Assignment Three

I conducted an interview via email with Dean Frey, director of the Red Deer Public Library in Red Deer, Alberta. The transcript is below.

Dean Frey: Intro: We're using Drupal 5.7 for a variety of websites:

www.rdpl.org - our main library website

www.electionforum.ca - a site devoted to the 2007 Municipal Elections - this will be re-started for the 2010 elections.

www.artsparks.org - a site about arts programming for persons with developmental disabilities.

www.digitalreddeer.ca - a digital repository

www.villalobos.ca - a site about Heitor Villa-Lobos (a personal project of mine)

staff.rdpl.org - a staff intranet

board.rdpl.org - a Library Board extranet

Me: How and where did you hear about content management systems?

DF: My IT Librarian (now Assistant Director) Cory Stier was well-versed in all of our CMS options.

Me: What were the motivations to use a content management system for the library's site?

DF: We wanted to distribute the content creation to a variety of people throughout the library, and to separate the content from the look+feel of the websites. We also wanted a robust back-end database to manage stories, information about events, image libraries, links, and specialized data. As we developed our websites using Drupal, we got more involved in blog posts and comments, and also needed user control for password-protected intranet and extranet sites.

Me: What criteria led to the adoption of Drupal, in particular?

DF: We wanted a robust system from the Open Source world: something that had a significant user-base to develop and test new functionality. We liked that functionality could be easily added by adding newe modules.

Me: What benefits does Drupal offer over the previous site or other content management systems you've used?

DF: Everything from 2. and 3. above, plus the opportunity to see some fairly mature library Drupal websites in operation. We liked Drupal's openness, and the upgrade path to new functionality. Drupal is very, very solid.

Me: Are there disadvantages to using Drupal?

DF: Some modules (Events, for example) are complex to setup, though once they're in place, they're very easy to keep running.

Me: How was the learning curve?

DF: On the setup side, my impression is that it was pretty quick for our IT staff. I was involved in putting together bits of the staff and board sites, and most of villalobos.ca. As more of an end-user than an IT person, I would say the setup of the site was of moderate difficulty. I think most staff and Board member end-users have found content development very easy and intuitive. Having secure sites to learn in made things less stressful.

Me: Are departments or non-IT staff updating their own content? If so, what kind of training was used for those staff?

DF: Yes. There has been some training - mostly one-on-one, I think. We've encouraged posting and commenting by all in the staff site, and that's worked out very well. Practising in the staff site (especially in the "Just Testing" and "Personal" sections) has given people the skills and experience to be able to update public sites.

Me: My class has been posting all of our assignments to a public blog. May I post your name and the library's name on my class blog?

DF: Yes, please do. We'll be on the lookout for Drupal-ready librarians in the future, so it's good for us to get our name out there. Red Deer is a great place to live, by the way, though it's a tiny bit colder here than it is in Georgia.

MLIS 7505 Assignment Four

Rhiannon Shoults-Wilson
MLIS 7505
Dr. Fatih Oguz
9 June 2009

Assignment Four

I went to our DSpace implementation and clicked on My DSpace, which allowed me to create an account, which was very simple. After I was given administrative privileges, I created my community. The technical side of this was very simple, though I wish there was more input on the site regarding the content. For instance, when creating or editing the community, there is the option to add "sidebar text," but no description of what type of information should go there, or how it should be different from the "short description" or the "introductory text."

I next created a collection within my community, which I decided would house a couple of works I'm considering for my MLIS portfolio.

I visited the metadata registry and added a new field, dc.title.shoults-wilson. I then emailed Larry and had him add the field to the input form and make it indexable. After that had been done, I uploaded a couple of files - a paper from my cataloging class and a pathfinder I created for my reference class. I input information into the fields, including the "Shoults-Wilson title" field. I used this field to indicate what class and project the document belonged to, e.g. "MLIS 7100 Pathfinder." The input was very intuitive, though it relied on the user having an understanding of the metadata elements. If I were to implement this system for end users to upload their own documents, I would want the ability to link to style guides and information about what is required for each metadata field.

