vs design
• how much staff time can we put into the redesign & upkeep;
• do you need to outsource or do you have the talent you need on staff
• how will decisions be made, who gets the final say
• who is the best for the website
• how will staff be involved in the redesign process
• what project management tool should we use – blogs and wikis, they used a wiki

 goal wc3 compliant

new page – www.wcls.org

results

• increased user feedback
• more content, more up to date content
• users spend more time on our site
• improved navigation
• w3c compliant
• flexibility

Problems

• you cant limit authors to just one page or section
• calendar
• migration

CM Tools: Drupal, Joomla, & Rumba

John Blyberg

Ryan Deschamps

Ryan
ModX
How not to have to use drupal
Cms in general
Why joomla
Why switch to ModX

Good content mngmt system should facilitate division of labor, support overall development, ensure best practices and standards
Halifax public library now in modx looked the same in joomla
Its not about the front end, its about the cockpit, ask long as the front end performs its about making the lives of your staff happy

Why they choose joomla
Number 1 in market share
Huge community of support
Templates
www.opensourcecms.com – demo of anything, can see how the back end looks and works

why they switched to ModX from Joomla
painful upgrade
started looking useful stuff – code etc, wanted to look at new services, joomla is not that great for adding unique
nice interface but doesn’t help the development of the site

ModX
Has fine grain user access, can restrict access to specific pages
Resources

What he does like
Still needs work
Needs more documentation
Some syntax knowledge required

Joomla really good for an intranet, wouldn’t recommend for a front end site,
community engagement is more important that community size
application framework

John
If youre not thinking about cms at this point you are doing yourself a really big disservice
Drupal – named open source cms of the year for the last 2 years
Not as easy as joomla – steep learning curve

How drupal handles content
Nodes – not a page, not a post
Blog post could be a node, drupal considers that content type

Content creation kit (CCK) – allows you to create new content types
Taxonomy system – drupa allows you to create your own classification system for your content types
Drupal allows you to structure sites so that content is on more than one page, on front page and on book groups page for example

Templating system – php standard, html with php tags and code
Sopac is completely template driven
If you don’t like how something looks you can make it look exactly how you want it to

api system api.drupal.org
hooks
drupal website is the place to start if youre interested in having drupal in your system

sopac was built on top of drupal because they were confident that drupal was a viable product
thesocialopac.net

questions
if you were starting with drupal now would you go with 6 or 7? Answer 7 hasn’t been officially released yet, so use 6
learning curve problems – some people have a problem with the taxonomy system, even John runs into things he doesn’t know and has to go to the site and look it up
moving from one system to another, are there tools to facilitate a move from joomla to drupal? Ryan – probably but the tools might not be that trustworthy, always be looking forward, what is the next upgrade, how difficult is the next upgrade John – migration is not easy, he advises against if possible

mentioned not hacking the core code, can you explain – John if you tweak code & drupal upgrades the file that you changed might have changed so you need to compare, very time consuming

modx has snippets, allows you to change code from back end with out breaking it

how easy to migrate from an existing site in php to one  of these tools?  Manually migrating your content,

if modx went away where would you go? Ryan – drupal

Social network profile management

Greg Schwartz
Michael Porter
Sarah Houghton-Jan
Amanda Clay Powers

Greg
Identity
Digital identity mapping – online interactions make identity much more complicated
Your next employer looking for your identity will do a google search
You do not own your online identity

Tip
-own your username
- if your name is unique and can grab everywhere use it, otherwise pick something
- checkusernames.com
- join the conversation , develop your identity by participation
- listen, pay attention to what other people are saying about you
- be authentic – your digital identity should be your real identity

Amanda Clay Powers
What are we doing here anyway
How managing identity online is like managing information
We know how to manage identity because we know how to manage information (really?)
Our place is to educate people about what they are doing
Peoples perception that librarians don’t know how to help them with their online interactions
Who else is in the position to coach people with this? Who else has the number of computers we do

Sarah
Being online as the library
Register for online sites with a generic email address, not the address of a specific staff member
Quick replies to users messages
Keep it open to everyone – let anyone being your friend, other than spammers

