Assignment 3 - Option 1

For the purpose of this assignment I arranged an in-person interview with the librarian in charge of maintaining the website content for a small university library in southwest Georgia. The librarian that was interviewed is a recent MLIS graduate and in addition to this being their first professional job, it is their first experience in an academic library. While the librarian’s main job duties are currently in cataloging, they were given the task of web maintenance shortly after they began working for their university when they were occupied as the circulation librarian previous to an organizational restructuring within the library. As presented in the interview, the librarian has no experience with web maintenance and had not previously taken any courses in the technology track.

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Me - Good afternoon! I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to ask you a few questions about maintaining the website at your library.

Librarian - Not a problem.

Me – How long have you been a librarian?

Librarian – I have been a librarian for two and a half years

Me – When did you graduate from your MLIS program?

Librarian - I Graduated in May 2010

Me - When you were completing your MLIS program did you take any courses in technology?

Librarian – No, I mainly took management and public library courses.

Me – How did you end up becoming the website manager for the library that you currently work at?

Librarian - Well, I think that came about because there was no one at the time that was in charge of that in the library and the IT department was not on top of getting things done for the library website. When the library was given the opportunity to have input with the website I was the one nominated for the position.

Me - Before you were nominated to take over had you previously had any experience with HTML coding or building a basic website?

Librarian - No

Me - When did you first hear about content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal?

Librarian - The first time that I really heard about those is when I attended the first training session my second semester here when I was trained on how to make changes to the website. Thats really when I became aware of that.

Me - What’s the name of the content management system that your university is currently using?

Librarian - We are currently using WordPress.

Me - What has the university used previously?

Librarian - Umm… the one that we had used before was Liferay.

Me - Do you know what was the criteria that the University had for choosing WordPress?

Librarian - Umm… I was not involved in that selection process, but from some of the conversations that I heard I think they were trying to select a content management system that was a little more user friendly for the web management people that were going to be using it as well as something that was a little more up to date in their eyes, because they wanted to be able to compete with other academic systems as far as with the website was looking.

Me - What are the benefits or advantages of using WordPress over Liferay?

Librarian - Since I am still new to all of this I am not really sure, but from what I can tell so far it is a lot easier to access and is user friendly, more like Facebook where you can just click and drag things. It’s just a lot easier to use compared to what we were using.

Me - What has the learning curve been in picking up how to use a content management system without having any previous experience in web management?

Librarian - It hasn't been as hard as I expected it to be. I’ve received a lot of training to help me along and since I have a lot of computer experience it hasn’t been that bad. I am still trying to play catchup with learning WordPress because I have missed a few sessions.

Me - Finally, do you think that MLIS students would benefit from taking classes that incorporated building and maintaining websites?

Librarian - I think the best thing is to just do it on the job, you can’t learn it from books or in a class or anything.

Me - Alright thank you for your time!

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Reflection

Overall I was surprised to find out that this librarian had no previous experience when it came to web design or web management. While I do personally feel that this librarian is a good example of the thought that anyone can learn to use a content management system, I believe that they are incorrect in their belief that MLIS students would not benefit from learning about building or managing websites in an MLIS course. I also believe that they are incorrect in the belief that web design, coding, and management are not subjects that you can learn in books on in classes. If anything, rather than focusing on classes in public libraries and management as stated, this librarian might have benefited from taking the 7500 or 7505 course to aid them in their future work. I am unfamiliar with the Liferay CMS, but I have personal experience with installing and working with WordPress using MAMP. Like this librarian I feel that it is very intuitive, but the comparison to Facebook was a little off in my experience with using that CMS. I must say that I was overall somewhat disappointed in this librarians answers during the interview.

Assignment 2: Joomla

For this assignment I had to create a website using Joomla (http://sparrowlakepm.cloudaccess.net/)

I had some previous experience installing and setting up websites based on WordPress and Drupal using MAMP (which if you want to get some practice working with CMS sites I highly recommend doing this).

