Joomla... We finally come to an end.

Believe it or not, I successfully completed my Joomla website yesterday. Well, I guess that depends on your definition of successful. Anyway, my book-loving-self decided to create a website for a fake book store in the heart of New Orleans' French Quarter. This fake book store is on the beautiful Rue Royale (Royal Street), for those of you that have visited the French Quarter before. Going along with the personality of New Orleans and my own personal interests, I "created" a bookstore that features paranormal, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy books.

When it came to designing the actual website, I ran into a few problems in the beginning. For instance, the video tutorials provided by Joomla and Site Ground seemed very helpful. However, when attempting to follow the step-by-step process, I found that some times I could not duplicate what the instructor was doing since I was using a demo version instead of a paid version. Unfortunately, it took a bit of time, and quite a bit of frustration, to figure out how to change my website's name and how to remove the sample Joomla data that was on my website from the start. However, once I finally figured out some of the basics, I felt somewhat better. Feeling slightly relieved and less stressed, I began downloading extensions and creating content.

Two extensions were very helpful throughout the process: JCE editor and Akeeba. Akeeba backed up my work and JCE gave me far more extensive options for editing the content articles than the Joomla demo version did originally. As I created content, I created a category for each main menu item on my website. Being able to add all of my articles from one category into a menu item at once saved time and potential frustration. One of the demo's features that I utilized in the articles was the "read more" feature, which showed a teaser of information. This feature allowed visitors to the website the option of whether or not they wanted to read the entire article. I found this feature to give the site a more professional and less cluttered look. 

Once the content was complete and I began to play around with the template once again. I became frustrated with the template in the beginning and set it aside to create the bulk of the website. Doing so was a smart decision. By the time all of my information was successfully uploaded onto the site, I was more comfortable with Joomla and was able to change the color and fonts on the site.

If you want to see the site, check out https://librarylady.demojoomla.com/. Websites are always a work in progress, but what you see is what I was able to do with a CMS in less than a week's time.

Joomla! It's not me... It's you.

It is day 3 so far of working with Joomla. So many of the good feels and hopes for my website are turning into frustrations with the less than user friendly Joomla. As I watch the video tutorials, it all seems so simple, yet once I get into the administrator site and start playing around I feel differently. I do not doubt that it can be done. With practice and patience I could see myself mastering Joomla, but with the limited amount of time that comes with a Maymester, I may not become a Joomla pro by Monday. 

So, it seems that I dislike Joomla more than I did a few days ago... For now, Joomla and I are tolerating each other, but Joomla is certainly not my CMS soulmate. Other CMSs that I've tinkered with in the past seemed much easier for the technology challenged like myself. 

Joomla! Oh joy.

As I've come to my second day in the world of Joomla, I am doing my best to keep my priorities in check. What seemed, to me, like a daunting task at first began to excite me as the creative possibilities for my website began to form in my head. Once I got the ball rolling, I had a million ideas that suddenly needed organizing in my trusty notebook. Although, the overwhelming feeling returned as I realized I might not have the time to create what I envisioned in my head, and I had to come to terms with the fact that I might not be able to achieve perfection. But hey, I'll get an "A" for effort, right? Let's hope so. :)

Despite the limit of time to my rare creative juices, I can at least feel good about the fact that I am actively learning from this assignment. My brief experience with website management comes from my time as a communications intern for a chamber of commerce. At the time I did not realize what I was working with, but looking back with new knowledge from this course, I now know that I was using a CMS. Various people, and a few choice interns, had access to the chamber's website. I had the fun task of posting all of my latest PR articles to the site, keeping the chamber's events calendar, and home page up-to-date on a daily basis. 

Learning to work with a CMS is certainly something I could see myself utilizing in my future endeavors. 

An Assesment So Far

After successfully completing the first full week of the Maymester and first round of assignments, I feel like I should be able to breathe a bit easier. Or am I kidding myself? I would not describe my first Maymester experience so far as “easy,” but the amount of work is not as bad as I had anticipated. And on a positive note, I do not think I have ever learned this much from a college class in such a short amount of time before. I’ve discovered the world of “wikis” outside of Wikipedia, I’ve gathered about a million ideas for my social media project at work, and as of this afternoon I will begin creating my very own website with Joomla! I have no idea though what I want my website to be about. At the moment, an assortment of potential ideas are being considered. I plan to get some coffee and a snack after work to help the creative juices flow.

 

For now, I am counting down the days until class is over and a brief summer vacation begins. I can guarantee that by June 5^th I will be at Disney World celebrating getting one step closer to finishing my degree. Anyone want to join me? ;-)

Wiki Wiki, What??

“Wiki Wiki… What…” was my first thought as I began looking over the material for Assignment 1 of my Applied Technologies course. Twitter? Not unknown to me. Blogging? I hadn’t tried it, but I've read enough blogs to understand the concept well enough. A wiki? This one was new. Originally, I thought a “wiki” was a part of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I had never thought of “wiki’s” existing in other forms, especially not as a tool for libraries. I guess that just goes to show how tech savvy I really am.

