typo(s), tendency and text » Library

What’s in the library? – Info videos about what happens in two small libraries

r4gni — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:24:31 +0000

Two small community libraries, Fjell folkeboksamling and Meland bibliotek, have said yes to a new experience: Making a film about what people can find in the library. Two groups of students from a seminar at the Institute for media and informations science, University of Bergen, had the task to find out what the libraries had - and how they could present the material.

The outcome is quite fascinating. While the one about Meland focuses on words and animations with the (very nice and sympathetic) head librarian as, the other one focuses on the youngest target group of potential patrons: A - mostly silent - kid boy with his curious discoveries in the library. Both the films are charming. I like the approach of presenting the librarian as a person and give the library not only a lot of meaning, but also show a friendly and smart human face. And I also like the approach of the other film that shows very well how you can go on a discovery in the library - and find besides the fishing rod (that you really can borrow at this library" and all the other stuff, what could be an interesting discovery for you.

The film about Meland bibliotek:

The film about Fjell folkeboksamling:

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Organic Groups, Calendars and new hosting perspectives

r4gni — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:19:11 +0000

It has been awfully silent on this blog about the work on Drupal sites for the Hordaland libraries. Quite the opposite were my work days. I have had a number of meetings with the three library consortia I have been mainly working with, and soon there will be more classes for the librarians who are becoming editorial groups for their own social media-ready web sites.

New modules have been tried. I am very satisfied with using the Organic Groups module for making subsites for the involved community libraries. Although they don't use the full spectre of social media capability og the module, it is quite powerful for managing the workflow and adding more areas for publishing. That way both the collaboration between the libraries and the profile of the individual library is preserved and managed. If the libraries will have use for this, their patrons can authenticate on the site and get notified about new articles and events. Maybe they will even have forums or other features for their users one day. While Drupal is somewhat more complex to administer than WordPress, it makes it so easy to add new features and areas without programming in PHP. Two library consortia needed calendars that would show the individual libraries events as well as the whole consortias events in different views. This was easily deliverable with Organic group calendars, the Date and Event modules and the Views module. I learned a great dal about Views, which has a learning curve. But once you understand the essentials (what means what), you can do powerful reorganizing of content and list every type of content in new ways.

One difficult issue was the question: Where to host the Drupal sites? The library department in the Hordaland County Council could not do it in-house and had special needs: The Drupal core and the modules had to be kept up to date for them. It took me a lot of time to research which companies could do this for a reasonable price. We ended up finding a collaboration of two smaller vendors of free software for libraries. Which gives the department both the possibility to get support in Norwegian, as well as the vendors are experienced in the field of library catalogue software, as both vendors sell installation, migration, hosting and support of the Koha and Evergreen ILS. So, Libriotech and BibLibre will take on this task in the coming weeks.

It may not sound like a big deal, but having capable people ensure that the sites are running really wasn't easy to manage and secure the future of this project. It also takes some pressure of my task list as the updating processes will not take that much time anymore when we will come into the critical phase of launching the sites for the public to see.

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Evaluering av ulike CMS for bibliotek

r4gni — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:55:02 +0000

I vår avsluttet jeg en test av ulike serverbaserte publiseringsverktøy til bibliotek, og skrev en rapport. Jeg testet, med hjelp av andre bibliotekarer, tre forskjellige fri programvare CMS: Drupal, Joomla og WordPress.

Siden den gangen har min og andres erfaring bekreftet resultatene. Jeg vil gjerne publisere den, for å muligens få tilbakemelding på den. Kan hende jeg har oversett noe, eller andre kan bruke min fremgangsmåte eller noe av resultatene i sin arbeid.

Her er rapporten til nedlasting i PDF-format:evaluering av ulike publiseringsverktøy

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Redaktørhåndbok Drupal

r4gni — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:56:15 +0000

Siden vi i Hordaland fylkesbibliotek får for tiden mye nyttig fra Drupal-samfunnet, vil vi selvfølgelig gjerne gi tilbake hva vi kan. Noe som ofte er undervurdert av utviklersamfunn selv i veldig oppegående åpen kildekode-prosjekter er brukerdokumentasjon, ikke minst til end-brukeren.

Jeg er invitert til Fjell folkeboksamling i morgen for å gi opplæring i bruk av Drupal til bibliotekarene, som blir da redaktører på sin egen nettside. Jeg har derfor laget en redaktørhåndbok for å støtte denne prosessen og for bibliotekarene å ha den aller viktigste informasjonen lett tilgjengelig i deres travel hverdag.

Eventuelt er det interessant til andre Drupal-prosjekt å bruke og forandre teksten på håndboka. Den skal få en GPLv2-lisens, så gjerne forandre alt mulig, så lenge du pusher tilbake til Drupal-samfunnet. Og ta bort mitt navn og organisasjon, bare gi oss kreditt hvis du synes det er nødvendig. Last ned filene (zip, ca. 850k med bilder): Kilde til redaktørhåndboken

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The Social OPAC – SOPAC

r4gni — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:57:24 +0000

As the libraries in Nordhordland are preparing to get the "Aquabrowser" installed, a vendor-installed layer to their catalogues that is supposed to add advanced and eye-candy search possibilities to their collections, there is a very interesting module project for Drupal: The SOPAC, aka the social OPAC. It could provide a functionality that is comparable to that.

It is especially interesting, because what most of the libraries in the norwegian districts suffer from is lack of time and money - which often ends up forgetting how people tend to use - and how they are looking for media. Dividing your webside and the web interface of the catalogue is not helping.

This is a problem that all libraries want to fix, but not everybody is so lucky to have the necessary resources to do that. Still, library services are not less needed whether they are being online or offline.

You can get an idea of what the Social OPAC can do if you look at the catalogue of the Darien library.

