Exciting news! My practicum supervisor, over at the Our Lady of Mercy library, was excited to hear about my website project, and pointed out that they don't have a separate website for their library, either. We're talking about collaborating on website ideas and designs as I keep refining St. Leo's website, and maybe helping Our Lady get theirs off the ground, too!
We haven't discussed collaboration plans in depth yet, but Our Lady has some EBSCO subscriptions we don't that could use a central searching hub, and if we could find a way to get an online catalog working in addition to the on-site one they have, they'd increase student ability to look for information pretty substantially. Plus, it's always nice to show off the Media Center and give families a place to see what's going on.
Obviously, that's a long-range thing that might or might not ever happen, since I may not be staying at St. Leo forever, but it'd still be nice to keep connections with local librarians and lend a helping hand. Networking for beginners, right?
Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
The Library Website: Working Toward a Better Tomorrow (Because Today Isn't There Yet)
I mentioned a while ago that the school's library no longer has a website - not even a basic portal where students could access the library's catalog. Obviously, this is no good for anyone who wants to use the library like a functioning information hub, not to mention that the school could really use a working library website for marketing purposes, so I've been working on an outline/sketch and now a mock-up in order to try to get something useful up and running.
Behold, a very unfinished beginning of a website!
It's still bare bones right now while I try to get content (or permission to write the content myself) from the administrators, but at least it links to the catalog and to our subscription to World Book Online, and has room to add specifics about what the students are doing right now and so forth. I'd like to also set up a citation hub, since learning to properly cite is such a big deal for the middle school students, and some connections to other community resources (public libraries, etc.) and online resources (WorldCat at least).
I used Wix to build the site; I did a few workshops with the diocese on Weebly, another WYSIWYG editor, but after testing both, I found Wix was a lot easier to navigate and use, and that Weebly didn't really have any tools that I preferred. I have built websites from scratch using HTML and CSS, but I'm not really a web designer or super fluent in things like Javascript, so in the interests of making sure the site is both attractive and useful, I decided to use third-party software.
The site's stuck on my Wix account address at the moment, but the school can pay to purchase a domain name for it, if they want to put that in the library's budget, or just link to it directly from the St. Leo school website and not bother with anyone visiting it directly. I do worry a bit about ease of transfer, since I may not be at this job forever and it would be good for the school to be able to easily transfer the site over the the new librarian to administer, so I created a separate Wix account from my personal one to make sure I could pass it on later.
As I'm looking over the year, I really wish I could have had a little more guidance from administration on this one; I seriously could not get anything out of them about what they wanted other than "the website should exist" and "I guess the catalog?" Oh, well... one of the issues of a tiny library in a tiny school!
Behold, a very unfinished beginning of a website!
It's still bare bones right now while I try to get content (or permission to write the content myself) from the administrators, but at least it links to the catalog and to our subscription to World Book Online, and has room to add specifics about what the students are doing right now and so forth. I'd like to also set up a citation hub, since learning to properly cite is such a big deal for the middle school students, and some connections to other community resources (public libraries, etc.) and online resources (WorldCat at least).
I used Wix to build the site; I did a few workshops with the diocese on Weebly, another WYSIWYG editor, but after testing both, I found Wix was a lot easier to navigate and use, and that Weebly didn't really have any tools that I preferred. I have built websites from scratch using HTML and CSS, but I'm not really a web designer or super fluent in things like Javascript, so in the interests of making sure the site is both attractive and useful, I decided to use third-party software.
The site's stuck on my Wix account address at the moment, but the school can pay to purchase a domain name for it, if they want to put that in the library's budget, or just link to it directly from the St. Leo school website and not bother with anyone visiting it directly. I do worry a bit about ease of transfer, since I may not be at this job forever and it would be good for the school to be able to easily transfer the site over the the new librarian to administer, so I created a separate Wix account from my personal one to make sure I could pass it on later.
As I'm looking over the year, I really wish I could have had a little more guidance from administration on this one; I seriously could not get anything out of them about what they wanted other than "the website should exist" and "I guess the catalog?" Oh, well... one of the issues of a tiny library in a tiny school!
