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.

Almost there

It is so close I can taste it! My web site is almost ready to be revealed. If there were only a couple more hours in the day! I am drowning - in homework, in housework, in motherwork! At least my actual job is a snap. However, it takes away the precious time when kids are in school. Anyway, Joomla is not so bad, just extremely time-consuming, and time is what I do not have. I hope that grace period is not a cruel joke and I have until tomorrow night to put the finishing touches on the web site. I will tell you all about it, but now I have to go to bed. I haven't gone to bed this early (midnight) in at least a week. Makes me feel like a lazy bum.

Gift of grace

This class is too short for procrastination. I am trying to work as fast as I can with the time that I have available, which is not very much. Yesterday, I spent two not entirely unenjoyable. hours with Joomla tutorial. I didn't want to stop, but then I realized that there is no grace period on postings, so I better get to them first. Many other things of no consequence to this class  happened in between and now my empty shell of a website site sits there pitifully. I no longer remember anything from the tutorial and likely will have to start over. Grace period, here I come.

On the bright side - tomorrow I go to work. Shelving has a marvelous therapeutic effect on me. I will be much calmer by the end of my shift and will have an extremely productive evening. Right?

Sometimes life interferes

These past few days have been impossible. There is nothing more worthwhile in my life than my kids. If I told you how awesome they are you would not believe it. Of course every parent thinks that their kids are awesome, but the difference is - mine really are. I am not trying to be obnoxious, or anything. I am not saying that they are the best, just stating a simple fact that they are fantastic and I love them.

I understand that this is not much of a post. I wish I had things to say about Joomla, CMS, and other subjects that I know nothing about (yet!) but  - not today. Today I have 13 sixteen year-old girls sleeping over at my house after 5 hours of dancing in the basement under a tiny disco-ball from Party City. They had so much fun! It was so much work! It was totally worth getting a little farther behind on schoolwork.

Yesterday was not a good day for studying either. Could I miss the talent show where my ten year-old son and his friend performed a comedy skit "Classy Ninjas", which they wrote themselves from scratch  and didn't copy from YouTube, like most other performers (not that there is anything wrong with that)? The title alone had the audience in stitches. What a night!

I will get down to doing homework this weekend. It may take a couple of all nighters, nothing I haven't done before, and the deadlines will be met.  Life has to be taken a day at a time. You have to see what the day throws at you and deal with that. It is not always a question of priorities. Sometimes there is no choice.

My Utopian Vision

Is there such a thing as over-posting and do we get extra credit or at least brownie points for that? I don't really care. I have more words to say.

I just though that I would publicly address the question posted by a classmate regarding the content of my hypothetical wiki. I tend to be quite an idealist and my library vision is admittedly somewhat utopian. I am enthusiastic about my less than glamorous position as a page. So what if I get paid less per hour than my daughter does fr babysitting? I used to do the same for free as a volunteer. My family is willing to make sacrifices because they know I love what I do and will finally have a career I love, even though finding a job may be more of a challenge than getting through this course. 

Anyhow, It is not surprising that  my plan for the library wiki is somewhat utopian. I envision it is becoming a kind of community portal, with the library as a central hub pulling it all together. It will contain information, discussions, and planning process not only on library events, but hopefully, the library will become such an integral part of the community, that it will have a role and a say in many civic programs. There will also be sections on book discussions, comments and suggestions by patrons and other citizens. Many of them have similar questions and through this wiki they can all be addressed and discussed at once and with input from all interested parties. Netcipia allows unlimited users and pages, so there can be many different groups: by demographics: retirees, teens, young professionals, parents; by interest in different genres of literature, film, and music; and by other interests. Netcipia blocks illegal topic, which could be useful, but appropriate criteria will have to be determined. This will of course require serious commitment from the staff, firm support from the management, major public relations efforts, training sessions for the community and many other events that are, realistically, quite unlikely to come together.

Still, It is nice to dream. As my experienced colleagues at the library kindly informed me, the enthusiasm will wear off quite quickly as soon as find out what working at the library is really like. I know they are right to some extend, but why put a damper on someone's dream?

If I had more time I would have written a shorter post

Before I start on the subject, let me just say that a minute ago I did a Google search to find out who said that famous phrase. Just on the first page of results there were several different attributions, including, but not limited to Cicero, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, and Woodrow Wilson. You choose. All I am saying is that I wrote too much, for which I apologize. 

Back to work. What, Why, and Wiki does my library need?

