I was thinking about some of the hurdles that face roving reference and I couldn’t get past the idea of librarians “getting lost in the stacks” or, maybe more accurately put, librarians “getting found in the stacks” by users. We can put signage on all we want to provide wayfinders for our users, but what happens when their target moves about the building?
- How is the librarian identifiable as a source of help and information?
- How can that librarian be sought out?
John Blyberg’s Growl notifications are an excellent step in the right direction, but that – as I interpret it – may only be a librarian-to-librarian connection. That is unless it can be hooked up into the catalog or and idea I have/took called hotspots. Stolen from the likes of Home Depot and other big box stories, hot spots are simply “call buttons” to get librarians back to the user’s location for assistance. I’m pretty sure John’s already thought of this…
One thing I have yet to see (as always prove me wrong if I am) is libraries branding their roving reference devices. With sites out there like Skinit and Schtickers, we could be making ourselves a bit more visible with our technologies by giving them a bit of flare with vinyl stickers. Both sites allow you to upload custom images and create your tailored skins for laptops, netbooks, iPods, and iPhones.
Creating a netbook skin is easy at Skinit.com
Screenflow to Vimeo HD Settings
- If at all possible, make sure your screen is set to 16:9 screen resolution. Vimeo likes a 1280×720 resolution for HD and because of this when I’m screencasting a browser I use a javascript bookmarklet to resize the window to that resolution: javascript:void(window.resizeTo(1280,720))
- Capture per usual with ScreenFlow (SF) (note that if you use Mousepose’ 3 for effects you may get some weird zooming characteristics)
- Use your resize options in SF to make sure the canvas is set on the front window and sized to 1280×720
- Here are my export settings:
- SF Settings-
- Scale by 100%
- Use motion blur if you set some internal animations with SF
- Video-
- Compression: H.264
- Quality: high
- Frame Rate: Current
- Key Frame: 30
- Bitrate: 5000 kbs
- Frame Reordering: yes
- Encoding Mode: Multi-pass (will provide greater quality, but will be slower)
- Dimensions: 1280×720
- Also, I always choose optimized for streaming
- Sound-
- Format: AAC
- Sample Rate: 44.100 khz
- Channels: stereo
- Bit Rate: 128 kbs
- Prepare for Internet Streaming-
- Fast Start
- SF Settings-
I’m very excited to announce that starting in January of 2010 I will be joining the award winning staff at Darien Library in Darien, CT as a Knowledge and Learning Services Librarian. To say that it is honor to be afforded this opportunity at this time in my career is a bit of an understatement. I look forward to getting to know the community of Darien.
Some People to Thank
I’ve had some success early on in my career and there are a few folks that need to take some real credit for helping me succeed. That being said, there are always those unnamed but not forgotten individuals – you know who you are.
Michael Stephens
Michael’s been my mentor and friend since I began my career in librarianship in 2007. Not many people talk librarianship with such enthusiasm, care, and reflection as Michael does. He’s truly an innovative librarian, amazing teacher, and wonderful person.
Jacob Hill
I’ve worked under Jacob for two and half years at the A.C. Buehler Library at Elmhurst College. He’s given me a lot of free reign in my side projects to think outside the box and produce some new services. Together we’ve been through two website redesigns, a migration to WordPress MU as a CMS, the introduction of SMS reference, a spike in IM reference traffic through the integration of Meebo and then LibraryH3lp, the creation of a Facebook OPAC application, a mobile website, and a myriad of great experiences.
This past Monday (10/26/2009) I was invited to speak at the Chicagoland Library Drupal Group, hosted by the very friendly Mick Jacobsen of Skokie Public Library (@mickjacobsen). Before I say anything else – thanks Mick, I had a blast and truly appreciated the opportunity.
But onto the subject at hand: Me talking WordPress at a Drupal group. Odd pairing, eh? Mick didn’t think so and either did I. There are a lot of skilled Drupal users at this group but there’s been (at least the two times I’ve gone) some folks simply exploring its opportunities. So to have a speaker like myself talk WordPress, an alternate CMS, alongside Drupal is a good thing.
We had a good turn out (25 folks or more) from around the area and an inquisitive audience. I was one of three folks scheduled for the day and stood up first at the podium. You can whip through the Slideshare version of the presentation below to get the gist of what I talked about, but I want to comment on a few specific reflections I had post-presentation.
1: I sold WordPress short
And I did it on purpose. It’s no use going to a Drupal group extolling the wonders of WordPress when the next two presenters are going to blow you out of the water with great features that WordPress simply does not have in core or in plugins: Drupal’s Views, CCK, and Blocks.
As a CMS, WordPress doesn’t have the extensibility with its data. For the most part, it’s stuck in individual pages or posts. Want to make a list of databases? Well, you’ve gotta rip into templates and WordPress template tags. Want to make a WYSIWYG two column layout? See the last point or show your CSS chops (be sure to remind WordPress that it’s ok to accept Div tags and such – it likes to erase them for you). And this brings me to my next point…
2: I was honest
WordPress works wonderfully as a CMS on small scale sites. On sites that don’t require a lot of mixing and matching of content types. I would bet you money that this changes in the future, but the future isn’t now and it would be a lie to say that it can do this.
What I did was emphasize its standout qualities: Usability, simplicity, and community. Because WordPress can’t be beat in these categories (in the present). It has a user interface that can be learned in minutes, administration that can be taught in a day, and a responsive and caring user base.
3: What I could have/should have done
Highlight more completely what we do do to make WordPress a more robust CMS. I listed the plugins we use and breezed through the important ones, but illustrating the why behind them could have been a bit more powerful. If you follow my #wordpressCMS hashtag on Twitter you’ll see that there’s a bunch of really good plugins that can enhance WordPress more fully into the CMS realm and I truly believe it can be a great CMS for the right user.
All in all it was a good presentation and a heck of a lot of fun to talk about. And if you think that my days are done at the Drupal group gatherings, you’d be wrong. I loved learning about CCK and Views and hearing from the “other” CMS pros 
a new theme
For awhile there I was sporting a nice custom theme that was tumblr/posterous inspired (i.e. simplicity was the key). But as I’ve been thinking more and more about the organization of content management systems and extensibility of their data, I thought I should start to practice what I may begin to preach in the future. A new theme was therefore in order.
I went with a theme called Titan by the folks over at Jestro. It’s got a lot of flexibility and I’ve been in a bit of a brown mood lately. Why choose a theme when I could build one? Because when it comes to details on my own web design projects I’m a bit anal retentive and this leads to things sometimes not getting done (like writing at this blog, or updating this blog, or…you get the point). I hope to create another theme for myself as I garner more experience from outside projects and offline experimentation on my WordPress MU install that I use for development purposes.
