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.

I gave a presentation on the future of school libraries to two conferences in Reading and Leeds. This was my first attempt to put together some thoughts about where we might be going and how we can use Web 2.0 in our work. It took a lot of thinking and research (using the blogs listed on this site), to create the presentation. It will be interesting to see what kind of feedback I might get.

I have spent days building Pathfinders on LRC Online for Art students in our college to help them with exams. The pages cover various art movements and have links to appropriate artists. This is the link: LRC Online: Art Pathfinders

SO…

Some students used them as directed…

BUT…

Others just “Googled” as normal. They wanted to find images and by-passed all of the informative sites that I had tried to find.

SO…

What is the best way to support students and make the best use of my time? I gather the links first on Del.icio.us, then build pages around the themes that the teachers have asked for. Does anyone have any better suggestions for the best way to use limited time - after all, this was “just” Art. What about all of the other curricular areas that we are trying to support?

How many school librarians run their school websites - I mean the official ones rather than their own library site? I am starting to look at ours with a view to revising and re-organising it.

So, what is the best way to use a school site? In England, we are now expected to develop learning platforms/VLEs. These will give students a flavour of the social networking sites that they inhabit, but with the control of adults. There are interesting from the school librarian’s point of view and many of us are beginning to use them to work beyond the walls of our libraries. I am wondering if we might feel a little constrained by these in the way that we want to develop our use of Web 2.0 technologies. Already, many of the filtering systems used by our schools block many useful sites - especially blogging.

Anyway, back to the school official site. Schools use these for many purposes. We are going to think about developing ours mainly as a marketing tool and using the VLE for the rest. It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop.