The Librain

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.

Well, I am having such a lot of fun! In fact I don’t think that I have enjoyed myself so much (in the professional sense, of course) since the early days of learning about computers. I remember the awed fascination that I had back in the early 80s for things like Prestel and the Domesday Project. It seemed amazing that we could “talk” to people around the world on our monitors and “walk” around rooms in 3D.

So… what has got me so excited? Well, a number of things.

1. Writing a collaborative document on Google Docs. Some of us are going to the CILIP Summit on School Libraries next week. So, I thought that it would be a good thing for the school librarians to share thoughts and ideas. We could have done this by email, but I thought that it would be much more interesting to do it by adding to a joint document. And so it has proved. I might be a bit sad, but it seems so clever and fascinating to edit the words whilst watching other people’s thought appear on the screen.
2. Playing around with our college portal. We are using RM’s Kaleidos and I have been trying for some time to think about how I could use it to help students access not only our resources in the LRC but link these with materials and information in the wider sense. I am only just beginning, but I was trying to find ways to attract students to the LRC’s pages. Some of the answer might be using widgets. So I have had a look at Google Gadgets - BTW this is not an extended advert for Google! What I have done is put widgets for football and cricket scores on the LRC page, works of art on the LRC’s Art page, RSS feeds about the latest Science news on the LRC’s Science page and a virtual aquarium on the LRC Student Helper page (this is the most popular). Each page that I am making to support subjects has appropriate widgets - it is such fun selecting them. I now want to explore what else I can add to get the college community to look at our pages. This is not silly stuff, apart from the aquarium and even that could be said to be soothing, I have a serious plan behind this.
3. Thinking about the balance between our website and the portal. I have said quite a bit about this already. But when it is so easy to edit a blog, wiki or the portal (less so), why am I continuing with our LRC website? Particularly when I cannot find enough time to develop it properly? I will continue to think about this over the Spring and Summer. I can quickly add links that I want to bookmark to Del.icio.us - but do I have a limit on this? Not sure.
4. Trying out a wiki with students. I have finally found the right teacher and the right (I hope) group to try this with. It is such a new idea in our college. But I hope that it will motivate our students better than doing individual essays. We are trying to get them working in teams with a mildly competitive ethos. We award each team points for how well they have worked during each lesson and I have made a league table on the wiki. Also, I now have a really good way of encouraging original writing rather than cut-and-paste and proper citation and referencing. As their work will be “published”, they have to do it properly. Well, let’s see how it goes.

Let the fun begin!