In a workshop for 4 hours today as part of ALIA’s Information Online conference.

Here is a description.

Web Metrics for Collecting Institutions

Workshop facilitated by: Sebastian Chan, Manager, Web Services Unit, Powerhouse Museum, Australia

This half day workshop will take participants through some of the different options for measuring success and using quantitative approaches to extracting value from the use of online content. The session will cover the effective use of traditional web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, as well as exploring some of the options for measurement and learning from social media. The workshop also explores the implications of web metrics for improving user experience both online and offl ine, as well as showing examples of how to improve organisational intelligence and digital strategy through web measurement. Participants will have the opportunity to have their own organisation’s websites analysed if they are users of Google Analytics as part of the session. This is the fi rst time that Seb Chan has offered this workshop in Sydney, having run it to acclaim in the USA, UK and Europe.

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Today Sue Cook from CSIRO and I gave a conference paper at the ALIA Information Online conference called: Flexible, customisable and good looking: multiple uses for WordPress MU in two Australian Libraries.

The paper can be downloaded from the conference site when available.

As I promised in question time, here are details about where you can connect with libraries using WordPress:

If you’re interested in WordPress for Libraries, please join us on the wp4lib wiki (http://wp4lib.bluwiki.com), the WebJunction Group (http://webjunction.org/706), or the Yahoo! mailing list (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/wp4lib/).

Here are the presentation slides, 30 Things we love about self hosted multisite WordPress .

ABSTRACT: Flexible, customisable and good looking: multiple uses for WordPress MU in two Australian Libraries.

WordPress MU (Multiuser) is Open Source software that at its simplest is a blogging platform that allows a number of users to run several different blogs on the one database installation. WordPressMU is also sophisticated and customisable enough to be used as a fully fledged Content Management System or to create an entire social networking platform.

This paper describes two case studies of WordPress MU used to provide very different solutions in two different libraries. Neither library used the platform to create blogs as the layperson understands them – reflective online journals. The paper outlines how and why the platform was chosen, decisions about hosting and the stakeholder negotiations required to have the solution accepted within the organisations. It describes the necessary customisation decisions and how these diverged with the different purposes.

The first case study involves a scientific research library service with technologically sophisticated, widely dispersed users who required an up-to-date current awareness service from multiple contributors. The second case-study involves a public library with a very simplistic and rigid website that was hosted by a design company and a need to formalise communication procedures before the move to a new library building made it much harder for staff to share information.

The paper also describes how the development of the new services were used as an opportunity to identify staff training requirements and introduce the potential of tools such as RSS, Yahoo Pipes, Netvibes, Twitter and Flickr to enhance the information in the WordPress MU installations.