Begin Again

Posted on January 6, 2009 by David

So, I haven’t done any blogging since I quit my last full-time job to concentrate on the second year of my graduate program. I’m enrolled in the Masters in Library and Information Science program at the Information School of the University of Washington. I’ve been thinking about starting up a little website to contribute some of my thoughts about things I’m learning about in school, as well as things I’m trying to pay attention to that are going on ‘out there’, so I thought a good way to get things rolling is to dusts off my old blog from one of the WEB 2.0 learning programs we ran through at the library I worked at previously.

There are also several technology related components I’d like to explore and gain some hands on experience with before finishing up this year – I hope to install Drupal and Moodle on a server and play around with tailoring those as a staff intranet. I hope to spend some time installing and working with both Koha and Evergreen open-source ILS systems. I have a server that I just set up running Debian Linux – so I guess I should learn a bit more about that, too. Oh, and some PHP, MySQL, um….and a ton of other stuff.

First though, I need to figure out how to add my domains to my brother’s hosting provider. Oh, and stay up with all my classes as this new quarter gets underway.

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Chat & IM Ideas

Posted on May 10, 2008 by David

One of my instructors forwarded an email to our class list-serve with several links to possible chat/IM tools for libraries. I had already been looking at Meebo and Pidgin as options. The new item to me is called Libraryh3lp. Information is available at:

http://code.google.com/p/libraryh3lp/

and

http://libraryh3lp.blogspot.com/

It looks like it would be a fairly robust and full featured option for our needs and for implementation at our library. I was hesitant about other options, including picking one of the mainstream instant messaging applications, because of their limitations. I really want to find something that could be monitored by several people and could allow forwarding or tasking a chat/IM session to another librarian.

I’ll be talking to several others on staff to see what they think and what next steps would be good to further explore this project. We would eventually need to develop policies and procedures, training materials and tutorials, and have several training and exploration experiences for the whole staff before rolling the service out for the general public.

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Trying some new things

Posted on February 20, 2008 by David

Today we talked about adding some new ways to communicate with one another. New ways to share information that may be relevant today or perhaps next year. We are looking into ways this could be realized. We talked about (re)setting up the librarydroppins blog and we are starting working on that. We are also going to look for information on what other libraries may be using. I am looking into what may be available for hosting on our server and see what we would need to do to set that up.

We also talked about adding a chat/IM feature for when the computer lab moves upstairs – that way students can call for help from their computers and perhaps we can help them remotely or go to them if need be. I added the meebo me widget to my sidebar. We gave it a try and things worked fine from both ends. We thought IM might be a nice intra-staff communication mechanism as well as possibly opening it up to the public website at some point.

More digging around and research will be needed as we look into what to use and what meets our needs the best. Perhaps mediawiki, drupal, edublog, or some other software would be an option for communication and sharing. More to come on chat/IM stuff.

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