The Librain

Almost a year ago I wrote a post about how I was trying to pull together all of the web services that I was developing in my previous school. I had created a library website, a wiki, a blog and was developing sections of the school’s VLE to support teaching and learning through the library – I decided to call it all LRC Online Services.

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!

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: