It’s All Good plugs OCLCs digitizing services [“aren’t you glad you’ve done the hard work of digitizing all your special collections at times like these?“], and then points to two useful pages on the SOLINET web site: Before the Storm: The Countdown (Preparing for a Storm) & Actions for the First Day After (Cleaning Up After a Storm)
emergencies, public information, and libraries
When disaster strikes, is the library web site a place you could go to for breaking news, even if the library was closed? I hate to be a disaster vulture, but I always wonder when things happen like the tsunami, or 9/11, or this hurricane, what is the library’s role? How could their web presence help people? Here are some other New Orleans web sites, to demonstrate what I mean.
- the Loyola web site automatically redirects their home page to the emergency announcement page and includes a bright yellow button on the footer of every page on the site so even if you start on a page within the site, you’ll see their announcements.
- Louisiana State has a news sidebar explaining that the school will be closed
- The Louisiana Library Collection Database even managed to put two links in which aren’t too styling but direct people to FEMA and the National Hurricane Center
- LSU Health Sciences does it quickly and simply with a big emergency headline across the main page.
- Nichols State even appears to have a blog ready for emergency preparedness with a way to post regular updates, linked off of the main page.
My question to you: if there was an emergency, could you update your library home page quickly to inform your patrons?
update: due to sporadic electricity in the Louisiana area, many of these sites are now down. I’ve added a bit more description in lieu of actual pages you can look at.
other side of the digital divide
The Filipino Librarian talks about how the capacity to experiment with technology, or not, creates the real digital divide.
Cat and Girl comic about librarians.
“If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is like a drunken librarian who won’t shut up.” Read the rest over at Cat and Girl [thanks matthew]
What We Want, The OPAC Manifesto
Andrew Pace reminds me that I used to have a wiki, way back when. This wiki was a place where, among other things, I had a roomshare page for ALA as well as the OPAC Manifesto which was going to be an article in Searcher Magazine. However, the final version was not quite Searcher material, so I shelved it temporarily while I thought about wikifixing and promptly forgot about it. The OPAC Manifesto is back for your viewing [though not editing] pleasure. Thanks very much to people who helped with it. Feel free to link or republish in any not-for-profit venture, just cite it and credit it.
update: for those of you who missed this topic before, the manifesto was set up on a wiki so that anyone could add or edit ideas on it. The intro and outro are mine, the rest was collaboratively built.