What not to do
Register with stranger usernames
Not replying
Outdated profile information
Slow or no replies
Institutional in tone

Under management and over management, over mgmnt is just as dangerous as under dangerous

Be personable – sarah got a gig via facebook
Checkusernames.com
Opened
Claimed
Ping.fm
Atomkeep

Michael
Libraryman is his online identity
Webjunction.org – community staff for library staff

Be fun, but not too fun
Things can be misinterpreted online
Share success stories

Audience participation
Question about dual identity –
greg Schwartz talked about keeping identity separate, that in being authentic those 2 lines start to blur
sarah – you don’t have control of how other people see your identity, she posted wedding photos thinking no one would find them, but within 4 hours they were located
Michael – its hard to control, you might be able to have a separate account somewhere, but not a separate identity, thinks as tools get refined we’ll see more levels of connections, more than just friends, family etc, we care about functionality, Flickr example – what if we could group friends and allow just certain groups of friends see specific photos
Amanda – might be a generational thing too

Not everything needs to be online

Greg – everything you ever do say whatever online may eventually be shown to everyone, you never know when it will become public

Library success wiki

Sarah – if its not personal its not effective even if it is an institutional site

Greg aggregate your life stream – people are not familiar with those tools on a mass scale

Sarah – integrate your profiles, put linkedin on flickr, etc, cross pollinate, include links to all the sites on your library website

Michael – It takes research and time to things well enough, you might have to let something slide to make something else work

Amanda – ppl are overwhelmed by information, Mississippi library 2.0 Summit – to talk about tools, whats working, how its working, you have to get ahead of the curve

Audience question – single woman, online interaction can be awkward, talking the other women near where she lives, she is more interested in connecting with other people for a purpose and not really share personal information as much, we might have personal differences, but we can collaborate online without bringing that in.
Do you really want all your colleagues to have access to all your past relationship information.

Flickr commons develop in 2007 – LoC approached Flickr about sharing photos, encouraging users tagging jan 16th 2008 launched Many nations now participating Can now only search the commons

http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Brooklyn Museum – contributing to the commons caused flickr account to get flooded with comments, also posting photos that they “think” are something posting to flickr confirms or discredit it

Can no longer respond to all comments, just completely got overwhelmed, it was no longer the small user community they knew and loved, were very close to leaving

Goes beyond community working with their stuff, they are also helping with our workload What is the best way to add images to existing sets?

Ask the question of the commons community, and you’ll get an answer

Library of Congress Power commoners –

do historical research and get really involved History detectives provide support to their statements by linking to sources online

People provide personal memories of photos Historical context discussions Then and now photos

New York Public Library – Flickr puts photos in space more accessible than they currently are, Failed in the creation of community – they framed it as a technology project,

No know copyright restrictions, other rights like privacy

If someone posted a question who was going to answers? The subject specialist, got some irate responses from curators saying how could they do this with their stuff? They are now trying to engage where they can, rather than thinking about it as a distribution channel for photos or technology look at it as community engagement

Smithsonian – considered it more of a social experiment, than a technology issues

Wide range of subject matter means communicating with widely different community of users

What you need is a small group of like minded people at your institution to get it started, once it takes off (quick victory project) and the positive feedback starts other will be lining up to participate

Questions

One of the problems is that flickr is created for individual users, when you use it for a institution you have one password that everyone has, that might not be the greatest thing Flickr allow strikeouts so handy for corrections Copyright isn’t the only issue – if there is a picture of a person, that person or descendants might have some rights to the photo

Embedded and widgetized library
- Dcpl – iphone app
- Chat widgets – question point
- igoogle gadgets

flickr badge creator – can do thru flickr

steal this code now please
- lets give it away – allow users to remis our source code for their own customized applications on any of their pages or sites

make it easy so patrons can just copy and paste code, doesn’t need to be hard

is putting code out there safe? Check with web & it folks to be sure

but people will start using our stuff –

creating a steal this code tool
- decide what kind of widget you want to offer – catalog, databases, combo catalog & databases, web-based or IM chat
- plan webpage layout of widget and code generator textarea
- provide a working example of the widget so people know exactly what they are getting
-

the magic of html forms – simple catalog search example

examples
auariua library – steal this code page
university of Colorado Denver –
university of Minnesota dulutch UMD library

advertise service
prepared for success

reasons to give it away
platform independent
fun opportunities

Mobi – easy to use to create a mobile website – need to stay simple,

we watched Eddie Izzard youtube lego star wars death star canteen while waiting, warning there are swear words in the video if that sort of thing offends you

