Thanks to Mick for organizing the Chicagoland Library Drupal Meeting in Oak Park. The presentation on "Top 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules" by Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL was excellent (see slideshare). My presentation on implementing WYSIWYG is below. I'll have the audio up shortly.
Here's something I launched in between bites of turkey over the weekend: http://www.CitizenAction-IL.org
It's for a great statewide organization that's very active in health care reform among other things.
Basically I took what they already had -- essentially a site consisting of links and pdf files -- and completely automated the thing so that in-house staff can add content themselves rather than sending it out to a web specialist.
The thing's running on Drupal with Panels for the front page. My focus was on automating as much of the site as possible including all the navigation and menus -- so that again, in-house staff could manage these things.
I went with WYSIWYG for the first time for content creation, including IMCE for managing stock photos and of course, ImageCache for pretty much everything else. Since the in-house staff was more comfortable with MS Word, going this way made sense.
Style-wise, I pretty much worked off the design of the previous site. This allowed me, again, to focus on the automation side, while leaving the option, further down the road, of coming up with something a bit more snazzy.
For the moment, it's totally serviceable and meets the needs of the organization. And that's what ultimately counts.
So I was checking out the location of a library -- from Nelson, NZ, no less -- that someone had just posted on LibSite.org.
It turns out, Google has a StreetView for the place. I clicked in, all prepared for something exotic. Here's what I found:
Okay, today was the official launch of the new community site that I've been working on for the Public Library Association: PLAspace.org
The announcement reads:
Today marks another milestone in the rollout of PLAspace. We officially open the doors to new CoPs and new participants.
We created PLAspace to give Public Library Association members a place where they could share ideas and work together on common interests. Today, the first official day for the site, we already have several dozen members and a half-dozen CoPs.
"Red Scare (1918-1921)" was a project I did for extra credit while finishing up my MLS at Queens College (CUNY). It must have been around 1997.
The online exhibit consisted of political cartoons with some photos from the period 1918-1921. There were over a hundred images illustrating the hysteria of the time -- most scanned from hard-bound copies of the Literary Digest, then conveniently housed in the stacks of NYU Bobst Library. The exhibit is hosted by Newman Library, Baruch College (CUNY) where I went after NYU.
Anyway, every once and a while, I get a request for permission to use one or two of the images. There was a lot of interest in them around the time of 9/11 but even afterwards, the requests still come in.
I usually explain that the copyright has long run out on the images and that they're free for the downloading. The latest request was from one of the College Prep Testing Services. They want to use one or two of the images for their section on U.S. History.
I guess, I'll have to upgrade the project at some point. Ten years is a long time for content like this on the Web.
We're doing a 'soft-launch' of PLAspace.org -- the community website that I've been working on together with some very nice people from the Public Library Association as well as a number of volunteers.
It's open to the public but it won't be officially announced till sometime in September. Anyway, have a look:
I wish I could say my lack of posting for the last week or so is because of me 'gone fishing'.
Instead, I'm working on a site for the Public Library Association that, happily, is close to completion.
The thing's looking good but it's taken all my free time away.
I've been involved with so many different things that I completely forgot the one-year anniversary of LibSite.org! Shame on me.
Yes, April 10, 2007 was the historic launch of the user-generated Library Website recommendation service. I was reminded of it recently by the number of sites posted -- increasingly -- from all over the world.
Most recently, and most wonderfully, we've had a collection of interesting examples of Web 2.0 à la française.
I'd like to thank everyone who's listed their site there. The experiment continues.
I've got a neat job building a community site for one of the library organizations here. I'll talk more about it at our Drupal4Lib BoF in Anaheim but basically the idea is to promote online collaboration. Needless to say (for those in the know), I'll be making great use of Drupal's Organic Groups.
Both ChicagoLibrarian.com and LibSite.org get a wonderful write-up in a brochure from ProQuest:
"Specific to library-related website design, Chicagolibrarian.com and librarian Leo Robert Klein maintain an excellent "recommendation service" for viewing best practices, innovations, and experiments being tried by your colleagues worldwide. Please take a minute to visit libSite at http://libsite.org and you'll become a frequent visitor."
It's on their "Customer Tools" page under "How-to guide on Marketing Your Library's Online Resources".
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