Unfortunately for the organising commitment, they had a second last minute cancellation, but were fortunate enough to have a couple of people step up and show what they were doing at their library.  Danny was first.

Darebin Libraries Website – Danny

Their website redevelopment began about 18 months ago. Advice for anyone who has a website – take your website content, print it out as pages, put them on the floor and see if you can navigate between them easily.

Its all about content, content, content. It needs to be coherent, accessible, and minimal.

Everything on Darebin website has been developed in HTML or XML.  No plugins required.  You need to be sure that anyone can access your site, without needing the latest software versions etc.  See W3C guidelines.

Firefox has a HTML validator plug-in which will validate your code, against the W3C guidelines. If there are HTML or CSS errors in your website, then Google will drop you down in search results.

Need HTML fonts that anyone can read and contrasting background colours.

Social networking will only work for you if you have a great, well working website.  The social networking aims to bring users back to the library website, so you have to get that right first.

They use a content management system for their website,  Convoy CMS produced by Roadhouse, customised for Darebin.  Roadhouse also developed the new PLEASED website for public libraries on disability topics.

Vision Australia has a free toolbar to validate your website.

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Fiona was the second step-in speaker.

Yarra Plenty Libraries Website Redevelopment – Fiona.

Their redevelopment is going live in March 2010. They are going with the  Biblio Commons Discovery layer to bring the catalogue into the website.  Keep the branding and the menus consistent with the website, even when it moves into the catalogue on doing a search.

You can create collections, mark for later and create lists, which can be public or private.  You are able to share and bookmark using a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools.

You can send messages to other users through Bibliocommons, follow them etc.  Can also block them.

It all looks very interesting.  The Bibliocommons website takes you to customer websites to check out.

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Pam Saunders and Elwyn Murray -  Talking about my generation – giving perspective on what their generation is interested in.

Pam Saunders  is gen X  and she has 10 library cards – a library junkie.  No one library gives her what she needs.  She lives in the city and the country.  She carries these cards in a wallet which also contains reviews, notes, recommended books, etc that she wants to get from her library.  She looks to which library can get it and which will get it to her the quickest.

Her first point of contact will be the library website.  Her impressions of library services, their reputations, will come from this. The best websites will be presented the same way that a house for sale is.  Pruned down, uncluttered.  Some libraries have other features that she is not aware of, because they havent sent them to her or she hasnt seen them on the library website.

Facebook – you can overload people with information that is not always relevant, so be careful about how much you dish out.  Don’t make her have too many user names and passwords.  Can find out interesting statistics about your Facebook users from Facebook itself.

Doesn’t like a big sign saying that you can pay your overdue fines online – not as a first thing. Put the positive things online, the not so delightful things should be tucked away – not unfindable, but not in your face.

Gen Y – Elwyn – uses the power of the Net to drive personal interest. Used Facebook to promote an event and got an unexpectedly good response.

Elwyn agreed with Leith’s earlier assertions, when you engage with people, you also engage with their networks. People attend events because they have an interest, because they know someone who is in it or because they know someone who is going.

You need to be personal in your approach, even if its in a broadcast medium like Facebook. Viral marketing plays a big role in promotion.

Things he is addicted to include: FFFFound – image bookmarking and Future Shipwreck – he also links to post things to Tumblr (microblogging tool).

Tends to shy away from institutions on the internet – wants to hear individuals’ opinions, not the company line.

Does a lot of buying online, reads a lot of blogs, doesn’t listen to the radio anymore.

Is he a library member?
Yes.

Why did they publish a hard copy of their book, rather than just online?
Easy to digitally curate things, but there is a different status level to a printed copy.  If you can buy it, it is a way of showing appreciation and a way to own the content, which is different to the online. Had a grant to do it.

So that was the day.  It finished with the LibMark Marketing awards – one of which was one by my library, for our teen blog  Quicksand. Woohoo!

Thanks to the LibMark Committee for an insightful and interesting day.  I will chasing up more than a few things for my library.