After I had uploaded my documents, I received emails telling me my submissions had been accepted. The emails also included a Handle System permanent identifier, which did not work (I would assume this is because we don't have the service set up for our test installation). Sending this permanent URI to the document owner is a very useful tool.

I went to the advanced search, and searched Title for MLIS. This brought up both of my documents, because I had included this term in the "Shoults-Wilson title" field, though it wasn't in the displayed title.

From my experiences here, I feel like DSpace is a potentially powerful tool for libraries and their digital collections, though it would require a lot of time to grasp all of the available features, and I think a lot of customization would be required to make a useable repository for community users to upload and modify (as opposed to librarians). I know that is what DSpace was designed for, and it's interesting to see how libraries are implementing that. One such is IDEALS, the repository for faculty, staff, and graduate student research at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They have customized their installation, created lots of help documentation, and have a final review process by librarians, and this allows community members to upload their own documents using DSpace, saving a lot of staff time. This illustrates what a great tool this can be!

URLs Created:
My Community: http://mlis.library.gatech.edu/handle/123456789/32
My Collection: http://mlis.library.gatech.edu/handle/123456789/33
My Cataloging Paper: http://mlis.library.gatech.edu/handle/123456789/99
My Pathfinder: http://mlis.library.gatech.edu/handle/123456789/100

MLIS 7505 Assignment Two

Rhiannon Shoults-Wilson
MLIS 7505
Dr. Fatih Oguz
31 May 2009

Assignment Two

After Suzannah, our team leader, adjusted the site's settings to accept new registrations, I was able to create an account on our site. I then updated my profile, so that my name displayed as "Rhiannon" rather than my user name when I made posts and comments.

After my status was changed to "admin," I looked over the site and the changes my team members had already made. I went to Settings and updated the blog's tagline, which still read "Just another WordPress weblog" to say "Applied Technologies in Library Practice." I created my bio page, and set it to appear under the "About" page, with those of my teammates. Inserting text and a picture was very simple. I changed the text of the "About" page, which was still set to the WordPress default, to describe our site.

Rita had already changed the site to the ArcLight theme. I looked at the other installed themes, and decided that one was the best, but I wanted to make a few modifications. The theme by default had background images used for the navigational buttons and the headers for the widgets in the sidebar, but had the options to change to an image-free version. I made this change, because I liked the look better and it improves load times (particularly for those on slow connections). I mostly liked the colors, but I wanted to get rid of the pink the theme used for the widget headers and the link hover text. I did this using the CSS modifications box on the theme settings page. I've never really studied CSS, so I don't know the proper syntax, but I'm able to make small changes like this by finding the appropriate spots in the style sheet, copying them and then changing to the color code I want. Learning proper CSS is definitely on my to-do list!

I next went to the widgets page and looked at what we were using. I removed the Events Calendar widget, as we weren't currently using it, and the Search widget, as the theme had a Search box in the header. I also removed the Recent Posts widget, and instead added the Archive widget, which allows viewers to browse archives of our posts by month. I decided I wanted a box that showed the recent posts from our class blogs in the sidebar. To do this, I went to Yahoo! Pipes (which we heard about in the lecture on mashups) and created a pipe that combined the RSS feeds from our four blog feeds. I then took the RSS feed from the pipe, and added the RSS widget to our sidebar, so it shows the ten most recent posts from our blogs. Initially the feed was showing our posts in a weird order, in the order in which it had imported our posts from our blogs. So I added a filter to the pipe to tell it to sort by the post's timestamp. It took a while for the RSS feed to resort itself, but it looks right now.

