So, here are the five projects that brought challenges, excitement, fun, and exhaustion to my work life since November:

• Mobile app: This is a project I started a few months before my new position began, but our target launch date was the end of December so I spent a lot of time on this towards the end of the year. We worked with Boopsie to develop the app and I think it turned out well, even if there are a few things we need to improve sooner rather than later. The app does a lot of things, but I’m sure the most commonly used feature will be the ability to log in to your personal account to place holds and renew items. The app’s so-called “killer feature” is the ability for people to check out materials from their own phone/tablet using their camera as a scanner or by punching in barcodes manually. My work on this project involved figuring out the content, the menu structure, working with our graphic designer, and going back-and-forth with my contacts at Boopsie to make sure the app worked the way we needed it to. Working with a vendor on a project can save you time in some ways, but it can also be very time consuming when there’s any customization happening.
• New web catalog: My library recently began using SOPAC, an open source Drupal module, for our web catalog interface. Several of my colleagues began this project awhile ago, but I was asked to take the lead soon after my new position was created. The biggest challenge for me on this project was to get up-to-speed on all the development and decision-making that occurred before I got involved, and to figure out how and where I could make a positive impact. I tried focusing my efforts on prioritizing the remaining issues/fixes and identifying last-minute improvements to improve the design and usability of the catalog. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been and I’m sure there were times when I slowed things down, but I think we’re getting there! We have thousands of users who have switched over to the new account system and are using the new catalog regularly, but it’s hard to hear anything but the small number of complaints and negative comments we get from the public and staff. It’s all feedback, though, and feedback can only help us improve things moving forward. Sidenote: I have even more respect for the expertise of our catalogers now that I see all the ways their daily work with our catalog records impacts the user’s end-experience.
• Pilot digital media lab: One of the highlights of my short career so far had been creating the Digital Media Lab at Skokie Public Library, so when I came over to Arlington Heights I was hoping to one day have the opportunity to create a similar space. Luckily, the executive management team at my library see eye-to-eye with me on this and we now have a pilot digital media lab open to the public. We have not publicized the space much since we’re not ready to staff it the way we want, but we’re planning a big publicity push at the end of February. Besides helping to figure out what equipment and software should go into the Studio, much of my time on this project is spent on staff training. We have a great group of computer assistants that are very tech-savvy, but every one of them still benefited from workshops on iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork led by a local trainer. Next week, we have 2-hour one-on-one sessions scheduled to help staff understand the basics of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. We also use Lynda.com extensively. To help the rest of the staff understand what we’re trying to do with these new services, our Digital Services staff hosted an open house, where we provided demos, talked about what people might want to work on in the lab, and, of course, offered refreshments. It was a great way to get buy-in from across the library and get people talking to customers about the new services.
• Evaluating the website: My new position places me in charge of the library’s website in terms of content, design, and usability, so in the past three months, I started ongoing conversations with colleagues about the state of our website and where we’re going with it in the next year or so. I had some familiarity with Drupal from a few years ago, but I needed to get a lot more comfortable with it in a hurry so I attended a “Drupal in a Day” workshop in December and also attended the Chicago Drupal Camp. I’m also figuring out workflows between myself and several colleagues who I will be working with frequently on web stuff. The new catalog took up most of my time thinking about the website, so I’m still in the process of figuring out what needs to be done with the website and how to plan my work out. I have to say that the recent ALA Techsource webinar, “10 Steps to a User-Friendly Website,” led by Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches-Johnson gave me a lot of ideas!
• Organizational Realignment: Besides the creation of my new position and department, Digital Services, there were significant changes made to other departments to help position the library as we offer new services and tweak how we offer current ones. This meant different things to different staff, but for me it meant helping to create the vision for the new Digital Services group and the new Customer Services group, which partly consists of my former department, Information Services (still with me?). Lots of meetings (the good, productive kind mostly!) to discuss the needs of our community, our services, staffing, communication, timelines, space use, and the future of the library.

So, those are some of the highlights from my first three months on the new job. It’s been a whirlwind, but one that I think my colleagues and I are coming out of intact! I’ll try to write more later this week with some details about what’s in store for us this year.

http://apalaweb.org

My goal was to give him a nice looking, functional, user-friendly, easy-to-maintain website. He wanted to use it to tell others about the church and to communicate to his congregation members. Unionrestoration.org is what we came up with after much discussion and tweaking. It’s still a work in progress, like every website, but the basic elements of the site are in place and I’m pretty happy with it.

The site is built with WordPress.org software, which is a popular CMS most often used for blogs but also capable of being used for more complex websites. I modified an existing theme and worked with Sang to come up with a good architecture for the site’s pages. I used other church websites like Garden Christian Fellowship (my old church in SoCal) as inspiration. It was a lot of fun to work on the site, especially discovering stuff like Tiltviewer (a cool way to display photos).

It was also fun to work with a friend from grad school, Dan So, on the church’s logo. He worked with Sang to come up with what I think it a pretty cool look. Dan’s super-talented!

Please visit the site and take a look. I’m interested in getting feedback on the design and usability of the site. Is there anything that doesn’t work or could be improved? What aspects do you especially like?

Building the Next Generation Public Library Website with Drupal
John Blyberg, Darien Library, CT
Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor District Library, MI

John Blyberg
Drupal in engineering terms and what is a public library supposed to be
Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System)

• import or create documents
• fluid management of blog entries
• effective user management
• delegation of roles
• version control
• separation of form from content (allows your web designers to design and your content people to create content)
• user participation (solicit opinions/comments/questions from the public)
• searchable

As opposed to…

• screwing around with dreamweaver
• fussing with ftp
• WTF do I do with all these files?
• Circ vs. Reference vs. Youth vs… (turf wars)
• (Battling for the unsustainable)

It’s 2007, does your website still suck?