LibMark, which is the marketing subcommittee of the Public Libraries Victoria Network, ran a full day seminar on Digital Marketing and Libraries on Friday 23rd October.  From here on in are my notes from the day, which was great – I came away with a lot of ideas and new perspectives.  Hopefully these notes can give you some too.

The keynote speaker was Darren Sharpe -  Senior Consultant at collabforge, who spoke on “Social Media, Marketing and Public Libraries”.  (His presentation is available at http://www.slideshare.net/dasharp/social-media-marketing-public-libraries)

Australians are generally early adopters of technology.  We have one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the world. 3/4s of Australian online adults use soical media and 1/4 have created their own content (Forrester Research).  Our largest online demographic is the 35-44 year olds (Gen X), followed by the 25-34, then the 45-54 and then the 18-24s.

Marketing has changed, it is now pull not push, many to many not only one to many, its about conversation now not just a message, its peer to peer not organisation controlled and its generative not static. Marketing is no longer fully in our hands to control and we need to be aware of this and to learn how to make the most of it.

Social media comprises:

• connection – which enables people, data, events and issues to meet u

• community – there is a lot of power in self-organising groups, which have represent an identity, have common purpose, trust and representation (See Seth Godin’s book Tribes)

• context – where you can interpret, find, personalise and complement content that you find -

• co-creation – take existing content, change it, add to it and more, then share it again

When talking about new forms of value, He gave us a quote from jeff Jarvis (2005) in “Who wants to own content”, which in its purest form says “The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.”

The new values in today’s social media are sharing, reputation, collaboration, attention, transparency, trust, authenticity and openness.

So what is the challenge for public libraries?

1. Connect your with your community via Social Media (highlighted Boroondara’s blogs)
2. Provide access to open data, tools and APIs (he gave examples from the Gov 2.0 Workforce)
3. Build engaging user communities – our own tribes around a common purpose (WePlan Alpine and Open Austin)
4. Enable crowdsourcing – so our users can feel involved (NLA Digitisation – OCR checking)
5. Facilitate the acquisition of new literacies – help our users to learn and interact with today’s online environment

Libraries are rich with social objects – books for one, other items, that people can gather around, around which tribes can be built. We can provide the right conditions for tribes to flourish.

Libraries are only going to become more important as our communities look to use for our informational leadership.

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Matthew Hunter from Thorpe-Bowker then gave a demonstration of Library Thing for Libraries and Aqua Browser, which I had seen before.  What was news was that there is a new interface for Global Books in Print (I think this is it) on its way – something to look forward to.

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Matthew Van Hasselt from the State Library of Victoria (SLV) gave an excellent presentation on email newsletters and why they still have a place in our emarketing strategies.

SLV’s communications needs is to communicate broadly their range of offerings to geodemographically diverse audiences. They do this through traditional paid media advertising, in-house promotional materials, signage, website, editorials in media, social media and through their email newsletter. They use multiple solutions so that the message is communicated as widely as possible and so that they can ensure it is received by as many people as possible.

Email is considered by many to be old hat, a thing of the past, so why use it for marketing?  Email has many things in its favour, including: its a long standing communication tool – accepted and stable, its cheap and fast, measurable, understood, more formal than social media and more widely available – its not blocked by filters and more people have email addresses than social networking accounts.

One of the problems with social media is knowing which of the many tools out there to invest your resources in.  There is also the question of longevity, not only in the tools themselves, but in people’s dedication to them.  Whereas email has proven staying power and high use.

So how do you market via email?

• Always ask permission – NEVER spam
• Understand what your users want
• Decide how you will give them what they want
• Keep it simple, clear and to the point
• Be responsive

What to consider in design? Matthew gave us some information from Nielson’s “Surviving inbox congestion”, including:

• Average time given to an email newsletter after opening is 51 seconds
• Only 19% of content is fully read
• Content is mostly scanned
• 35% of users only skim a small part of the content

Important stuff we need to be aware of before immersing ourselves:

• Have a straightforward subscribing and unsubscribing process
• Have an easy to read privacy policy
• Offer both text and html options – for equality of access
• Strip formatting from the text option – it can much it up otherwise – use Notepad to do this
• Make sure all images have tags – for accessability
• Check all links twice, more if you can
• Have someone else proof read your work
• Use a clear sender address ie. the name of your organisation
• Create brief and relevant subject lines that will engage your reader

He recommend the Inverted pyramid of writing, where the information the reader must have for the communication to be successful is first, then the helpful but not crucial information, then lastly the bonus but not necessary content.  You want to be sure they get the important stuff if they only read for a short time.

