CMS

Yesterday I attended a CMS workshop and I just now found an article on evaluating Content Management Systems. The workshop was great and with a bit of practice I'm sure I will be able to use CMS on web pages that I create (we "various committees" or the "royal we" are theoretically working on both a staff and a student manual at the library level that can be easily adapted for individual department libraries). Since all of the content on the illinois.library.edu has to be created using our CMS so it is compliant with the IITAA (Illinois Information Technology Accessability Act) it is important to at least be able to know what indicates compliance so the Office of Services web tech wizards can vet it.

I have to say that this was an enjoyable workshop. I was able to understand almost everything that Robert and Camille talked about, but Robert talks very, very fast...he is definitely over caffeinated. I love our web tech people.

Here is a list of what the article on evaluating content management systems says is vital in a good CMS:

1. Intuitiveness: easy to understand and use

2. Flexibility and Ease of Customization

3. Extensibility via Plugins and Modules

4. No Need for Programming Knowledge

5. Optimized for Performance and Speed

6. Security

7. Documentation and Community Support

8. Emphasis on Web Standards and Best Practices

operation ebook drop

Edward C. Patterson and other indie authors have started a "grassroots project" to send ebooks to soldiers. It started small, at Amazon, but Mark Coker @ Smashwords found out and the project has snowballed.

I encourage all authors to participate. Spread the word. Thanks.

(Proud mother of a veteran)

i'm back

Now that I am over the Heiney flu (H1N1) and I no longer have kidney stones (added insult to injury and it took from 9:15am to 4:30pm to have them removed) and I am back at work after spending 3 weeks in a drug induced fog, I am back at my keyboard, and ready to tackle various library problems and other topics of interest.

First thing is a lovely rant on curation and curators by @mikecane. I'm not sure I agree with all of his points, but I agree with some of them. Particularly:

Upwards of ninety-percent of the books I have read in my pre-Internet life were based on this:

1) Stumbling upon the book in a store
2) Stumbling upon the book in a public library
3) A passing mention in a non-fiction article
4) Having another writer mention the book

Where is the “curation” in any of that? Half were chance encounters, half were also chance encounters with mentions by others. There was no Curator tapping me on the shoulder to get my attention.

And in this Internet Age? It’s come down to number 4 — writers recommending other writers — and a new one, number 5: readers mentioning books.

Gift Books

When someone retires, dies or just changes offices one of the first things they do is gift the library with all of the collected piles of books, journals, conference proceedings, etc that have been growing in the dusty corners of their particular academic haven for however many decades they have been ensconced in their ivy covered halls.

Each piece that is boxed up and dragged over to the circulation desk in my particular library then must be searched in the OPAC and in WorldCat and a pronouncement must be made. Do we have it? No. Is it appropriate for our collection? Yes? Send it to cataloging. No? Send it to Acquisitions /Gifts / the library book sale.

There are often interesting discoveries, like the autobiography of M.E. Ensminger, the best known animal scientist of the 20th century or the proceedings of a workshop on postgraduate curriculum deleopment in animal science in Australia, but we are more likely to get the 19th copy of the collected Yearbooks of Agriculture for 1963-1975. It's a tossup between treasure and trash and it takes a lot of work to sort, search and list these things. Still, it's better than just scooping them up and dumping them in recycling.

Times Are Tough All Over

"It is neither campus policy nor practice to provide tissues for employees, although providing them in public areas is common - and we'll continue to do that. It would, however, be against state and university policy to purchase the tissue on state funds for employee use only. Just as it is against policy to pay for social events parties on state funds. These functions are paid for with Paula's unrestricted gift funds. Even though these funds are unrestricted the donors have certain expectations with regard to how the money is spent. Providing facial tissue to employees would not meet those expectations."

thanks again, @mikecane

MAKE THIS A POSTER: "The people who matter aren't conferencing. They're working."4:00 PM Oct 21st from Echofon

mikecane

Mike Cane

whatever

from john Scalzi's blog Whatever, about his local public library:

Athena had a hair appointment yesterday that was going to be a long one, so we swung by the library to get her a book to read, whereupon we discovered that for the forseeable future, the library is closed on Wednesdays. It’s also now closed on Saturdays (and Sundays, but it was always was closed on Sunday) and opens on 11am instead of 9am on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Why? Because library funds were slashed 30% statewide, that’s why, and that was from an already lean budget for libraries. Something had to give. So what gave were Wednesdays, Saturdays and two hours in the morning three days out of four.