Twitter Paper

This is the link to my paper for Assignment 4. I said my thanks yous, good byes and good lucks in the previous message. So, this is my last post. I will miss y'all!

Best for last

Last day of class! All is left is to finish the paper. I can do it. I am not too worried. This post is about something else. Throughout this class we have been talking about digital natives. Boy, do I have an example for you! I have been saving this story for a rainy day, but now I can set it free.

My 10 y.o. son was assigned a project on Bull Run. As a foreigner, I am not familiar with this book, but you probably are. One of my favorite things about my kids (have I mentioned earlier that they are awesome?) that they are completely self-sufficient with their homework. Good thing, because mom and dad have their own. My husband got his EdD right before I started this program, so they are used to parents holed up in the office cursing through their teeth.

Anyway, back to the story. In this particular case he probably could have used some reference help from me, but he didn't. He went straight to Wikipedia and was quite surprised to find his friend's name on the list of main characters. Challenge accepted, my 10 y.o. figured out how to add his name as well. He was very proud for a few minutes, but had the decency to remove both names right away (because he is awesome!). The moral of the story: don't rely on Wikipedia, because a pesky digital native might be messing with it as we speak.

This is my last heart-felt post. It has been a pleasure to lean on you and learn from you. I hope I did not mope too much in my posts both here and on Twitter. I will still follow those of you who don't mind and please feel free to follow me, although I don't know how active I will be from now on. That hashtag has become second nature, but don't forget to lose it after today. Thank you, good luck, and see you next time.

P.S. I still have to post the paper. I solemnly swear before any of you who check this out while procrastinating on you own papers that it will be done today before midnight.

One step forward, two steps back

I thought I was doing so well! Who ever heard of an assignment submitted a day early? For me early means before the end of grace period. Full disclosure, last semester I turned one in two minutes after the grace period deadline (technical difficulties, otherwise I would have made it just in time!). Fortunately, the professor let it go. Anyway, we are done with the prompt, I have been blogging ans tweeting, I even posted a few discussion posts already. But... Paper! I hate papers! I can write discussion and blog posts all day long, but having a paper due kills my soul. Really, it is only 1200 words, why couldn't I have done more today? A whole day of moping around, changing from one topic to another, looking for sources, ignoring family! Why? All I wanted is to write this thing early so I will have one extra day of vacation. I could have had fun today and would not be any farther behind. Anyhow, not much of a blog post today.

And, in case you missed my tweet, Happy Russian National Library Day! (Поздравляю со Всероссийским Днем Библиотеки!)

What about the reflections?

I very much enjoyed talking to Ms. Hughes and Mr. Lo. They were very gracious and accommodating. I found it interesting that the website and the intranet fall under continuing education department. I wish I had asked about the rationale for that arrangement. However, I did observe that Ms. Hughes and Mr. Lo work closely together on managing both sites.

Mr. Lo's educational and professional background is in computer science, which confirms my opinion that at this point only such high level of expertise can properly serve the technology needs of libraries. I hope the time will come when MLIS graduates will have enough training in computer technology. At the same time, the overall management of the web design is done by a librarian, so both points of view are taken into consideration.

The amount of work that came into creating a system that, although not perfect, serves the needs of the library well, really impressed me. It took combining several systems and supplementing them with custom code to achieve the results they wanted.

Straight from the horse's mouth

On Friday, May 24^th I interviewed Raylynn Hughes , Director of continuing education services, who supervises both DCPL website and it’s intranet, and Jim Lo, the E-branch manager and library web designer. The subject of the interview was DCPL’s use of Content Management System (CMS). 

A.M. Thank you for agreeing to answer my questions on such short notice. I will try not to take a lot of your time. To start with, how does DCPL use CMS?

R.H. We use a combination of Joomla, WordPress, and custom code for our main website and Plone for OLLI, our staff intranet.

A.M. What did you use before CMS?

R.H. We just used HTML.

A.M. How long have you been using CMS and why did you choose it?

