Anyway, it is progressing very well and we hope to open it soon. From the time the work started, in July, I have been taking photos and posting them on the library site – Library Online. Also, I have been tweeting (probably too much) from The Librain’s account and also my school library account – Library Online – with almost daily updates. I think that because of this activity, I have been asked to do a presentation for the next Your School Library Course!

If you are interested in library design, then this course should be very interesting. There are some great presenters – I wish I could have had this course a year ago! Anyway, if you want to find out more, then check out the flyer below:

Well, I have now reached a similar stage in my new job – very quickly it seems! We already have the following library sites:

• Library Online – the main library site
• Library_Online Twitter account – used to put news updates on to any of the library sites
• Library Online Netvibes pages – these have been created to house news feeds from France, Germany, China and the UK. Also, I am adding in Business and Sports news feeds
• Library Online Wiki – this is a private wiki for our Reading Group

I expect you are seeing the pattern here! Yes, I am branding all of these with Library Online in order to draw all of these services together.

I have played around a bit with Wordle and made these temporary logos. These are the colours of the refurbished library – I think the one on the left looks best!

I may open this as a competition at school later on – I am sure that the students can do a better job!

The podcasting presentation was excellent and I feel that I could try this out, when the opportunity presents itself. I have saved the presentation and also all of the links so that I can return to it later on.

I also dropped in on the “chat” session just to see that it works OK before our session at 8.00 pm tonight. If I have the energy, I may add to this post after that.

This afternoon, I tried the session on The Seamless School Library – well, that had me bowled over but totally drained at the same time. This is not a quick Word document or a .pdf, but a whole website to explore. It was too much for an afternoon – trying to fit this between the normal library stuff. I am also getting quite tired as I have been staying up too late reading stuff and then I cannot sleep as so much is whirring around my head!

Anyway, I will again come back to that section at a later date as I cannot cope with it today.

So, I spent some time working on the Library Online website. Having watched the social bookmarking presentation, I was reminded that I could use the “link rolls” script from Delicious to show visitors to the Subject pages the latest links for each subject that I have added to Delicious. I have only made a few of these pages as yet, because I have not reached the point where I am working closely with teachers. I just made these as examples – although the English one is starting to develop because the Sixth Form students are starting to ask me for help – wonderful!

Update: What great fun it was chatting to other school librarians on Meebo last night. Now I can see why teenagers get so addicted to MSN! Then I spent some time setting up Skype and got through to a friend in Australia. I still feel so starry-eyed by the power of technology! Maybe that is why I chose the picture below as my main avatar!

Anyway, back to the presentation. Again, I don’t think that I found out a lot of new stuff as I have been using both Delicious and Diigo for some time. But it did remind me of some things and introduced me to some new terms. I have favourited it on SlideShare and will return to it at a later date to think about it some more. I was interested in the RISAL project and will certainly explore that more when I have the time.

The second presentation : “The Os of Web 2.0: Openness, Originality and Others” is in PDf format and I have downloaded it and printed it out to read. I find it difficult to read long articles like this these days as they take a lot of concentration and I don’t really get the space and time for that – at school, everything is very busy; at home – well, mayhem would be a good word! Also, I am not used to it – I think that I am out of practise these days.

Anyway, I have begun a bubbl.us to show my learning network (I have used this before to create a sitemap for my Library Online site – although this needs updating).

I started the day thinking about participation on the course. A lot of SLN members from the UK have joined and yet I could see only a handful online and posting comments. Also it was apparent that many people were struggling with Sosius before they could actually get to work on the course. So I decided to  write a quick guide to getting started and then I uploaded it to a couple of areas and notified everyone – I hope that it helps.

Also, thinking about all of the wonderful resources mentioned in the posts, I had begun to tag them on Diigo for myself and so I thought that it would be helpful to others if I offered to do this for everyone. Now, I know that it is a huge task and may be a bit impossible to achieve successfully. But I will try to do it as best I can.

So, to the actual course. What did I learn yesterday? I have only just begun my new job and the focus for my first year must be on designing and developing the new library. It is such a small school and so it is easy to talk to staff face to face. However, I have also been given the remit that I will help the school develop ICT in the future. I hope that I have opportunities to show some of these Web2.0 tools to staff – maybe at a training day. So, I will take the chance to learn as much as I can and try to suggest things to teachers where appropriate. I will also use the Library Online website to demonstrate some of them also and maybe develop a wiki for the Reading Group. Then I will have some practical examples to show.

We are in a difficult situation when a lot of the staff do not read their official emails! But I will have to try to find my way around this. So these are my thoughts about the presentation on professional development for staff with Web2.0.

As to the other presentation on mashups! This was a really steep learning curve for me. At least I think that I understand a little more about what they are, but I couldn’t get to grips with Yahoo Pipes. Maybe that was because I was trying to do this in too much of a hurry. It is difficult to make the mental space and time at home on an evening, when my boys are fighting me for the computer!