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
The Library Website: How Did This Happen
So, in preparation for seeing what I could share with the library community at large, I checked out the library website recently. Or at least, I tried to, but I failed on account of there not being one. This came as a surprise, since the school website has a link on it that supposedly goes to the library website, and students had mentioned it before, but no dice.
After some investigation with the rest of the faculty, hampered by the fact that the previous librarian and computer teachers both left this summer and couldn't be reached, and the IT department is actually outsourced to a private company and thus not always available for consultation that doesn't cost a fee, i eventually discovered that the library did have a website, but that the school had recently migrated all its sites to a new domain, and apparently that one somehow didn't make it. Since the librarian had left, no one noticed that the site itself was also gone, which was not a welcome realization for the administration, let me tell you.
So, naturally, they asked me to go ahead and make a new one. No problem, obviously! All those digital library courses have to be good for something, right?
The library definitely needs a site, if for no other reason than to be an easy portal for the students who use it to get to the catalog (which they currently have no idea how to access unless I put in the direct link to the database for them, which is a pretty glaring flaw). It would also be a good marketing tool for the school, which as a private religious institution needs to try to attract families as much as possible and can always use more evidence of their useful services and resources.
I was hoping that I could start from some of the files or structure of the old site... but those are apparently all irreparably destroyed, having been removed and wiped from the old site's server as soon as the migration was complete. According to the old paperwork we were able to dig up, the site was designed and constructed by a third-party vendor anyway, so the previous librarian, even if I could get hold of her, would be unlikely to have any insight into it.
So that leaves me with quite the conundrum. What do I do here? How do I go about building this thing? The administration seems to prefer that I write something in pure HTML so that all files are available to be uploaded to the diocese's proprietary server, but hoo boy, I have not tried to write even a simple personal site in HTML in years, let alone something professional enough to work for an institution. I could work with a provider site - WordPress or Wix, or something similar - but while that would definitely be easier, it'd be hosted remotely and vulnerable to the hoster's decisions about its continuing existence, and might be aggravating in terms of ownership passage if I leave the library's employ.
I guess I'm going to go with making some lists of needed features and sketches of possible designs for now, and ponder on it.
After some investigation with the rest of the faculty, hampered by the fact that the previous librarian and computer teachers both left this summer and couldn't be reached, and the IT department is actually outsourced to a private company and thus not always available for consultation that doesn't cost a fee, i eventually discovered that the library did have a website, but that the school had recently migrated all its sites to a new domain, and apparently that one somehow didn't make it. Since the librarian had left, no one noticed that the site itself was also gone, which was not a welcome realization for the administration, let me tell you.
So, naturally, they asked me to go ahead and make a new one. No problem, obviously! All those digital library courses have to be good for something, right?
The library definitely needs a site, if for no other reason than to be an easy portal for the students who use it to get to the catalog (which they currently have no idea how to access unless I put in the direct link to the database for them, which is a pretty glaring flaw). It would also be a good marketing tool for the school, which as a private religious institution needs to try to attract families as much as possible and can always use more evidence of their useful services and resources.
I was hoping that I could start from some of the files or structure of the old site... but those are apparently all irreparably destroyed, having been removed and wiped from the old site's server as soon as the migration was complete. According to the old paperwork we were able to dig up, the site was designed and constructed by a third-party vendor anyway, so the previous librarian, even if I could get hold of her, would be unlikely to have any insight into it.
So that leaves me with quite the conundrum. What do I do here? How do I go about building this thing? The administration seems to prefer that I write something in pure HTML so that all files are available to be uploaded to the diocese's proprietary server, but hoo boy, I have not tried to write even a simple personal site in HTML in years, let alone something professional enough to work for an institution. I could work with a provider site - WordPress or Wix, or something similar - but while that would definitely be easier, it'd be hosted remotely and vulnerable to the hoster's decisions about its continuing existence, and might be aggravating in terms of ownership passage if I leave the library's employ.
I guess I'm going to go with making some lists of needed features and sketches of possible designs for now, and ponder on it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)