Always give your users the option to view the enewsletter in a browser and include all the important links at the bottom of the newsletter.

For more examples, check out the Australian Writers’ Guild (awg.com), Empire Online (empireonline.co.uk), BabyCentre.com and DailyOm.com.

Software services that offer email newsletters include MailChimp, iContact, Vertical Response and Mail Out.

Last notes:

• Subscribe to your newsletter and test the experience
• Don’t build your newsletter in email software
• Get advice from someone already doing it
• Learn some basic HTML for tweaking if needed
• Keep it simple from the start
• Be happy with the limitations of the medium

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Leith Baggs stepped in on the day to replace a last minute cancellation and did a great presentation on viral marketing.   (her presentation is available on the LibMark blog at http://libmarketing.blogspot.com/)

Viral marketing is a broader form of word of mouth – as new internet tools give us a way to spread the marketing message indirectly as well as directly through our users.  Each person online has on average a network of 8-12 people in their close network – people who they would pass important messages onto.

Using such networks, a message’s exposure could grow exponentially, whilst being sustainable as well as cheap to distribute once the product has been created – after all its your users doing all the work of spreading the message!

Tips for great viral marketing:

• Stand out from the crowd
• Make it emotionally charged enough that people will send it on
• Include something unexpected, weird or naughty to gain attention
• Tell a story that people will want to share

YouTube is a great place to load your viral marketing product.

• Creating a video is easy and YouTube is free for posting.
• Homemade videos are fine and should be no longer than 3 minutes (shorter is better)
• Descriptions should be clear and specific (shouldn’t be hard for librarians )
• Don’t use fake customer insertions – product placement is OK though
• Invite your communities to submit videos
• Tell everyone about it
• Make sure bloggers know about it
• But most of all, have fun and experiment.

Viral marketing can also be about a simple email that meets the tips above. Make sure you personalise it so that it comes from a familiar source (ie. your library name).  However, beware of being a spammer and respect the privacy of your users – you must get their contact details from them directly.

Some great examples of viral marketing:

• Dove Evolution – http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com.au/dove-self-esteem-fund/default.asp
• Hotmail (link at the bottom of each email inviting you to get your own account)
• Burger King Subservient Chicken - http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/subservient-chicken.html
• Fruit Burst – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZlhHsMXl6Y

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The next session was Katie Dawson on Accessible Online Places for your Events.  Unfortunately I lost my notes on this session, but I can advise you to check EventBrite as a potential event booking tool for your library.  I know I will be.

I will post the rest of my notes from the afternoon in Part 2, coming soon.

Maspalomas, Canary Islands

The M word is marketing.  Libraries have called it many other things, including outreach, community engagement and more.  Why is it dreaded?  I can think of several reasons including that it reminds people of shonky salespeople (who would want that sort of reputation?), because cold calling people is awkward and uncomfortable and because often librarians are introverted.  Not that these are bad things necessarily.  Can you think of other reasons why it affects library staff so negatively?

Anyway, I have been thinking about this for a while. I have been try to look at my job from an object point of view , looking at why and how I am doing things, not just what. Then this morning I read a blog post Outreach is (un)Dead at In the library with the leadpipe.  It expressed some of what I had been thinking about and is worth a read.

I am responsible for my library’s website and in the whole my daily work includes updating blogs, slideshows and other elements of virtual services.  We have several blogs and the ones I post to either review titles in our collection and/or share news about the library and its services or things happening in our community. The slideshows do the same. So I spend a proportion of my work day directly marketing.

