Hi. I have the day off today which means that I can stay home, mess with cars, watch it snow and not have to shake my fist at the weather. I have been working on the library web site for the past month and it’s almost ready to go live. If anyone would like to take a peek at it and give me some feedback, I’d appreciate it. My goals are to have the site use all CSS for layout, be accessible to people with low vision or who use screen-readers, be standards compliant [I am still doing some retrofitting to make this work, like closing my [li] tags] and have stuff be easy to find. On the back end, I’ll be running Movable Type on Lishost so it will have a series of templates and stylesheets that can be ignored as content is updated. Things I could not control includes the inclusion of images, the boxy logo and most of the content, which came with it. Here’s the old site and the new site. My goal is to improve on the old site which was not terribly bad to begin with, but hard to update and maintain, and to make it one of the best public library web sites in the state of Vermont.
Month: February 2004
no more inky stamps
Fairfax County VA libraries are starting to use those little receipt-printers instead of the old ink stamps. We use it at my library and while I don’t run the place, I must say I liked the ink stamps. I like knowing how popular or unpopular the book I was reading is. I like not having a piece of fresh paper to recycle or toss out. I like my book not seeming like a purchase, but like a loan. Of course, we’ve kept the pockets in the books, where else would you put the receipts?
bad, headline, worse problem
Sometimes it’s better to have no services at all than bad services. No services means hope for good service. Bad service means that all people do is talk about how much it will cost to fix what is broken, not, say, return service to the population. A sad tale involved with the Delhi Public Library’s Braille Library.
the greying of the profession does not equal more jobs for new grads
Rachel Singer Gordon has written an excellent article for Library Journal about the “greying of the profession” hype we’ve all been hearing and how it doesn’t necessariy turn into tons of jobs for younger librarians.
“How old will you be in 2019? Will you be watching for the “next next wave” of new librarians entering the profession then? Sitting around waiting is not only macabre, it’s against the very spirit of librarianship, which recognizes the importance of the varied experiences and contributions of every member of the profession and of every piece of knowledge each of us possesses.” [lisnews]
Google Schmoogle, what’s the REAL answer?
The New York Times — and my favorite library professor Joe Janes — tries valliantly to convince people that librarians still serve a purpose. This article interests me for a few reasons. Librarians still beat out Google in terms of being able to provide definitive, properly sourced, information. I also like Janes’s description of librarians as being people who have a “plan B” when Google fails them. However I wonder if most of our patrons value this level of detail? If you need the name of the party Perot started do you really need to look through more than one page of Google results, as the Times somewhat snobbily implies most people don’t? How many times do our patrons really just want to know what most people think the answer is, which is Google’s strength, and not the One True Answer, which is ours. [thanks all]