The library in question is the Northlake library in suburban Atlanta, one of 21 community branches of the DeKalb County Public Library. The population of the library’s service area is near 36,000, and is projected to exceed 44,000 by 2025. Due to the demographic trends in the surrounding area (prevalence of middle class, aging population, well-regarded public schools, etc.), the two major groups served by the Northlake Library are the elderly and families with young children. Library’s current collection consists of approximately 60,000 items, with a focus on popular fiction, materials for children and young adults, and audiovisual materials.

The library was recently renovated and is technologically up-to-date. However, the system is experiencing a major budget shortfall which leads to severe staff shortages and drastic reduction in operating hours. That, in turn, affects patron satisfaction.

As a community library located in a mostly residential area, Northlake library has many regular patrons. It is proposed that staff try to develop these relationships further using a social networking tool, such as a wiki. Northlake Library has no direct presence on the web. The website, Facebook page, Twitter, and the internal communication system are all centrally maintained from the administrative office. Its own wiki would allow the library to customize the way it presents itself and to communicate directly with their patrons. Closer relationship with the library and the ability to express their opinions and suggestions will improve patron satisfaction. In addition, the branch has an active Friends Group, but there is not enough cooperation on projects. By using wiki, communication will improve and the relationship itself will strengthen.

I suggest that wiki is presented as part of a larger public relation campaign with the goal of better connecting library to the community. Library staff will offer training sessions for patrons of all ages and interests, and generate several subject-specific groups within the wiki to appeal to a broader audience.

WikiMatrix helped me to determine the criteria for choosing a wiki for my library.

1.                  Page history is essential because with many users there is high risk of losing information.

2.                  WYSIWYG is required so people of all technical abilities could contribute.

3.                  Commercial support is probably not necessary. Library system has specialists available to help if needed.

4.                  Localization is not needed. Most users are English-speakers.

5.                  Hosting rather than purchasing software.

6.                  Own domain is not required. Wiki will be tied in to the library’s webpage.

7.                  Branding is important so that wiki is stylistically consistent with the rest of the library.

From 20 available options, I settled on Netcipia. Northlake library has no additional financial resources available. This project is an experiment and has to be implemented at no extra cost. Netcipia provides its services free of charge, offers unlimited storage capacity, and does not restrict the number of users, pages, or wikis. Consumers, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions are all listed among the intended users. This is the choice I made based on my admittedly limited knowledge and experience.

Never Say Never

Yes. It is official. I like this course. Did I just say that? I may change my tune when workload increases, but  it is already very heavy, and still... More than anything I like staying in touch so regularly with my classmates. I have been in the program for over a year, but this is the first time that I don't feel so isolated. I think it was Judith who jokingly tweeted about having a social life now with all these social networking sites. Well, it is working for me!

It is also the first time that I am ahead of schedule with homework. I am always on time, but just barely. Maybe this time it is different because there is so much work that if I fall behind I may never catch up. Or maybe I am enjoying this just a little bit.

The only thing left to do tomorrow is - oh horror - the wiki! Well, I have a whole twenty four hours to figure it out. Come back tomorrow for another fascinating post on the transforming powers of Web 2.0. It will be wikid!

In relation to Mother's Day

Going back to school after 25 years is challenging. The challenge is even steeper because computers were not available in Russia until mid-nineties, and my college thesis was hand-written and retyped on a typewriter using carbon copy paper. Now I use technology as a consumer and my teenage daughter is my 24/7 IT consultant.

Part of me longs for the time when librarians didn’t have to worry much about technology and spent most of their time surrounded with books. However, this longing is overpowered by two major considerations. First, I must catch up with the times before my daughter goes away to college leaving me helpless. Second, and more important, as a librarian, I will not be able to do my job without mastering modern information technology.

Now, do you think my daughter is helping me with homework for this class (like blog redesign)? You will have to guess because am not telling. 

Can I do this? Yes, I think I can.

Hello MLIS7505 classmates! I am pretty sure that you will be my only audience. Don’t know about you, but I got completely terrified after reading course materials. Now that the Maymester started in earnest, I am enjoying some of the assignments. Don’t get me wrong, I am still terrified, but tweeting is fun, and hopefully I will get into blogging. By the way, I had to look up how to spell “tweeting”, which, I am afraid, means that I will have to spend more than recommended three to five hours a day on this class.

I am glad to finally understand the meaning of Web 2.0. I use Facebook, but mainly to keep up with friends’ activities. It seems that my life is just not eventful enough to bother other people with it. I don’t frequent Wikipedia and YouTube, but of course I visit them occasionally. I really didn’t plan on ever joining Twitter, but here I am. Now I have to control myself to prevent irrelevant tweeting. I am impressed that some of you immediately started posting professionally useful information, while I am just mastering the technology!