I will have to come back to this at a later date, when I can find a quiet time to really concentrate!

I am having a lot of fun with the school library website. It has been started as a way of tracking the development of the Library as it is refurbished and also offering a service to the school when the current library stock is not of a standard to really meet the needs of the staff and students. It has been gratifying that so many school librarians have seen the site and have used it as an exemplar of what can be done. I also think that I can use the site to create a bit of a “wow factor” by utilising lots of Web2.0 gadgets and widgets to catch the eye.

These are being used in an educational way (honest) but also as a bit of fun. I chose a theme for the site that has a sidebar at each side of the main page. That way there is enough room to add in a range of widgets. I have moved them around a bit and tried a range of services.

So what are the main Web2.0 services that I am using? The left sidebar is mainly about the Library Online website itself:

• The top two widgets are just text that I use to explain the site and put on the latest news about the site.
• Then comes a widget with my Twitter feeds. I have to make sure that I use direct messages for personal conversations as the Twitter feeds need to look professional for the site. They are a great way of adding instant news updates to the site. I am Dixie_library on Twitter, by the way!
• The next six widgets are those generated for a WordPress blog that enable visitors to see the page structure, recent posts, recent comments, categories and tags. These help a visitor to navigate the site.
• Under this is more fun stuff. I have found that our students are fascinated to see where the visitors to our site are coming from – this is especially important as we are have International School Award. So I have put in widgets from Feedjit and Clustrmaps to show all of this.
• Below this are a range of widgets. The Educator’s Calendar from Widgetbox is used as I wanted to show events from around the world. I am not entirely satisfied that this is the best source as yet. Then a weather widget (also from Widgetbox) for our nearest town – Hinckley – shows how cold it is today! A badge for the TeacherLibrarian network and administrative tasks finishes this sidebar.

The right sidebar is more about the Library itself and also the public library etc.:

• First of all a text widget which will show current activities such as the recent National Year of Reading and currently the Times Books for Schools.
• Secondly, a widget that shows the photographs of our Library that I have uploaded to Flickr. I have done this so that I can show the development of the Library from this baseline year going forward into the future.
• Below this is another text widget with quick facts about the Library.
• Then I have put in a box with a link to a Meebo account. This may be a bit risky, but I have been reading about libraries who are using Instant Messaging with their customers and I am trying it out. I may find that another service will give me more control as I am a little concerned about misuse. What do you think?
• In the absence of an online catalogue, I am using LibraryThing to show the books that we have at present – the only issue I have is updating this as I think that I need to delete all records on it and re-import them regularly as we are buying a lot of new stock and withdrawing a huge amount at present. Anyway, this is shown in the sidebar.
• There are then some other reading-based widgets with favourite authors, a link to reading development websites tagged on Diigo, and a book review finder – which is a Google custom search engine.
• I have also highlighted our local public libraries in Leicestershire and Warwickshire (where most of our students and staff live) with links to their online catalogues and to the online subsciption services that they offer. Our local branch is also advertised here to encourage use by our school.
• Following this are three more widgets – firstly showing our Delicious tags: I have built these up over a long time and am in the process of adding new ones to support our staff and students. I use Delicious now for our curriculum and Diigo for professional links. Next is a link to SlideShare, where I upload any presentations that I think would be of interest. Last of all a link to Wordle, which I find fascinating – I keep trying to get teachers to use this – but no luck at the moment!

So, this has been a very long post, but I wanted to explain what I am trying to achieve at the front end of the site. Ideas for development are very welcome – please let me know if you have found better alternatives!

So, interesting times for me. I feel that I am back to doing a lot of “traditional” library work again. My present library will be re-furbished next summer, so in the meantime I am sorting out a really dated book-tock. These are the things that I have been doing:

• stock-taking
• weeding
• re-cataloguing
• cleaning
• re-labelling
• making new guiding and signage

When that is finished – which will take months – then I will be able to start buying some new stuff. At the same time as all this, I am trying to get to know the staff and pupils – making those all-important relationships that will stand me in good stead as I develop the library.

So, where does that leave all of the new Web2.0 stuff that I was beginning to develop in my last job? Well, as the resources of the library cannot adequately support the curriculum of the school, I have been working on the Library website – see previous post. The new Library Online is developing nicely and the school are really pleased with it. I am planning to spend more time on it over half term, when I can really get on with thinking about how I want to use it.

Soon, I will do a presentation to the entire school in Assembly and show everyone the site.

Do have a look and let me know what you think:

Library Online

If I decide that this is the way to go, then I will spend more time on it:

The site is at: http://library-online.org.uk/

I have chosen a hosted WordPress site and used a theme that I like a lot. The theme colour goes well with the school logo and colours. Also I can add widgets with lots of lovely Web2.0 stuff.

The idea is to have something that looks professional, can take links and resources to help students and staff and can be editing very quickly and easily from any computer.

I also want a bit of a Wow Factor!

Does this work?