And there’s a bevy of stuff happening at MPOW. We’ve launched the official beta of our new website, and I’ve signed to write an article for Library Journal.
Yeah, yeah…let the stoning commence!
To be fair, I did request and get the “better” publication agreement from Reed, as well as request and receive permission for a clarifying line of text to be added to the agreement (the clarification was in the realm of the term of the contract, and what rights reverted to me after 6 months). I will be able to self-archive the work, which was a big deal. I feel like I was treated fairly in the negotiations, now I just have to write.
So what am I writing about? There’s a great opportunity at MPOW revolving around our instruction section and podcasts/vidcasts/netcasts/whatever the cool kids are calling it these days. I wrote a grant proposal for 30 ipods and supporting equipment (including everything we need to produce nearly professional level videos), and we’ll be moving forward with integrating podcasts into our new instruction/outreach efforts. So my work for LJ will be chronicling that process, as well as looking at ways that libraries can leverage this technology to greatly enhance their efforts towards patron education.
I’ll be blogging some of the process…it’s exciting, because it’s a completely new feature for MPOW, plus it will involve a lot of integration with the new website and the instructional team.
4 replies on “Back from Thanksgiving”
I saw “stoning” and thought something completely inappropriate. Wow, the beta looks great.
Looks good, Jason. I’d be interested in learning why you chose Joomla over other CMS systems. Also, is there any concern that the URL’s do not have pretty names? For example, do you see a problem with your “students” page being a long url as opposed to something like http://www.librarywebsite/students ? I doubt most folks remember URL directories and addresses, but some users may have a desire to just type in a URL, rather than visit the home page each time. However, the CMS’s ability to generate dynamic (and up-to-date) content may outweigh the need for a traditional directory and URL structure. Anyway, nice job, and I look forward to hearing more about he instruction project.
Good questions, Chad!
We looked at Joomla, Drupal, Mambo (which is effectively Joomla at the present time), Geeklog, and at least one other one I don’t remember with a wide lens, then focused in on Drupal and Joomla. Both were good, and I know that Drupal is probably the current leader in the Open Source CMS world. But we thought that Joomla was a bit more straightforward, would let us develop faster, and would give us the tools we needed on the backend to make distributed content management easier.
re: URL: yep, and we’re gonna fix that. The current setup will transition with the removal of the old site into the Joomla install running at the root level of the webserver, with pretty URL’s that we can control with a Joomla module. This means that we will have complete control over the actual URL, with just about push-button ease of use. It may take a bit to work out the bugs (I’ll have to migrate the installation, which will be a bit of trial and error) but I expect it will go pretty smoothly. The goal is to get the migration done before students return for Spring semester.
Looks good, Jason. I'd be interested in learning why you chose Joomla over other CMS systems. Also, is there any concern that the URL's do not have pretty names? For example, do you see a problem with your “students” page being a long url as opposed to something like http://www.librarywebsite/students ? I doubt most folks remember URL directories and addresses, but some users may have a desire to just type in a URL, rather than visit the home page each time. However, the CMS's ability to generate dynamic (and up-to-date) content may outweigh the need for a traditional directory and URL structure. Anyway, nice job, and I look forward to hearing more about he instruction project.