It goes further than that though. In my interactions with customers, I find myself marketing.  Do you know about the library website?  I love that author, have you tried this one?  (on noting what they are borrowing) Did you know that we have this event coming?

And it goes further again.  I said on Facebook (via Twitter) the other day, that I was taking my kids to the library.  A Facebook friend replied that they didn’t think that was too exciting.  The conversation went back and forth for a bit and by the end of it, she was asking me for the details of our storytimes and which would be best for her child.

Marketing is becoming second nature now and its great that it is. We have so much great stuff at the library, collections, services and events and we should be talking them up every chance we get, whether its in person, in print, display or online.  It never ceases to amaze me that even well established library members are not always aware of the breadth of things that we offer – so we should continually be raising their awareness as well as reaching out to others not yet making use of their local library.

Why that is needed, is not necessarily our fault alone.  We can do more to promote  our libraries to our users and to potential users – but we are restricted by limited space, time and budgets, so we can’t do as much as could be done. On the otherhand, our users can have tunnel vision when they visit the library and not see beyond what they are focused on.

So I guess the next thing is for us to get serious about marketing as part of every library staff member’s job description and find ways within our work and our libraries, to promote everything we do and offer.  Its awesome stuff, its free and its relevant.  And it doesn’t have to be an uncomfortable process, it can be as simple as having a friendly conversation.

Marketing for me is no longer the M word – its a key part of my work and I am looking forward to doing a better job of  it.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Marketing and Libraries – check out the M-Word blog, Marketing at the Library Success wiki and of course your local library associations and organisations.

But as part of my appraisal this year, one of my goals was to weed the reference collection at our biggest branch.  This collection has filled 17 bays of 5 shelves each.

It has been quite a few years since it has been weeded well, beyond replacing superseded editions.  And it shows.  I went in expecting to weed maybe up to 40% of the collection.  So far, I have weeded just over half of the collection and the proportion of the collection that had been weeded out is over 60%.

It may have been much higher, but that included our motor manual collection – which coincidentally is the best used part of reference and which, therefore,  will not be hitting the lending shelves or withdrawals anytime soon. And there are other classic titles too, which are much too precious for their unique content, that likewise will not make that journey.

Fair price on the scales by purplbutrfly

The weeding hasn’t been hard to do either.  I’m a chucker rather than a hoarder, but I think that even a hoarder would be hard pressed to keep more than 50% of the collection.  The amount of dust accumulated on each title shows how little the majority of the collection is used in these days of online information domination.

Fortunately, a lot of what I have weeded has gone straight to our lending collection.  It is good quality information, if just a bit dated now, but I’m sure that most of it will do well there, much better than it has done in reference in recent times.

Which brings me back to the hybrid idea.  Print reference is not dead in my library, not yet, but it is no longer the force that it was.  Now it seems that print reference is a backstop to our online resources and the internet, whereas it was always the other way around.  Now its where you go, when its too hard or really to obscure to find something online. And even that’s changing.

For a long time, when talking collection development, we talked about the hybrid library – finding the balance between print and electronic resources. When it comes to reference type material, the scales are now definitely tipped in favour of the electronic.

Its funny though. Even though I work on the library’s virtual spaces and spend a lot of my time online and love it, it has been surprising in a way to see the stalwart of information services – the reference collection, whittled away so, in importance as well as in collection size.  I have long appreciated going to the reference shelves and being virtually guaranteed of finding a book that would help with that immediate user need. I think that I still have some of the romance of the book attached to the librarian in me.

So as our print reference collections dwindle, alongside their corresponding budgets, I say goodbye to the hybrid library.  Online is now dominant in the world of reference, both in the eyes of staff and users.  This is not a bad thing, as there are things online that people seek which we would likely never had in a print reference resource.  But as they go, I cant help but feel a tiny bit wistful for what was.

Maybe because it was the bastion of librarian’s assistance to our users – where we could take them to discover the world of information – something that is not so easy or so common in the online world? Maybe its as I said before that there is romance in books and reference books are  a category all of their own. Maybe its because reference books were always something special, a unique type of book not appropriate for any other location.  Maybe its because each reference book was a treasure just waiting to be discovered.

