The Librain

As usual, the best ideas seem to come to me when I should be doing something else – like relaxing or the housework! So, I was musing on how I could promote all of the services that we have been developing – or playing around with. We have had some for a while, like the LRC website, and some only recently, like the Portal pages, blog and wiki. They all looked a bit different and all serve differing purposes. Some were my way of learning a new skill or thinking about how I might use a new service. Others were something that I might reject as not necessary for my job at this time.

But… I was beginning to see how we might use a more collaborative way of working – difficult for me as I have been called a control-freak in the past!

So… how could we promote all of these disparate things to the school community? We already called our website “LRC Online” as this mirrored the school website. It had its own logo.

Simple thing really – we have now called everything our “LRC Online Services”.

LRC Online Website
LRC Online Catalogue – coming soon
LRC Online Blog - a basic blog made to insert news into the other services
LRC Online Portal Pages – only for the school community
LRC Online Wiki

… and so on, as we add more new things in the future.

We have now started promoting these services to the school with the logo, “LRC Online Services” and the strapline:

“Bringing the LRC to you!”

Cheesy? Maybe – but it emphasises the idea that we are working outside our physical enviroment. Not rocket science, but worth trying.

This is what the top part of our Portal Page looks like:

For a variety of reasons, including family stuff, I had to spend the Easter Holidays working at home. I decided to really think about all of the “webbie” things that I am doing:

Strongest Links Website – I think that I want to continue this for a while longer as I believe that it is still useful to school librarians. However, I can only edit this from home in my own time and there is not much of that to spare. It will go on a bit longer. After the CILIP Summit, they are apparently going to create a resource on their website – so where does that leave Strongest Links?

Strongest Links Wiki – I started this as a response to people on SLN asking for a collaborative space to share resources and ideas that came up repeatedly on SLN. I had no intention of doing all of it myself. Just creating the structure for others to fill. But there are few people contributing – has it “died the death” and should I delete it?

The Librain Blog- I enjoy writing this, although I don’t post as often as I should. Some librarian bloggers are really prolific. But I need to think about what I want to say, or else I will end up repeating myself too often. It is a good way of clarifying my own thoughts, though.

School website – I now edit this and try to keep up with things, adding news and tweaking pages as necessary. We have decided to make it an online prospectus and move all resources on to our Portal, which has a secure log-in.

LRC Online Website- I spent a lot of time rationalising what is on this and updating things to include the Web 2.0 stuff that I am doing – e.g. del.icio.us links etc. It is now a bit more streamlined and should be easier to maintain. I would be reluctant to take it down as it represents many years of work from the time when I was learning how to put things on our intranet.

LRC Online Blog- I have made a very basic blog, hosted with the same company as the LRC website. This enables me, using RSS feeds, to put news into the LRC website and the LRC’s Portal pages by only editing one site instead of several. Neat!

LRC Online Portal Pages – I am trying to cross-link everything that I do so that however a student or member of staff finds the LRC (Portal, LRC Website, School Website) they can easily navigate to the resources that they need.

LRC Online Wiki – I have started using a wiki with some students – mentioned in the previous post. This is going quite well so far, but it is very early days as yet and I will devote a post to it later on, when I can see some results.

LRC Online OPAC – we are finally about to install Heritage Online so that we can have our OPAC accessible from the web. This should enable us to reach out to the school community.

I am also playing around with Pageflakes, creating a really useful homepage for myself with RSS feeds about my personal and professional interests. Thinking about how useful this could be, I then tried to build  some Pageflakes pages that could be used with teachers. Although I have since found that a teacher has used NetVibes to make something very similar. I will think a bit more about whether it is worth spedning the time on this before I go much further. Some colleagues have also sent me “flakes” to add to the page, so we could work on this collaboratively, then use the pages for our own schools.