The Librain

I am now busy transferring the links on to Diigo as the site has now gone – along with the associated email address. It will then be incorporated into another site – watch this space for more details.

Then I had better get on with posting other things as The Librain! I am so busy in my new job and with my new library website. But I am sure that there are issues that I will want to write about here in the near future.

I have put the site back up today and it will run until the end of the year, without any updates, though. I will now put all of the personal stuff onto this blog and just leave the site for the time being. I will also keep the links that are still useful on delicious or furl and link to them from here.

The School Library Association are looking into how they can use the links on their site.

It will be sad to see it go in a way – and my husband thinks that I am making a mistake in finishing the site now – but technology has moved on so much and I want to try out new things. Now that the SLA has such a good site, I am sure that they can use the links and keep themmore up-to-date.

When I started Strongest Links, there was nothing like it around for UK school librarians, but things have improved so much.

I will continue to post on this blog with my thoughts about school librarianship, and also enjoy developing my school library website.

Many thanks for all of the lovely comments you have made here or by email about how much Strongest Links has helped. I am glad that it was of so much use!

Best wishes to you all…

I would like to start a debate here about Strongest Links. This was set up about 5 or 6 years ago to act as a support website for UK school librarians. There was very little available in this country at that time – the SLA had a very basic site and SLG’s was similar. I saw a niche for a site that would be useful to my colleagues.

My reasons for creating the site were:

• To support my colleagues in the UK
• To develop my web-building skills through a project that I thought would be useful
• To have a place to store my huge number of bookmarks that were constantly being lost on my school network
• To raise my profile in the profession – I am not ashamed of that statement – I am being honest here!
• To have a place to put miscellaneous stuff!

The site is written at home and in my own time using Frontpage. I gave it a re-vamp last year to update the look and incorporate a bit more of a Web2.0 feel.

However…

The world has moved on apace and now the SLA at least has a much better and more informative site and I am sure that SLG will follow. I have now developed a wider range of skills and am working on blogs and wikis and enjoying the ease of creation and editing that these bring – my new school library website is testament to that.

So these are the issues for me:

• The site has not been updated for quite some time, as I have very little time available at home to work on it. As it is written using Frontpage, I can only edit it at home and not add things on the fly as I can do with my school site.
• Is it really being used by anyone? I can see the hits on the site, but I don’t know how useful it is any more.
• Should I spend some time at half term updating it? If so, which sections are useful and which should I get rid of?
• Would I regret it if I closed it down?
• Should I offer it to someone else? If so, who would want it?
• I think that the wiki part was not useful, so I will delete that – does anyone mind?

If people want me to carry on with it, I am happy to do so. I just need some feedback to help me decide. If you want it to continue, please let me know…

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.

During a sleepless night recently, I began to think about how much time I spend writing my two websites, Strongest Links and LRC Online. I have spent ages trying to design useful sites which flow easily with the best appearance that I can manage with my limited ability. But is this kind of thing necessary any more?

I have a growing list of Del.icio.us tagged websites. Why not just add a link to these rather than labour to make finely honed Pathfinders? I talked about this with Jan Radford, who does this on her site and I will now begin to think about this a bit further.

The other thing is that it is so easy and quick to edit this blog, but I have to go through a long process to edit my LRC site – LRC Online.  I can edit this at school or at home, but I have to then upload it at home because of restrictions on our school network. yet, I can add my thoughts to this blog in a moment.

Shall consider this more…

When researching Web 2.0 and School Library 2.0 a consistent voice has been Joyce Valenza’s. I have always admired her school website and have found other sites that she has made. But this particular page really rang bells for me:

How my life has changed/How my life will change

She started out a little before I did and has been several steps ahead of me in her thinking and daily practice. I found this page so interesting that I had to think about how far I have come.

She says: “We cannot expect to assume a leadership role in information technology and instruction, we cannot claim any credibility with students, faculty, or administrators if we do not recognize and thoughtfully exploit the information and communication paradigm shifts of the past two years.”

Yes, the pace of change is accelerating and we need to think what kind of library spaces we are going to manage in the future. Will the library be a physical space at all?

Anyway, read her page to see where she thinks we are going.

I have added two new pages to Strongest Links on the future of school libraries and the impact of Web 2.0. These contain the links that I have found when researching for the RTA Conference  materials. This has been really fascinating, finding out so many new ideas and trying out Web 2.0 technologies.

My particular favourite things were:

 Kathryn Greenhill’s  Why should I learn about that when I’m busy with other stuff? and 20 reasons why learning emerging techologies is part of every librarian’s job from her Librarians Matter Blog. These are great posts – I can just imagine how many school librarians will respond to the idea of school library 2.0.

Many will be interested and try to find out more. They will try to incorporate new ideas in their work and will “sell” them to teachers – and their response will be fairly predictable in some cases. Other librarians will use the usual argument of not enough time. This is perhaps rather unfair of me as I don’t mean to criticise. In the UK, many school librarians work on their own and are part-time, term-time only. Many are very poorly paid. There are so many things that take up our time and are very important: reading development, information literacy teaching, the day-to-day running of the library.

But, this is the future. When I started out as a school librarian in 1982, we did not have computers in school libraries in the UK. I think that I got my first one in 1984 – a BBC Model B! I have always tried to keep up with new ideas and, in fact, keep ahead where I can.

So, the future is now! I will continue to use this blog to think about how I am changing and how I am trying to use new ideas in my work.

Decided today that I should completely re-vamp my website Strongest Links. The colour scheme is tired so I have tried to make a new one. When this is completed, then I will look at the links and the rest of the content.

I want to put a lot of new stuff on Web 2.0 and School Library 2.0. During the last three weeks or so, I have been working on a presentation for the RTA Conferences for school librarians in November. This has been really interesting, although very time consuming. I feel that I have learned so much – especially by reading other people’s blogs. I will add some of this stuff on here as well, when I have time.