I’m not sure why it is, I just know that the end of this era is coming fast and its one I will miss.

How about you?

I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while now.  Even considered stopping altogether, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Although I’m not blogging as regularly, I still feel I have something to say and that this is one of the places I can say it.

Some of the reasons I have been blogging less, are that I am twittering more (most days and for most of the day usually) and I have been more writing away from the online, in the form of conference papers and articles, as well as continuing to do book reviews for ALJ.  I have 1 article and 2 conference papers on the go at present too.

I’m feeling less pressure to blog too, probably because of my increased presence on Twitter and Facebook – now I try to blog at least once a month, if not once a fortnight, but only when I have something to say, not just for the sake of it. Maybe I’m finally maturing as a blogger.

And just when I think about blogging less, I find the content to do 3 blog posts in 4 days.  Figures!

I’m far from being the only one thinking about how blogging is changing.  Iris Jastram (Pegasus Librarian) in her post The ebb and flow of my online communities talks about how, between chat rooms, Twitter and her blog, she is having trouble finding her centre.  I can relate to that.

Connecting Librarian was intended to be the centre of my online presence, but its now one of three main locations you will find me.  Its now becoming where I do my deeper thinking, whilst Twitter is where I have more of my interactions and conversations and Facebook is mostly just about connections.  Are others experiencing the same?

Meredith Farkas (Information Wants to be Free) in her post Whither blogging and the library blogosphere? laments what has happened to blogging in the face of micro-blogging.  I too miss the depth of content that comes with blogging and I have noticed a marked decrease in the frequency of blog posts arriving in my RSS reader.  On the other hand however, I love the immediacy and the contact that micro-blogging brings.

I twitter and then feed my twitters through to my Facebook status.  When I write a blog post, I twitter that.  So a blog post can be seen by people who read my blog, who follow me on Twitter or who have friended me on Facebook.  It becomes even more interesting when you start getting comments back on a blog post at each of these places as well.  So where is my centre?

I think that for now, my centre is Twitter – that’s where I spend most of my time in terms of an online presence, but I am not giving up my blog.  I still have many things to share and this is the ideal forum for that. Facebook is just another means of spreading the news from the first two and connecting with people that I can’t connect to otherwise.

So Happy Blogiversary to me and thanks to all my blog subscribers and readers. I am still amazed that you are following me and am grateful that you do.  Be reassured that there will still be blog posts, in the next year, although maybe not as often as I have in the past. I still want to blog though because I am still learning and discovering and find I still want to share all that I do, whilst “connecting new ideas and technologies with library service”.

Before I begin, I am an Information Librarian for a public library service in Australia and on Mondays I work at our Headquarters, doing regional type work.  Usually that is focused on the library’s virtual services, but my manager left 2 weeks ago, so today was a little bit different to normal.

My desk is at bottom left

So what did I get up to at work today – Monday 27th July 2009.

8.20am

• Answered email queries received from our users – mostly what’s my PIN, how do I get this item etc.  They seem to save them all up for first thing Monday morning.

8.40am

• Checked RSS feeds and printed off articles I was to focus on later.
• Read memos.

8.45am

• Some quick catalogue changes to a few old reference books. Helps to keep the hand in.

8.50am

• Adding websites to delicious for future reference. Some for website development, some for proposed research, some for ammunition.

9.00am

• Adding events to our Google calendar – love how easy it is, although wish it would let me incorporate some HTML, eg. links.
• Creating and adding slides promoting said events to our website – this is such a fun thing to do, although it can be time consuming.
• Removing old slides – nothing lasts forever.

9.30am

• Dealing with my former managers mail – got a little backlogged
• Preparing handouts for this week’s eBay seminar

10.00am

• Touring the rearranged floor plan of the library branch to which our HQ is attached – looks great and is a huge functional improvement.

10.10am

• Reference stock work, dealing with superseded editions and making reallocations and withdrawing old stock.

10.50am

• Morning tea time and there is food for morning tea – leftover from working bee to rearrange branch – promised to be good with my food intake today, so didn’t take advantage of it.

