The Infodome Dispatch

Presentation on a Georgia State U Library CMS project

CMSWatch.com

David Walker has a short piece about Xerxes here (I’ve asked him for a login so we can see it together).

More on David’s various projects here.

Anne sent this along - neat!

Yet Another Firefox Plug-in For Libraries

LibX is a new plugin for Firefox that can be configured to work with your library’s catalog (if you use III Millenium, Dynix Horizon, Ex Libris’s Aleph or the Voyager OPACs) to do all kinds of useful things. Some of the features of the plugin are:Direct access to your library’s catalog via a toolbar & right-click context menuAdaptive context menus that change depending on what (such as an ISBN) is selected.

Just wanted to give the SDSU templates a try. Obviously, it’s just a test - the SDSU logo is messed up, I didn’t create all the links, we wouldn’t necessarily use this type of navigation, we might want a dome fade behind the logo, and there would be footer info. Oh, and there will be new SDSU templates soon, so we wouldn’t use this one anyhow. But I thought it was a concept worth discussing at some point.

A very draft test page.

Joomla

What labels on our site make students go ‘hunh?’ I know of a few possibilities:

• Catalog (the PAC)
• Service point [as in ’service point hours’]
• Article databases [though it’s better than just ‘databases’]

What else?

Plone is an open source content management system (CMS).

A CMS is a tool that lets people create and update Web content easily, without knowing any HTML. Think Contribute, but more robust. Blogging tools like blogger and wordpress are specialized CMS’s. A CMS could be a good way to manage Library Web content.

I have no idea if this is the right tool for us, but there’s a consortial project in Oregon called Plinkit that’s using Plone.

Our campus may, some day, license a CMS, and perhaps the CSU will. So we’ll want to keep one eye on the future as we look at these ideas.

Blogging libraries - a list by Amanda Etches-Johnson at blogwithoutalibrary. tinci vinci test1 trali vali net (also some other good info on blogging and RSS).

And here’s her entries on libraries using RSS feedstest2 proxodili >. Check it out, some examples will help us imagine the possibilit eto nam test3 ne zadavali ies.

Some links on RSS feeds, for future reference:

The term ‘RSS’ either sounds sort of scary or it means nothing to a lot of people. But really, it’s just a tool to pull web content into one easy-to-read place. And it’s easy to set up, too. The first two links below are background on RSS. The second two are techie stuff on how to set it up on our Website.

• Definition of RSS - from Wikipedia
• A List Apart’s RSS Feed page - with some good links to other info, plus it’s a nice example to crib from when we do RSS.
• Making an RSS Feed - a tutorial from SearchEngineWatch
• ListGarden RSS Feed Generator - even better - looks easy, and it’s free.

Our style sheets need some work. Some things don’t display so nicely in Firefox, and I’m scared to look at them from a MAC. Nothing breaks, they just need some help.

I’ve also been wanting to set us up so that people don’t have to click ‘printer friendly’ in order to get a printer friendly version. Information here.

But I wonder if it’s worth the effort at this point - maybe we’ll create a cleaner style that prints better?