Redesign the pitfalls and perils and how to avoid them

Good reason to redesign

• When nav is dysfunctional
• When your site doesn’t scale
• When your site is difficult to update
• When you code is helplessly sick
• When your site has poor usability
• When its not performing based on you objectives / goals

Redevelop vs redesign

Redevelop = triple bypass

Redesign = cosmetic surgery

If its not broke don’t fix it, if users are finding their way around, consider just cosmetic update – example Amazon.com

Quiet death of major relaunch – users don’t like redesign

Facebook ainti redesign group has 1.7 million members

Last.fm

Caveats

Beware the vocal majority

Be evidence based

Five stages of user grief

• Denial – why did you change it?
• Anger – you have made the site useless, I’ll never use it again
• Bargaining – if you would just go back to the old version of a certain portion, it would be great
• Depression – I have no idea what I’m going to do now
• Acceptance – I dislike the new design but I was able to find what I’m looking for

Do we really need to redesign

Maintenance = boring, redesign = exciting

At launch you will be really happy and become less happy over time

At launch the user will be unhappy and become more happy over time

Pitfalls

- failing to account for assessment time and effort

Spend your money where the water is – know where your water is,

Look at where people are going int eh site, where they are not going, what pages they enter into, what pages they leave from – google analytics, clicky

review past usability studies

if its been a while do one now

tip – find and document your current page rank

do not want to loose page rank as the result of a redesign

tips on generating buy-in

– show manager or director other sites, what other libraries are doing

– show him or her data indicating that redesign

trying to reach too much consensus or death by committee, avoid committee if at all possible, if you must have a committee make it as small as possible

define constituencies and include them in the process

librarians are users but they are also experts, do not design your website for library staff, design it for your users

planning thinking outside the box

is a traditional page based model what you want? consider – cms,  blog,  wiki

don’t spend too much time designing – its all be done before

Seth Godin – “I’m going to out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a million pages on the web. Surely there’s one you can start with.”

Users expectations are not formed by library websites. You should not be looking to other libraries for examples of what users expect

Goals – specific and measurable

Increase google page rank

Show x percentage improvement in usability

Decrease time for adding new content

Pitfall – failing to communicate

• be open and transparent
• redesign blog or wiki to keep public and colleagues aware of what’s happening, helps manage users expectations

cook library web site redesign blog

Execution

Pitfalls – communicating too much,

• redesign by committee is not pretty
• look to evidence to short circuit tedious discussions

pitfall – not providing users a clear path

define the primary functions of your site and make sure those paths are clear

Queens Library example – good example of prime goal being connecting people with their tasks

Pitfall – don’t reinvent the wheel – from javascripts to CSS chances are its already been done

Spend money & time on

1 .Remarkable content – you have a staff full of experts – use them to create content,

- remarkable content is well written content, not cut and paste! Invest time in creating content specifically for the web

2. remarkable tools – next gen opac, federate search, engagement tools, user interaction options

3.

redesign for search engine optimization

- simple urls are better

- descriptive unique titles for every single page

- proper and consistent use of structural html

- descriptive alt tags

after you’re done submit a new sitemap to google

ask google to remove outdated/removed content from their cache

redesigning with social media content in mind

social bookmarks

tag your pages

don’t move or eliminate good content – don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater

update robots.txt file

update analytics definitions

pitfall – plan beyond the redesign

- content strategy

- maintenance strategy

I’m at Computers and Libraries this week so the next few days will be filled with conference posts.  I’ll even be presenting on Tuesday afternoon, just after lunch.

I came in yesterday and stopped by the gadgets and gaming session last night to see some cool toys including the Kindle 2!  There are so many new toys I want

If you’re following from afar the hash tag is #cil2009, you can follow on Twitter, or Jason Griffey has pulled together everything using Yahoo Pipes.