For the sake of creating an imaginary wiki for a library, I would choose the college library I currently work for, the Nassau Center Library and Learning Commons of Florida State College at Jacksonville. However, I would include the other six library and learning commons branches from our fellow campuses. As a whole, the college serves over 57,000 students. Also, since each library has its own budget, a free wiki would be ideal for such a collaboration. The reasoning behind a staff-only wiki, covering so many library branches, is unification. As an institution, FSCJ strives to present itself as “One College.” Each campus has its own distinct personality, but bringing the libraries together through a wiki would give librarians and assistive staff a place to share ideas, knowledge, policies, procedures, etc. For instance, I know myself and several of my coworkers have called the campus that handles all ILL requests numerous times with questions on how to fill out forms, or manage odd requests that we’ve received for our materials. Furthermore, as I have had the opportunity to visit our other libraries, I always notice a plethora of great ideas in action, causing me to wonder why all of the libraries are not doing the same.

So, my wiki would be a place to gather all of the FSCJ libraries’ collective knowledge, to share ideas, to unify policies and procedures, for each library to answer FAQ’s, and to have a place where information about individual campuses can reside in one place. Specifically, I would have a calendar with not only public events that are on the college’s main website, but meetings and happenings internally that are not always shared campus to campus. Also, since students take classes at more than one location, they tend to ask questions about tutor and library staff schedules for multiple campuses at once, which can be difficult to locate without a good deal of searching and/or phone calls. So, all schedules for tutors in the learning commons, and other branch specific information, would be in one orderly place available to circulation staff as a quick reference regardless of location. Furthermore, instead of each campus having its own Dropbox (cloud device) for forms and documents, all would be available as a downloadable PDF on the wiki. Similar to the collection of frequently used forms and documents, a section of the wiki would archive all previously made “libguides” regardless of which branch created them originally. In addition to being a one-stop resource for library documents and procedure information, I would make a space available for the branches to share pictures, success stories, and ideas with each other. With this type of collaboration, I feel that individual libraries would still retain their particular styles or personalities, yet at the same time, each branch would be able to provide better services as a result of the shared knowledge.

To meet the goals, budgetary needs, and to allow collaboration of over 100 staff members the wiki would need page history since so many people would be working on it, WYSIWYG editing capabilities for the less tech savvy employees, professional support so the wiki does not become a responsibility of FSCJ’s IT staff, a separate host so the wiki does not interfere with any one campuses’ server, no personal domain and no corporate branding since it is for staff use only. Based on the libraries’ needs, GeniusWiki was the best option, meeting all of the criteria, and having extra features, such as database storage to support a large quantity of material and it is a wiki intended personal or team organization.

Rules, rules, and more rules : Beneficial to professional social media, or an unnecessary hinderance?

As I read through the assigned list of articles this week for my MLIS 7505 class, I kept coming across the subject of libraries adhering to policies, guidelines, best practice, etc. in relation to their social media use. One article in particular stood out to me as I started reflecting on the social media situation I am in at my own job. In an extensive article by Taylor and Francis, Use of social media by the library: Current practices and future opportunities, the author quotes Troy Swanson (Department Chair and Teaching & Learning Librarian at Moraine Valley Community College). In the discussion of whether or not libraries should take the time to write detailed literature on social media use, Swanson “warns of ‘over thinking’ social media and encourages libraries to avoid creating detailed social media plans (which can be very time-consuming) and instead concentrate on defining policies, workflows, best practice and guidelines” (18). When I read that, all I could think was, “YES.”

Normally, I am all for detailed plans, guides, rules. I am a person that likes structure and organization, but that does not mean that I am blind to the fact that sometimes there needs to be a bit of leniency to allow creativity and progress. My latest experience with social media in the library has left me yearning for a just a smidge of freedom.

I work for a wonderful college that is spread out over 7 distinct locations, each with its own personality. One of my superiors approached me about heading up the social media for my particular library, which I have been very excited to begin. As of yet, I have not been able to start this project because we are all waiting on the marketing department to develop the new social media guidelines that will unite the social media endeavors of all the libraries. A uniformed set of guidelines is a great idea, especially when there will be up to seven social media pages representing one organization as a whole. However, the process has been spread out over several months, and work on the project is still at a standstill for those of us actually in the library. I have no idea what the marketing department is developing, but I hope there is no “over thinking” of this process. Keep in mind, our department has a difficult task in front of them. If they let the campuses run free, different branches could reflect conflicting messages about the college. On the other hand, the guidelines might be so detailed, that the various branches won’t have the room to reflect any of their individual personalities that they are known for.

For now, I remain in anticipation.  

An Introduction and New Experiences on Social Media

Hey, I'm Danielle Navarro, a librarian assistant with an almost unnatural love for reading and the calming affect of libraries.This blog will follow my experiences throughout my Applied Technologies 7505 graduate course, as I aspire to become a professional librarian. This semester I am on the quest to discover more about new technologies in a professional setting. I have never been much for blogging, since I share only a minuscule amount of my personal life on social media. It will be interesting to see how my feelings on blogs develop over the course of this semester.

Our first topic of discussion, for any random visitors to this page, is "Web 2.0" and "Library 2.0." From what I have gathered, regarding Web 2.0, I have only begun to dabble in this emerging, collaborative world of the Internet. However... it seems my dabbling has primarily been personal. Unless of course you count the 50+ "Tweets" I posted for a Young Adult Lit class. Alas, my familiarity with Web 2.0 in a work setting is not where I would like it to be. Especially since my boss has asked me to create and manage my library's social media (I'm just waiting on the guidelines from marketing). I guess I'm am taking MLIS 7505 right at the perfect time!

I look forward to learning from my peers' experiences, and hope to share a few of my own along the way.