• Unless you’re absolutely sure it doesn’t it probably does.
• Most public libraries suck
• Our websites need to be a public representation of a cohesive and comprehensive technology strategy
• Don’t bother with a new website unless you’re completely and absolutely committed to making it excellent…implementation, not necessarily equipment

What are some key components of a good PL website?

• a firm commitment to not settle
• single sign-on (very critical to customer service)
• integrated opac (users don’t care that it’s difficult for us to overcome this…all they know is that it’s difficult to use the opac and website)
• significant quantities of content generated everyday
• usefulness
• understand your community
• youth
• staff buy-in
• website is an extension of the library experience, not a resource.

Drupal is a means to an end, not the end itself

• simply installing drupal won’t make your website great.

Drupal is

• open source
• written in PHP (very accessible, easy-to-use scripting language)
• relatively low hardware requirements
• can be run on open source platforms
• free (though the time is not)
• pronounced Droopull not Droo-pal

Taxonomies

• classify content
• site organization
• cross-post stories, blog entries, etc.
• can be extended to custom nodes

Theme Engine

• separates form from content so you can change the theme without affecting the content
• closely integrated with drupal’s API
• supports multi-site or civic spaces
• completely customizable
• several templating engines available
• PHP Template, Smarty

API

• application programming interface (like a wall outlet)
• API allows you to move data back and forth seamlessly between software
• Hooks (do stuff when something happens)
• Search functions (create custom content types that are instantly searchable; use the search hook to query external databases, or just about anything…)
• Form Generation/Validation
• Create forms rapidly and validate forms easily
• Menu System
• menus are complex, even when they’re not
• menus are contextual
• manage menus easily
• api.drupal.org

Eli Neiburger
aadl.org (started project in Dec. 04 and launched in July 05)
saw Drupal as the best tool to meet their design goals
Joomla! is a serious competitor to Drupal and is very similar
When you choose a product, you want to make sure there is a vibrant community behind it so you can learn from others and share knowledge with others…makes it more sustainable
July 05 – 600 registered users
July 07 – 40,800 registered users (averaging 30-50 new users everyday)

Top five entry pages (what are people doing on the website):

• front page
• catalog start page
• rss feeds (almost a quarter of their traffic)
• card catalog image
• my account

aadl.org by the numbers

• 40,000 registered users
• 32,000 registered patrons
• 70% of active cardholders (similar to % of patrons who have provided an email)
• 4,250 content nodes
• 10, 833 post comments (at least 9500 from teens)
• 13,000 contact us comments
• 85 posting accounts (everyone in the organization is invited to contribute content as long as they have permission from their manager and take a 30-minute training session)
• 248 taxonomy terms in 7 vocabularies
• 274 patron reviews, 2092 patron tags (most on the manga materials)
• 3,473 catalog card notes, 5,931 saved cards

Materials blogs, events blog, services blog, research blog

• promoting more than just books

Contact us page (with browsable comments and responses)

• great way to let it all hang out and show everyone the great customer service you provide (growing trend in corporations to be more transparent), even to the most difficult patrons

My Account Page

• check request status
• check-out history (purely elective service)
• fine and fees
• personal card catalog
• my tags (does not replace subject headings, in addition to them)…view as list and view as cloud
• reviews and comments
• wireless devices
• request ILL

Publishing content

• can link to subject headings, titles, authors, wikipedia articles, external websites, etc.

Wrapping the Catalog

• Browser -> Drupal -> ILS
• single sign-on (easy user authentication)
• customizes your data before it goes back to the user

When Nancy Pearl, the model for the coolest action figure on the planet, was the Executive Director for the Washington Center for the Book, she asked the question, “What if all Seattle read the same book?” Well, she made that thought come to life by creating the first-ever “One City One Book” program and soon after libraries all around the country began creating similar community-wide reading programs.

For the past 6+ months, I’ve been a part of a dedicated group of people (mostly Library staff) committed to bringing this “One City One Book” concept to Thousand Oaks. It’s easily the biggest project I’ve been involved with since I started here, and I have to say, it’s going to be an incredible program. The book that the committee chose for the inaugural Thousand Oaks Reads is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. If you haven’t read it yet, you really should pick it up.

In the Fall of this year, there will be several weeks when book discussions (at the Library, coffee shops, bookstores) and special events will take place all around the City. Jonathan Safran Foer is even visiting Thousand Oaks to talk about his book and his work. I’m really excited about this project because it really represents many of the positive things that libraries bring to their communities. It’s meant as a celebration of reading and literature…it’s meant to strengthen the community…and it’s meant to enrich people’s lives.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the project’s website at thousandoaksreads.org. Working on the website has given me the chance to become more familiar with WordPress and learn a bit more about web design and CSS, so I’m very happy about that. It’s very much a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please let me know.

By the way, when I was in grad school at UM-SI, I heard Nancy Pearl give a lecture on campus and she was truly inspirational. Afterwards, I approached her to say hello and have my Nancy Pearl action figure autographed (yes, that makes me a certified librarian geek!). I told her that I planned on becoming a librarian and she asked me what type. I told her I was interested in public and academic libraries, and she encouraged me to become a public librarian. I believe her exact words were, “Public. Go with Public. We need more good people in public libraries.” I took her advice