11.05am

• Killed the shredder whilst disposing of old outdated documents. Despite assistance and a range of tools, were unable to resuscitate it. Have to call in a specialist.

11.35am

• Gathering feedback forms from Information Services seminars for evaluation of this year’s programs.  Need to make recommendations for next year’s programs to management team meeting in a few weeks.

11.45am

• Quick look at SOPAC in action.  Love how it looks and what it can do, don’t know if we will be able to implement it.

11.55am

• Touched base with my next level up manager – checking that bases are covered and that current projects are moving along OK.

12.35pm

• Out for lunch with partners in crime, former manager and current desk side buddy. Good time catching up with what manager has been up to and catching her up on the gossip (there wasn’t any….)  Succumbed to chocolate mousse for dessert – diet slipped a little there.

1.30pm

• More email information queries, including a doozy that took a bit of time.  Very enjoyable to be able to get my teeth into something a bit more solid.

3.00pm

• Meeting with senior managers about proposed blog survey.  Going to research how and why our users do or don’t use our blogs.

3.30pm

• Catch up on 3 sets of emails, only one of them directly mine.

3.45 til 5.00pm

• Website updating. Including adding new booklists content, linking in to our catalougue, fixing spelling and grammatical errors and more.
• Find one of the holds my husband has placed, in amongst the 27 boxes of them that have just arrived at HQ.
• Make notes to send a few emails when I get home and have been able to think about some of the things that have come up during the day or after I have checked my calendar.

5.05pm

• Pack everything up and head towards home and a whole different list of things to do and done.

Just another day in the life of this Information Librarian. Hope you had a good one.

I highly recommend you check out some other Library Day in the Life stories as well and maybe think about adding your own at some stage.

Since I attended the Aurora Leadership Institute in February this year, I have been thinking more seriously about my profession and where I want to go with it. I absolutely love being a librarian and love my job. I also love my family with all my being. I have been able to balance these two passions quite successfully by working part-time for the past ten years – since my eldest was born.

But now I find I want to do more with my profession. Not that I have been quiet or anything (lol). I have presented at lots of seminars, a few conferences and am starting to get a few things published and I’m enjoying all that immensely and have made a lot of professional contacts and good friends out of that. But that’s feeling like its not enough anymore. I want to do more as a librarian, see if I can make more of an impact on our profession and in a library service and I can’t do that as well as I would like, working part-time at a lower middle-management level position. So that means going back to full-time work and all the impacts that would have on me and my family.

I love what I do, let’s make that clear. So I guess it seems a bit selfish to want more. Maybe that’s one of my struggles.

The other is my family, in particular my kids. I made a decision after Aurora that I would start looking for full-time employment, at a more senior level in 2010. That would give my husband and I time to adjust to the idea and for me to help get the kids ready for the change. The problem is that they’re already keen for the change (although I’m sure they don’t understand all the implications), its me that’s struggling with the concept.

We have been getting the kids ready by letting them take some more responsibility – in the main, in getting to and from school by themselves.  When I don’t work, I had been dropping them and collecting them from school – they in now doing that for themselves (with a lot of checks and balances in place of course – I’m still a neurotic mother ).  They are loving it. They keep asking me when they can go to the next step.

I’m the one who is holding back, because I’m going to miss this so much.  I know its going to change anyway as they grow older and become more independent, but I find that I am trying to hold onto this moment in their lives as long as possible. Again, what you would expect from a mother, but not what I would have expected of myself.

Although I have the greatest respect for stay-at-home mum’s, I knew early on that it wasn’t something I could do. By the time I had been home 6 months with my newborns, I was going stir crazy.  Working part-time has given me the best of both worlds and allowed me to be a better mother as a result. For that I am truly grateful, to both my husband  and my workplace for giving me the opportunity to do this.

So 10 years on, its time for a change and time to deal with all the struggles it entails. I know I can make a difference in my profession and I know there will be differences at home, I just hope that we can all adapt to it as we have done in other situations before.