I then searched the plug-in directory, sorting through the most popular plug-ins. I found the Add to Any plug-in, which adds a button to all posts and pages, allowing the viewer to add the post or page to an email, their browser's bookmarks, or one of over 100 sites, such as Digg and Delicious. I really like and use these buttons on other sites, so thought it would be good here. I emailed Dr. Oguz and once it was installed I activated it. It works well for the services I've tried (Delicious, Gmail, and Facebook).

I made posts to our site's blog to document what I had done for my teammates. When I did so, I added categories from the ones Rita had created. I also added a few topical tags, such as "RSS" and "CSS."

I had used WordPress before this assignment, so everything was pretty familiar to me already. The most trouble I had was with working out the kinks with Yahoo! Pipes and the RSS widget. I'm glad I did this - Pipes seems to be very powerful potentially and I'm glad I'm now familiar with it. WordPress is a really great tool - it looks great out of the box, is easy to use, and is really potentially customizable with the plug-ins (and even more customizable if you're familiar with scripting).

URLs Created:

Our Site: http://www.valdosta.edu/~foguz/mlis7505/team5/
My Bio: http://www.valdosta.edu/~foguz/mlis7505/team5/?page_id=96
Our Site's About Page: http://www.valdosta.edu/~foguz/mlis7505/team5/?page_id=2
The Pipe for our Combined Blogs: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=eJa8BKBL3hG4JHPa_g6H4A

MLIS 7505 Assignment One

Rhiannon Shoults-Wilson
MLIS 7505
Dr. Oguz
24 May 2009

Assignment 1

Part One:

I created my class blog at http://rhi-lib.blogspot.com. I customized my settings, including having comments emailed to me and excluding my blog from search engines. I also customized my layout by changing some colors, rearranging and removing items from the sidebar, and adding script that lists recent Delicious links in the sidebar. I posted a link to the blog's RSS feed to the discussion board.

Part Two:

I decided to create my standalone RSS feed to list entries from the Athens Regional Library System's "Featured Genres" column. I did this through RapidFeeds as directed. It is located at http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/23631/. I posted this link to the discussion board.

Part Three:

I already use Google Reader and subscribe to several library blogs, as well as the MLIS Program's feed. I added a few new blogs from the suggested list, including Information Wants to Be Free (Meredith Farkas's blog), and Cliff Landis's blog. I also added the feeds from my classmates' blogs that they have posted to the discussion board. I created a new folder for these, labeled "mlis 7505."

Part Four:

I decided that my imaginary library is a mid-sized public library (service population approximately 200,000 people) that wants to create a wiki to contain general subject guides. An example of the type of wiki they are envisioning is the St. Joseph County Public Library's subject guides wiki.

I visited WikiMatrix, and began their comparison wizard. I decided that, even though this would be a staff-edited wiki and not subject to public vandalism, a page history feature would still be useful for editing, and was thus necessary. I decided that, as staff would be trained on updating the wiki if they were not already familiar with it, a WYSIWYG interface was not necessary. I decided commercial support wasn't strictly necessary. As the wiki will be run by a small community of users in one location, I decided localization wasn't necessary. I decided the flexibility and security of running the wiki software on the library's hardware was preferable to a wiki hosted by an outside service. I decided to go with a database system, for its search capabilities. I decided Open Source software was important, both philosophically and to reduce costs. I did not restrict based on programming languages.

The wizard left me with 44 choices, so I scrolled through the comparison table for these. I removed the software that was still in early development - I use such software in my personal life, but I do not want to try to implement a professional project with it. I removed software that did not run on Windows, as that is what our library computers use. I removed software that did not include a preview function, which I thought was important. I restricted to software that had the most common editing features, such as revision logs, and minor changes. I removed software that did not have support forums.

After doing all this and browsing through pages, I ended up choosing TikiWiki. It has all of the features we might want for the wiki and, since it has CMS components, would enable the library to easily include non-wiki elements, such as RSS feeds and forums, if they chose to in the future.

Part Five:

I logged into my Google Docs account, created a new document and typed this up. I then shared it to my blog.