almost one year

It is almost one year since we took this course and I ALMOST have all of my proposal implemented. There were elements that were super easy, some that took longer than expected, and ones that may never truely get off the ground. But I know I have made changes to this library, for the better!

The easy: Meebo was a very natrual and easy change for my library. It meant creating a new ask-a-librarian page (http://www.library.fau.edu/depts/ref/askpol.htm) which then spawned a number of new research help pages (http://www.library.fau.edu/depts/ref/start.htm) and a redesign of our "help" type of web pages.

The more complex: The idea of a wiki is great, the end result of a wiki is great, the implementation of a wiki when you are trying to migrate from another system, not so great. I decided to make our subject guides into a wiki system to: Make it easier to edit, to make the structure more consistent, and the make our guides searchable. But we already had 85 guides in html format, that were of all different styles, and some with broken links. So I (and my intern) took 3 months to migrate all the guides. I just completed training the librarians on the wiki last week (with 1 huge hug and one "what is the benefit of this again?"). The wiki won't offically be availalbe to those off campus until later this spring, but I will still put the link here (http://rtlib.fau.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page) for future reference. It is now up to the reference staff to update the guides (most are too long to be a true "guide") and perhaps to restructure the wiki a bit.

The hard: Oh blogs. Why are people there two kinds of people? Those that embrace blogs and those that drag their feet? I set up a blog for the Dean to test. I have not heard much since. Part of his goals for the year is to better communicate with the internal and external communities, and a blog is a good tool, but I guess with all the florida budget cuts, it's low on the list. I don't know if it really will be implemented...but I can hope.

So there is the update!