Anyway, as ever, this blog has been a place to help me get my thoughts straight on something I have been mulling over.  If you have gone through a similar process, I would love to hear how you have managed it and whether it has worked out for you and your family – both personally and professionally. An encouragement or a caution if you please – either way they would be much appreciated.

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.

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.

I am a librarian.  I recommend you check out Librarian Idol’s recent post The Great I AM….. Andrew manages to express succintly how I feel about that. (thanks Andrew)

I decided that I wanted to be  librarian in Grade 6.  We had a great librarian at my school, who made the library fun and got me interested in more than reading, which I was already more than interested in.

Going through high school I think my teachers thought it unusual for anyone to be so dedicated to knowing what they wanted to do. They encouraged me to consider other options, one assessment required me to investigate another – my choice?  Marine Biologist.  How further apart can you get.

I never doubted that a librarian was what I was going to be. I was accepted into the course of my choice on first offers and was happy doing it.  All confirmed what I had decided when I was 11.  I was happiest with reference related subjects and that has held up for the 23 years since I graduated.

I am a born reference librarian.  Anyone asks a question and I have to answer it, even if its a retrospective one. If there is a problem that needs to be solved that interests me, I need to find a solution. As a librarian, there have been a lot of such problems.   

If you’re on Facebook, I recommend you try out their What kind of librarian are you application.  Of course it came out with me being a reference librarian. I seem to know myself reasonably well by now.

What it said about me was: ” Reference Librarian” – You are a human search engine who always wins Trivial Pursuit. Logical, direct and clever, you’ll spend days tracking down bits of information, even though the patron who requested it has long since moved on. If you can stop beginning all of your sentences with “Well, actually” or “I’ve always found that…”, your co-workers will start talking to you again. Primary sources and well-structured databases make you quiver with excitement, and you probably stand the best chance of surviving Armageddon due to the breadth of knowledge tucked away among your little gray cells.“  For those of you who know me – stop laughing!

Well its not entirely true, I’ve moved on from pure information seeking for patron’s sakes (but still an entirely consuming personal passion, lol), onto the joy that the internet and bringing it to and using it for the benefit of our users.

Stepping back in time once again. (cue up music and shimmering screen as we go back – picture is in colour though, I’m not THAT old).  In year 10 I did my work experience at a public library and didn’t think much of it. Not that it put me off being a librarian – I knew it could be better. However, it had me thinking that when I qualified, that I would work in a school or special library, because it would give me the variety I wanted. As such, I did my course placements in a school library and a special library.  I enjoyed both those experiences and it seemed to confirm my chosen direction.

However, it was not to be.  Whatever you believe in, God, fate, coincidence and my own fickle mind took me to where I never expected to go.  I started applying for jobs towards the end of my final semester at Uni. One such job, was in a public library. I ignored it the first week I saw it, but when I saw it again the following week, for reasons unknown even to me after all this time,  I applied.  Was delighted to get an interview and awestruck when I got the job. Even moreso when reviewing my application letter later and saw the amount of typing errors still in the letter, even after the liberal use of correction fluid. (PCs weren’t around at that point – it was the good old portable typewriter).

When I first started work, there was an Apple IIc and an Apple IIe computer available for staff use only.  I had never seen anything other than mainframes and dumb terminals, so they were totally new to me.  But being a curious person (good librarian trait) and not scared to play (another good trait), I started learning and within 6 months, was the person everyone came to for help with them.

How things have changed since that day nearly 24 years ago.

So on reflection, what about me personally, has helped make me a good librarian. I’ve mentioned some of those things already, but here they are in list form:

• curiousity
• desire to learn
• problem-solver
• information seeker
• question answerer
• like to make people happy (sometimes not such a good thing)
• not afraid of new things
• like to experiment
• like to share what I learn
• persistent and determined

And many more.  They have all helped me to do a good job over the years and have helped me to be an ever improving librarian who loves what she does.

So what’s your story?  What about you makes you a good librarian? Although Library Week is usually about promoting libraries to our communities, lets celebrate Library Week for ourselves as well by reaffirming our librarian-ness and being proud to say I am a librarian.