J.L. In 2007, when I started working with DCPL, we began investigating our options. CMS was an easy choice, because it offered several important features that we required. It allowed us to separate content from design, in other words we could add content, while overall design stays consistent throughout the site. It does not require writing code, and it allows updating by multiple users. Cost was another consideration, so choosing an option that was free was ideal. Then we began looking for the right CMS.

A.M. What did you chose and what were the criteria?

J.L. We considered many options and looked at the pros and cons of each of them. Nothing was perfect, but Joomla was chosen fairly quickly because at the time it was the only CMS that had built-in events calendar. It turned out not to be a perfect system, so we had to supplement it with WordPress for our blogs, podcasts, and for kids and teens sections of the website. In addition, we had to add some custom code to accommodate other needs that could not be met by either system.

A.M. What about a learning curve?

J.L. “Wrestling” with Joomla to get it to do what we wanted took a long time. I had no previous experience with it and had to get used to it. Since then we gained a lot of experience and understand that we could have done many things differently, including choosing a system other than Joomla, but we made the best choice with the information and the expertise we had at the time.

A.M. Why did you choose a different CMS for the intranet?

R.H. For the internal site we had different requirements. The site is a lot more basic in its design, but it offers a lot of flexibility, it is easier to edit, and it offers a comprehensive search feature. However, the main criterion was access. Unlike Joomla, Plone allows to differentiate the level of access depending on the authority and other criteria, so user privileges can be different for different people. With Joomla, a user either has permission to make changes, or he does not. That is not acceptable for an internal website.

A.M. Thank you very much for your time. It was nice to meet both of you.

R.H., J.L. You are welcome. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have more questions.

P.S.

Here I blabbered on again, but did not include the link to the site. http://amack.cloudaccess.net/

Here Comes the Caboose

I don't know if I am the very last one to finish my site, but it is looking that way. Yes, I am admittedly late (but not too late, right, Dr. Yang?). However, I am ridiculously proud of my website. You do not want to know how many hours I spent on it. I really think that it is not bad for a complete rookie like me. Of course, experts will cringe at how rough it is, but so what? I did it all by myself, armed with nothing, but a fuzzy tutorial.

In your face, my in-house computer experts, you, with your AP exams, finals, and business trips! (No offense, I will be begging you for help soon enough!) All by myself I created this thing of simple beauty, the kind that only mother could love.

It all started with me missing the first three day of the module, due to circumstances completely out of my control (see Life Interferes, below). When I finally sat down to Joomla I was trembling with fear. Poor Joomla surely generated a lot of hatred and pure venom from many of you. I had the benefit of your comments and advice, so thank you, trailblazers! The most helpful suggestion, repeated by many, was to work along with the tutorial. So, I was pausing and rewinding every two seconds. I have to say that if it were not for the time constraints I would probably enjoy the process. However, I was terrified that I will be kicked out of the program, like some others, or that something will not save and the work will disappear. I also tried to stop tinkering with every font size, color, and picture. I just didn't want my website to be a complete flop.

When the first web sites started to appear, I became completely intimidated. They were beautiful, the subjects were interesting, and, you did that so fast! As the deadline neared, my pace was becoming more and more frantic. There was simply too much to do. I didn't find Joomla's structure as cumbersome as some of you did. Maybe it is because I had nothing to compare it with. At some point, I realized that I could work without the tutorial and thought that I was almost done.

Then the unthinkable happened. I realized that my particular topic required a feature that was not explained in the tutorial: a drop-down menu The panic set in and just like that I was lost. So I decided to put it off until this morning. Thankfully, today is my day off. Low and behold, I found the appropriate topic in the Joomla help section and I figured out how to do it! I literally jumped up and down, I was so proud.

My topic actually stems from a project that we do at my church. For two years now we have been featuring a country every Sunday, in alphabetical order, to expand our world vision. We are now on letter N. The whole project is expected to take almost 5 years. I write most of the country profiles, but the ones I posted on a site are about a year old. I changed some facts (like newly elected leaders), but there may be some outdated information. I am sorry!

I do hope that some of you will take a look and tell me what you think, even though the new deadlines are looming ahead.