At about the three minute point, I take you on a tour of my whiteboard and my office….

I am hoping to make a weekly “hi there, have you thought about *this*” video for my students. All the students in one unit and about two thirds in the other are studying online only, so I hope that a video will make me seem less faceless. I have bought a Zoom Q3 Handyshare to make the videos. It has studio-quality audio with the added bonus of a video attached – with about the video quality of a Flip camera. It looks like this:

What you don’t see in this clip is the twenty others I made before with such thrilling content as:

• “This is with the window behind me and the overhead light on”;
• “This is on the rounded end of my desk, with the desk lamp on and the overhead light off”;
• “This is up against the back wall of my office with all light sources and the camera on a filing cabinet”

- as I tried to find a light source that made me look human and not like a kidnapper.

It would have been even better if I wore a white shirt and used some of the other tips and tricks in the article that first made it all click for me about how lighting worked with video cameras – How to Improve Your Cheapo Webcam’s Picture Quality

On my way from the carpark on my first day, I tweeted that I had just heard a segment about the whether the  ”paperless office” fulfilled its promise on ABC Radio National’s Future Tense .  In response, Michael Rees from Bond University shared that night his experience with cleaning out 19 years worth of contents in his university office, A Major Step Closer to a Paperless Office. He discarded…

…About 8 bookshelf metres of conference proceedings, box files and the usual stuff in ring binders including lots of overhead slides from the 1970s and 1980s all bit the dust. 9 full filing cabinet drawers were reduced to 0.25 of a drawer – that was all I had actually looked at in the last 12 months. 23 old conference bags were reduced to 2. Out of over 100 optical disks about 3 survived. I kept 1 USB headset/mic and discarded a dozen or more old analogue headsets, mics and speakers. It feels wonderful. [For those wondering I discarded all my printed journals 2 or 3 years ago.]

Consequently I don’t feel too bad about the inheritance that will share my space until we move buildings at the end of the year. It’s a decade worth of the Tuesday IT Section of the Australian newspaper. Only half of the collection fit into the photo.

I was asked whether I wanted to continue adding to the collection. “Why not”, I thought, “obviously it was valued and it would be a pity to stop it now”. For about 5 seconds… before I asked myself whether I would have chosen it as essential for my office if it wasn’t there already…

I used the Featured Content option. In the Reading option in Settings, I set the home page to be a page that uses the Magazine template.

Of course, I am wondering whether the home page is a bit overdone. If you have an opinion about any of the questions below, please let me know.

• Do you think the rotating content is a bit too much?
• The refresh rate too fast?
• The blog a little too slow to load now?
• Does it look less friendly and like a place to have a chat?
• Do you notice the RSS feed options and do they take up too much screen real estate?
• Would you prefer the output of a search in the search box to be a list of blog post titles, or the little excerpt boxes as appear on the front page at the moment?

I *can’t* be the only one who has spread her content over many,many sites.

I start at Curtin Uni next week and I want to:

• keep my academic references / papers / thoughts and jottings in order and accessible and sharable.
• be able to tag, store and retrieve them at the flick of a button and without interrupting my everyday workflow. (Don’t we all ? )
• have a place that I can flick references/readings that I want students to look at.. possibly with annotation (Tumblr? Delicious?)
• have an online portfolio/repository of my own writings/audio of presentations that I can link to when people ask about them

I am toying with starting a “Kathryn as an academic” blog … mainly so I can use all sorts of tools but have a single place to pull in the feeds from the tools, and then point people that I want to share with to just the one spot… (Or maybe I should start a separate friendfeed account for that ?)

Currently I use:

• A Zotero account for my “personal and scholarly” citations (for papers I am writing etc). Synced via Firefox on my own PCs and at Zotero on the web
• A Delicious account for my “non-scholarly and want to share” bookmarks (like WordPress hacks). Not backed up.
• Evernote for my personal jottings, screenshots and crap. Synced on my own PCs, iThings and the web.
• Dropbox as a backup for whatever I am writing, a place to pop pdfs I want to read on my iThings and for sharing co-created works while they are being made. Synced between my PCs and the web.
• Instapaper to save readings that are pushed out in Twitter that I want to find later and read on my iThings. Not backed up.
• My Slideshare account for the public face of my presentations, plus audio on my own webserver if it is a screencast. Presentations backed up on my PCs. Synchronised slidecasts not backed up.
• The c: drive on my PC for pdfs of professional reading that I have saved to Zotero.
• Goodreader now that I have my ipad for reading long pdfs. Downloaded by emailing them to myself) Only on my iPad and gmail
• LibrariansMatter.com for my blogging and KathrynGreenhill.com as a kind of professional portfolio. Backed up regularly.
• Twitter as Libsmatter where I push out things that I would otherwise blog here. Not backed up.
• I also have a YouTube account and a Flickr account that has a mixture of personal and professional. Originals on PCs