First and foremost I did not really like my experience with using Joomla. Unfortunately after setting up my Joomla account I had a hard drive failure that I have spent the better part of 72 hours attempting to recover from (as of writing this I am still having issues with recovering my backed up files onto a clean install of the Operating System), so I am probably always going to associate the frustrations I have been having with my laptop with my Joomla experience.

The first issue that I had with Joomla came when I made the mistake of deleting the the initial Article site. Relating the term article to a blog or magazine post I did not associate the initial article with being essentially the index.html file. This forced me to completely reset the site, but no big deal since I had not added content yet right? As soon as I was set up again I decided to try to install a third party template like I would with WordPress or Drupal, but somehow this did not only erase my website, but it somehow magically erased my administrative site as well, website reset number 2. On my third go I decided to play it safe(r) and followed the instructions for setting up a Joomla site using this guide:

While this guide was helpful I noticed right away that the version of Joomla that the person in the video was using was different than the version of Joomla that the demo version offered (version 3.3). This was not really a big deal until getting to the part about adding the scrolling photos to the main page, as you can see by the lack of scrolling photos on my live site, I could never quite figure it out. At first they were completely warped in appearance, then after a few tweaks they just disappeared entirely and I could never get them to come back.

Overall I think that Joomla is a fairly straightforward interface, but in general I have had a better experience with Drupal and Wordpress (or even Tumblr for that matter). I believe that given more time I could develop a fully functioning website using this platform, but given the short amount of time that Maymester allows I feel like I open a can of frustrating worms and am not sure that I would really recommend Joomla to someone just starting out (or dealing with a crashed hard drive during a school project at least!).

Assignment 1: Finding a Wiki for a Library

The public library that I formerly worked for, the South Georgia Regional Library system, is currently in the process of starting a wiki for patrons to find out information about title holdings, reference resources, and other information of patron interest as well as for hosting information of interest to staff such as training materials and Library Science related information and links. In order to make the decision about which wiki package that the library will use as the backbone of their wiki site, the library has asked for my opinion to help aid them in implementing their new wiki.

The library system serves a diverse population in a mixed urban and rural environment spread across three counties in southern Georgia and is part of the Georgia Public Library Service. The budget for the system is lower than the state and national average for libraries serving a population size in excess of 100,000 and anticipated funds for creating and maintaining a wiki are estimated to be low.

In order for the library’s wiki to better serve the interests of their patrons, staff, meet the library’s budget requirements, and be user-friendly for staff editing, the wiki must meet a few requirements: 1. The wiki must have a free and open-source backbone, 2. The wiki must be windows compatible, 3. The wiki must have a freely available community support base, 4. The wiki must have the ability for user interaction via comments, posts, etc., 5. The wiki must allow for a fully functioning calendar., 6. The wiki must allow rich media content in the form of images, video, etc. 7. The wiki must have the built-in capability for statistics gathering such as ranking content by popularity, etc., 8. The wiki must allow for HTML tagging and WYSIWYG editing., 9. The wiki must be able to filter SPAM and have security features., 10. The wiki must be user friendly!

Based on the libraries requirements and budget my suggestion would be to use the MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) platform. MediaWiki is a free software and open source wiki package geared towards education that is written in PHP and is the backbone of Wikipedia. This wiki package meets and exceeds all of the library’s designated requirements when comparing this package to other comparable packages found at http://www.wikimatrix.org/.

For more information about MediaWiki and Wikipedia check out this talk with Brian Vibber (known as Wikipedia's "only paid employee"):

Hello MLIS-7505!

This is my second course in library technology after taken 7500 in the Spring of '13. I am formerly the Community Relations Coordinator for a large mixed urban and rural library system in South Georgia. I currently work as a senior library assistant in technical services at medium-sized public university (HBCU) in Southwest Georgia.

Generally speaking I have been around computers since 1983 and have been online since '92-'93 (including pre-WWW dial up BBS'). I am very familiar with Web 2.0 technologies such as Social Media, RSS, Podcasting, and Blogging. I hope to have a great experience in this class and look forward to getting to know my fellow classmates!