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Test: openbook plugin for WordPress

r4gni — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:37:10 +0000

I am testing viable ways to display media data in a way, that libraries can show what they have - which is not unproblematic at the moment with having many different libraries with different catalogue systems from different vendors - and as it is with working in the public services sector: a limited budget.

So here is a test with WordPress and the open book plugin, which pulls data from the Open Library and points to the WorldCat.

The problem is: Book data from norwegian books appear, but very little and almost none of the Norwegian books have a cover picture. I don't know if librarians are actively taking part in collecting data for this open database of books, or not. Problem nr. 2: There is a non-trivial discussion going on in library world about in how far the WorldCat tries to own data that libraries deliver to them. I don't know if this is the reason while there is no support for Norwegian libraries on the WorldCat.

Make: The First Year (4 Vol. Set)

Mark Frauenfelder; O'Reilly Media, Inc. 2005

WorldCat⋅LibraryThing⋅Google Books⋅BookFinder

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Screencast: Hvordan å bruke DokuWiki som intranett

r4gni — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:27:58 +0000

Hordaland fylkesbibliotek planlegger å tilby biblioteker som samarbeider over kommunegrenser å opprette et samlet internt intranett med grunnlag i DokuWiki-programvaren. Her er en screencast over hvordan DokuWiki kan brukes. Kritikk og innspill er velkommen. Hvis filmen nederst er for små, eller du ikke kan bruke flash, prøv å klikke på
DokuWiki Screencast. (76,8 Mb)

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trying to find a good way to handle multiple cms installs

r4gni — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:51:59 +0000

One viable way of managing multiple cms installs of the same kind would be using version control and distributing the tested new version of updated software to the different locations. Since I have heard of and read up on git recently, I signed up for GitHub. You can find the first repository here, it's for trying out Joomla!.

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Brochures on accessibility in Norway

r4gni — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:14:12 +0000

Norway wants all public service to be accessible to everyone, regardless of disabilities. "Universell utforming" is the term that describes how every aspect of public service should be shaped to meet the needs of a diversity of people. Of course, also the web services in public service have to be accessible to as many people as possible. You can order and download (norwegian) brochures about this topic on the pages of the Norwegian Directorate of Health:

Tilgjengelige nettsteder:

1. Oversikt og innholdsproduksjon

2. Design og koding

3. Anskaffelse og kvalitetskriterier

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Testkatalog – under construction

r4gni — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:34:45 +0000

Del av den nye jobben min er å finne frem til en løsning for det aktuelle problemet: De fleste folkebibliotekene i Hordaland har nettsteder som er vanskelig å oppdatere. For å forbedre kommunikasjonen mellom bibliotekbrukere og bibliotekarene skal jeg lete etter en CMS som er både moderne, enkel å bruke, vil eksistere lenge. Etter det og andre faglige kriterier har jeg utarbeidet en testkatalog, som jeg gjerne vil ha tilbakemelding og tips om.

For å se hvordan programvarene som skal bli testet forholder seg i virkeligheten har jeg skaffet domenen folkebiblioteket.org. Der er for tiden utviklingsfeltet, og jeg jobber med forskjellige scenario hvilken programvare man kan bruke til hva. Strukturene er ikke endelige og kan endre seg hele tiden, men så snart den skal beta-testes sender jeg en e-post til alle interesserte.

Prosjekt - Tilbud om felles nettsted til folkebiblioteka

Testkatalog: CMS som egner seg til bibliotekenes behov

Preambel: Kravene som rettes mot en Content Management System (CMS) retter seg etter spesifikasjoner i prosjektplanen. Kravene kan bli utvidet eller innskrenket etter samtaler og møter med folkebibliotekene i Hordaland. Testkatalogen skal spesifisere utfordringer til programvaren og i gjennomgang av katalogen skal det bli synlig og transparent hvilken programvare egner seg mest - og hvorfor. Til tross for skjematisering skal ikke inntrykket vekkes, at avgjøringen er fullstendig objektiviserbart. Det foreblir en viss subjektivitet, men tross alt skal programvaren som blir valgt være brukbar og håndterbar.

Lisens:
Hva betyr det?

Installasjon:

Tid brukt:
Enkelt eller tungt?
Hvorfor?

Språkfiler:

Bokmål:
Nynorsk:
Installasjon enkelt eller tungt?
Hvorfor?
Dekker språkfiler både både frontend og backend?
Kvalitet:

Oppgradering:

Tid brukt:
Enkelt eller tungt?
Hvorfor?

Er installering og oppgradering automatiserbart?
Hvordan:
git
subversion
annet, hva?

Hva kan programvaren fra starten av:
Blog
RSS
Statiske Sider
Meningsmåling
Podcast
Filhåndtering
Mediefremstilling
Wiki-funksjonalitet
Katalogintegrering
Annet, hva?

Moduler/Plugins:
Enkelt å installere
Språk
Kostnader?
Utvalg (biblioteksspesifikk?)

Brukbarhet:
Brukere ser bare I menyen det de kan gjøre
Admin-funksjonene er enkelt å skjønne
Brukerfunksjonene er lett å skjønne
Tid å opprette og lage en artikkel
Stavekontroll?
Lett å legge media til artikklene
Avansert brukersystem
Backend har hjelpesider (som kan utvides?)

Sikkerhet:
Sikkerhetshull i fortid:
Mulige sikkerhetsproblemer:

Community/Langvarighet:
Hvor lenge fins programvaren?
Har utviklingen vært stabil?
Konstruktive konflikter?
Destruktive konflikter?
Hvor mangen hovedutviklere?
Inklusjon av nye utviklere?
Lett å kommunisere?
Oppdaterings-syklus?

Konklusjon:

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