I seem to have a lot of places where I am storing full text, so I intend to investigate Omeka as a way of creating my own repository, or maybe Kete or Drupal…although I do not want a huge rigmarole to store and upload files. I know there is a great Zotero/Omeka plugin.

I’m trying to set up a really sensible structure from Day 1 …but with so many tools I think I must be being really inefficient. It doesn’t bother me so much to use so many, I just feel really “unlibrarianly” and not very analytic to be doing so. Maybe that is just the nature of the beast- all do what they do very, very well..

I am curious about whether anyone else has solved this kind of problem in a more elegant way…

I’m starting the position as Associate Lecturer in Information Studies at Curtin University of Technology on 15 July, teaching the unit about Information Management Technologies and also the Public Librarianship unit.

IMG_0835 uploaded to Flickr by Mal Booth

I take a week off with the kids on school holidays next week, spend two more days at the Grove, then start at Curtin the next day…The students arrive about two weeks after I start.

If you are in my network and are a student or a library school teacher or a librarian with an idea about what should be taught, I will probably be calling on you for mentorship as I find my feet in the next six months or so..

I would love to know your best bit of advice you can give to someone teaching library school students, online and blended online/internal teaching, changing to a new sector or balancing work and family … any and all ideas gratefully accepted….

But if you have:

• Seen the slideshow of how the sun soaked building is shaping up
• Heard me talk about our vision on the radio; or
• Read the library’s digital strategy

…and would like to be part of shaping it all and add your own touch, then you should apply.

The Grove. Leading, learning, living. Site visit May 2010 uploaded to Flickr by thegrovelibrary

The position will be advertised in the West Australian this weekend and an information package has just been sent out on WAIN, the Western Australian library list. Applications close on 19 July 2010.

Here is a bit more information:

e-Services Librarian – Full Time

An exciting opportunity is being offered to an enthusiastic and creative professional interested in sharing in the challenges of providing a “state of the art” library service to the Cottesloe, Peppermint Grove and Mosman Park communities.

The successful applicant will be responsible for driving and managing all the technology initiatives and the library’s online presence within this new and innovative library environment.

We will be looking for a person who has the technical and communications skills to implement our Digital Strategy.

The salary range is $61,173 – $65,731 depending on experience and a superannuation package up to 16% is available.

Applications close Monday 19 July 2010.

Contact: Tricia Hille on 9385 3233 or thille at  thegrovelibrary.com

Infographic by PPC Blog

It may have been delayed panic from nearly missing the interview when Google Maps and my iPad conspired to send me to the wrong address for the ABC studio – about 10 minutes away. (When I checked my route the night before, I saw that there was no building there and thought that the Maylands river bank was an odd place for a studio to be anyhow… )

The discussion on the future of libraries went very well. Sophie MacDonald has a great post paraphrasing some of the discussion, where I sound more coherent than I was Thank you.

Evolution of Readers Uploaded to Flickr by jblyberg

I have a couple of very, very nice emails. In answer to one of them about ebooks, here are some posts that I have written about my experience and opinion of ebooks that you – or others – may find useful.

• 22 things I am going to do now that the library Kindle has arrived.
• Why we chose a Kindle…and about free content.
• Ebooks and ebook readers in Australia
• IPad as an ebook reader in Australia

This is the last post for the 30 posts in 30 days challenge .

With the look of the blog, there are a few challenges:

1. I am not a designer, not do I want to be. I like colours to match and graphics to be harmonious, but I’m not your woman to achieve that.
2. I know that I want “search catalogue”, “search my details”, “contact us” and “opening hours” on each page, plus a top navigation menu. This is forced because I have to embed third party searches in frames and the pages they will be on will be too wide to keep sidebars.
3. I want the sidebars to be changeable by library staff. Part of the strategy to get our users using our subscription databases is to highlight a different one in the sidebar every so often.
4. The branding and design of the website is already contracted to a firm that is great with visual design, but has no experience with WordPress Themes
5. Because we want control, we do not want to pay for a theme that charges again with each upgrade.
6. I want to launch the new WordPress site a month or so before the new library opens, but want the look of the WordPress to be very similar to that of the legacy site during the transition time. The new site for the new building will go live about a week before the doors open, so I wanted to be able to customise the site to suit the old and new design with very little farting around.

