Group project papers

Throughout my time at VSU I have completed 3 papers as part of group projects. Writing papers long distance with my classmates has consistently been some of my most challenging assignments of this program. What do you do when you disagree with someone? How do you handle it when you don't like the way someone has worded something? It's very difficult to be subtle when you're communicating through emails or even WIMBA. Sometimes it seems best to just directly make a suggestion or say that you don't like something.

The group writing experience in this class has been fairly positive. I liked working with my group members; everyone was very communicative and clearly put a lot of work into their portions of the paper. I'm worried that I went a little overboard and changed my group member's words where they might not have wanted me to, but I guess that's just how things work out when you're writing with others and you can't be face to face and you're pressed for time.....

Assignment 4

With a 1200-1500 word paper due Friday, my group is trying to hurry up and decide on how to focus our thoughts. We decided to go with option 1 and focus on an emerging technology that can be implemented in libraries. We've thought about CMS, blogs, open source ILS, and finally wikis. We haven't completely made up our  minds yet, but I'm leaning toward wikis. At first I really wanted to look at open source ILS, but that's just such a complex subject it'd be a real challenge to stay within our word limit.

Assignment 3 Option 1: Interview

I interviewed an Electronic Resource and Systems Librarian for a small four year liberal arts college in Ohio. The FTE is around 1200 students and there is a small distance learning component that is under development. This librarian is a recent graduate of the University of Missouri Columbia MLIS program and this is his first full time library job. His prior background is in IT which helped him focus his education on the technical side of the library. However, the college where he works has a very small library staff; only four full time employees. This has resulted in a need for every librarian to be a jack of all trades.

This interview was a wonderful experience. My interviewee is a user of Joomla, and I was therefore able to follow a lot of his points since I am somewhat familiar with that system. It was really nice to hear about someone applying what I’ve learned in this class in a very practical and meaningful way. Below is a transcription of our communication.

How and where did you hear about CMS?

Content management systems have been on the radar for some time now in both library circles but also predominately in the small business community. Applications like Wordpress and Drupal have been used extensively by individuals and small business to provide an easy and affordable way to provide a web presence without the requirement of a dedicated IT team. My first personal exposure to CMS was in creating some blogs through Wordpress for some friends of mine. Wordpress has been one the highest profile systems because of its use in the blogosphere as well as it's comparative simplicity in implementing the software. Not to mention that Wordpress doesn't require you to provide a hosting service for small sites. I believe it was mentioned in my programs classes a number of times, however you never think that you are going to be in the situation to roll out a entire CMS library site until you are sitting in a meeting and they all turn and look at you!

What were your motivations to adopt a CMS for the library’s website?

Prior to my arrival at the college where I work, a decision was made to upgrade the colleges website.  One thing you need to be aware of is the disconnect between the College site and the libraries new site which is still in development). These two domains share a relation only that someday they will live on the same server and fall under the umbrella of the College. The college has developed their site almost completely independently of ours, even the database is separate.

The libraries current website is very very old code. It was straight HTML with very little css supporting code and absolutely no js. It was originally developed in 2003 to 2004 and has grown into a Frankensteinian monster since then. It needs to be put out to pasture because it had/has some very significant problems.

1)    It was time consuming and unwieldy to add content.

2)    Updating any page required some knowledge of html which removed regular librarians from the process.

3)    If any restructuring was to be done, such as changing a url, every location in every page needed to be reworked. There are over 400 pages of this code to work with. This is impossible.

4)    It looked as old as it was. In the digital age, where very often the age of a website, and thus the relevance of the content cannot be determined by a publication date, the only other method people have for determining if the info is still valid is how the site looks. Ours looked like it was out of date.

Additional considerations included data that has suggested that dynamic and content rich sites with frequent additions to the pages yield more 'hits'. In other words, we saw that the librarians would need to get more involved in content creation on the website and couldn't do this easily with the old site.

What was your decision-making criteria? What is the name of the CMS you used?

Ultimately we had several choices with regard to what CMS to use. However it came about in an odd way because of the aforementioned disconnect between the college site and the libraries. We were ultimately given the option of going with Joomla and a custom template for it (the colleges choice), and picking something else. That something else was Libguides.

I believe that the primary decision making criteria was the following:

1.     Can the system accomplish the mission of the library without massive recoding?

u This required us to really ask ourselves what is it that we wanted in the new site. Was it just a link of links? Did we want content that could be added by patrons? Did we want it to resemble the college site?

 It turns out that it just needed a little less than massive recoding... good news!

2.     Is it simple to learn?

 More important to the regular librarians than it was for me, the idea here was that we would need to train the librarians to add content. If it was too difficult it wouldn't be used.

3.     How much did it cost?

 We are a small college library, every cent counts. We were by no means against spending money on a new system, however if one could be found that could do the same with no overhead it would be preferred.

4.     Was there support?

 This was another factor that revolved around us being small. We needed to leverage other experiences if major issues cropped up. It would not do well to have a system that got only minimal support, or wasn't used for libraries before either. It wasn't enough that the new CMS was working in the field in other ways, it had to be developed somewhere else as a library site.

Finally we decided on Joomla. First it was the same system that the college decided upon so there was not going to be much issue on a wildly different design. Secondly Joomla is free. Outside the need to get it hosted the Joomla software is Open Source which allows us to save money as well as change the code without getting into sticky legal situations. Additionally Joomla had been used in many other libraries over the past few years so there was some precedent for it working the way we wanted. Congruent with that was the knowledge that Joomla has been hugely successful in small business sites as well as not for profits which meant a large body of support.