We looked at Polly Farrington’s list of library sites using WordPress and liked the simple and clean lines of the Southfield Public Library . From looking at the page source, I could see that the theme was Thesis. It sounded familiar. I remembered Stephen Collins from Acid Labs tweeting as he set up his site using Thesis.

I particularly liked how different the two sites looked, demonstrating three features I was after – flexibility, lots of scope for customisation and looking pretty. If  you look at the user site showcase on the Thesis home site, you can see that they are very different from each other . Unfortunately there is also a (modest) license fee to use the theme .

BUT…

I really didn’t want to go down the path of a licensed product and wondered if there was anything similar out there. A bit of hunting about led me to Suffusion from Aquoid Themes by Sayotan Sinha .

The first attraction was the widget bar under the header so that I could put my consistent links (catalogue, borrower details, opening hours, contact) underneath the header and change them at will. Then I looked at the small Suffusion theme showcase and liked what I saw.

When I installed it I found that many, many features that were usually controlled by the theme’s CSS files, thus out of reach for mere mortals like me,  were tweakable from a “Settings for Suffusion” panel in the dashboard.

I could choose from seven different sidebars to place widgets. I could upload my header image and specify its size and whether it was inside or outside the wrapper. I could change the background colour for the blog or replace it with an image. I could place a logo on the header. There were templates for just one sidebar, no sidebar (usable when I had to embed a search frame), magazine style and many others. I could decide which pages appeared on the top navigation menu, how they displayed and whether the navigation bar was above or below the header. Link colours. Customisable. Visited link colour, Customisable. Favicon. Customisable. Inserting Analytics. Customisable.

There are many more features. Like the ability to add custom content types and custom taxonomies through the theme panel, so no need to edit the functions.php file by hand. As with many projects of love and collaboration, some obvious customisations are missing – like the ability to change the colour of the tabs in the menus , while some small things are customised to the nth degree – like the way the date is displayed. If you do know your CSS , there is a window where you can add your own CSS, which will then transfer when the theme is upgraded.

I think the company doing the graphic arts and branding for the new library were a little surprised by the limitations of the theme, but very much understood our desire to control the site for ourselves. They knew that with CSS they could control everything and make it look wonderful but , understandably, did not have time to learn exactly how to make the same changes through Suffusion. I really like the design they have come up with – not as beautiful as they could have done on their own; much, much better looking that I could have done and – most importantly – flexible enough for us to change, control and customise the site to suit our needs.

Post number 29 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge .

]]> http://librariansmatter.com/blog/2010/06/29/why-i-am-using-suffusion-wordpress-theme-for-our-library-website/feed/ 3 http://librariansmatter.com/blog/2010/06/28/what-do-you-want-passionate-readers-to-know-about-the-future-of-public-libraries/ http://librariansmatter.com/blog/2010/06/28/what-do-you-want-passionate-readers-to-know-about-the-future-of-public-libraries/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:27:18 +0000 Kathryn Greenhill http://librariansmatter.com/blog/?p=2327 [click to read more ...]]]> I’m going to be on ABC Radio National’s Book Show this Wednesday 30 June talking about the future of public  libraries along with other guest, Ian McShane from Swinburne University.  I record at 8am, with the show being broadcast at 10:30am and repeated at 8pm that night.

Of course there is a future…let me show you it….

So…if you had just one thing that you think a group of educated people, passionate about books and reading, should know about our libraries and the future, what would it be ?

Moonstruck chocolates uploaded to Flickr January 7, 2009.

I skipped Saturday’s 30 posts in 30 days post because I was flat out…. and then in one of those “just have one more square of chocolate” moments on Sunday …. I skipped a post for that day too. It felt really, really good not to feel like I *had* to say something when I had nothing to say… aaaah. This challenge has been a great way to get back into a blogging rhythm, and I have loved reading everyone’s posts, but gee I’m going to enjoy being a bit quieter.

Post 28 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.