In my mind the stumbling block was the simple to learn part. It happens to be a catch-22.

Joomla, and many other Content management systems rely upon the setup to do the bulk of the work. Joomla's method is in the use of a template which sets up how the site looks and where content can go. The template is the problem. While using Joomla to add content is not difficult it requires that a template for how the site will look to be in place and working the way you want it to.

This means that it has been simple for the users to learn, however the programmer, me, has had a lot of work to do in getting the site into the shape we want it to be in.

What are the important benefits or advantages of Joomla over other CMS systems you've used in the past?

Some of this was answered above but a few things bear underscoring. The clear major advantage of Joomla was that it wasn't predisposed to create a particular kind of website. For example Wordpress is great for creating blogs but doesn't do other things very well at all.  Drupal comes closest to the feature list of Joomla and it appears it is a toss up which one many libraries go with. In fact I believe that Miami of Ohio's site is Drupal.

How was the learning curve?

This is the million dollar question in my mind.

The learning curve for regular users is pretty short. If the programmer does their job right it should be simple to create basic content and add it to the system. However more complicated work should probably be left to a person that has more in depth knowledge of the system.

If you are creating a site from scratch however, Joomla is not a one size fits all solution. In order to make it look exactly the way you want, and even add some more complicated features you will need to know HTML and CSS. In some cases maybe even Javascript. The basics of Joomla are pretty straightforward but it does take some time to learn the ins and outs of the system to make it really work for you. Especially if you don't want it to look too generic.

Summaries of Activities and Experiences with Joomla

I have had several challenges in creating this website, but overall it has been a very positive exercise. As of now this site is incredibly basic. I’ve made minimal modifications to the style and linked menu items with single articles. However, I’m really beginning to see the potential that a content management system like Joomla has. This site has the potential to be extremely large and complex; with the right amount of patience and entrepreneurship it could really be something huge.

I must remind myself that everything should not come easily to me. Learning is painful, but knowing how to build websites using a content management system like Joomla is extremely relevant knowledge in today's world.

Interviewing on Short Notice

I've found a CMS person who is willing to be interviewed! The only catch is that I asked her Monday, she agreed on Tuesday, but I still haven't heard back from her. She knows that this is a Maymester assignment due on Saturday - I don't want to be crazy or anything, but my stress level is definitely beginning to rise. Hope she doesn't back out at the last minute.

Joomla

I've begun building my Joomla site-hopefully I'll soon have something to post here!

Joomla/CMS

After reading all about Content Management Systems such as Joomla and Wordpress, I was eager to attempt creating a website. I've begun with Joomla, but I'm going very slow and the process is a bit painful. The thing that bugs me is that Joomla is supposed to be super user friendly and the whole point is that "anyone" can create a website. This is misleading. While I realize that Joomla is probably about 100x more user friendly than it could be, that doesn't mean it's easy for anybody to just sign up and build a site. I think this kind of stuff takes someone who has a lot of patience and who's willing to go through a lot of trial and error. I'm not one of those people.
When it comes to technology, there is such a variety of user knowledge levels. I've been using computers for as long as I can remember. (When I was a baby my family bought a big ol clunky apple.) Older people at work sometimes act like I am some kind of computer wiz. I know that I'm not, but they still think so when they compare their skills to mine. You'd think with my background and Joomla's reputation I'd be going a lot faster...but that's just not the case.

Wiki found.

I think MindTouch would be an ideal wiki type for my public library. All employees would use the wiki; many are not very tech savvy. The wizard at WikiMatrix found 13 relevant wiki types that could be of use at this library. The most important factors in my decision were cost and an easy to use,  WYSIWYG interface.
Library staff plan to use the wiki as a resource guide for library policies.  Anything from circulation, handling donations, or how to handle unruly patrons will be addressed in the wiki. It is understood by the staff that the purpose and use of the wiki could develop and change once it is established. MindTouch is an ideal fit because it is hosted software with commercial support, allows for endless edits, preserves page history, has a WYSIWYG interface, and allows users to comment.

A search for the perfect wiki....

If I were asked to develop a wiki for a moderately sized branch of a larger public library system I would have many options from which to choose. This branch employs 12 full time staff, and about 20 part time employees. This branch is located in an urban area, and serves patrons from a variety of economic backgrounds. The community is culturally diverse and serves a large bilingual population. Like most public libraries, this one is on a strict budget and is very limited in what it can accomplish financially.

All employees would use this wiki; many are not very tech savvy. The wizard at WikiMatrix found 13 relevant wiki types that could be of use at this library. The most important factors in choosing this wiki are cost and an easy to use,  WYSIWYG interface.

Maymester Overload

So I've managed to plow through most of assignment one at this point...but I still have wikis and discussion posts to work on. I've taken Maymester classes before, but it's never been like this. I don't think I've ever had so much coursework condensed into such a small time. I don't know if I would recommend Maymesters to people who work full time...

RSS feeds

Reading up on RSS feeds and trying to understand what, how and why. Up until now I've only ever heard the term and never understood what it is or how it works.

Intro

Today is the second day of my Applied Library Tech Maymester class. I'm still trying to get the hang of things.  I tend to really resist technology in general. I don't like being too connected and I often make a point of not sharing things online.
So why am I taking this class?
Because I'm only 24 and I already feel like my generation is leaving me behind; plus I aim to be a librarian and all.