theshiftingstacks

CMS day at the Portsmouth, NH public library presented a show and tell forum for a variety of content management systems. I enjoyed Jessamyn West's keynote address to the event, along with the two additional presenters I watched. Unfortunately I could not stay the entire time and missed the Plone and Wordpress portion of the conference. You can find West's postings at librarian.net. Follow up materials of all the speakers are located on NELA's ITS page. Rather than rehash the entire keynote and conference I'll point out some of the ideas I found most interesting. And for my own exercise I will relate those ideas back to my projects. My site, theshiftingstacks.net and most of the projects I have worked on up to this point are designed with Drupal. My current place of employment still requires hand coding to update content and styles.

You don't need to be a coder to use the CMS's, but it helps.

Across all of the presentations, each speaker emphasized their lack of coding knowledge. Though CMS's have a learning curve, through experimentation the presenters overcame most issues. The start up costs of a CMS (learning the system, designing the look, etc) seemed minimal compared to the benefits. The learning curve is a small cost, though the curve is much steeper for some. Unless you have a familiarity with the web in general, working with a CMS is a huge leap. Jessamyn West pointed out that the term CMS is to librarian as OPAC is to patrons, librarians may not understands what CMS means. Especially in training, terminology and concepts become barriers. During the Circuit Rider project, my colleagues and I found that the librarians needed a minimal level of experience and/or training to take full advantage of the CMS's we used. Especially for the small libraries we aided, the librarian often tackled the website on their own. Starting some librarians out on a more simple interface like Blogger would allow the librarians to develop experience with web tools such as CMS's. As West pointed out, CMS's help place content on the web but CMS users do need to learn to talk to computers. As an example, West described users attempts at pasting a Word document into a CMS field.

The webmaster's task is setting up and maintaining a website. A webmaster should not, but often does, manage the content on a page.

Jessamyn West pointed out this issue with building websites in any organization. The webmaster usually ends up placing content on pages rather than managing the site itself. CMS's in West's opinion relieve the webmaster from managing content and allow other librarians with content (and librarians have tons of content) to publish to the web. The task of the webmaster then becomes training staff to work with the CMS and making adjustments to the website.

CMS's remove much of the effort of designing the look of a site. Simply tweak an available theme.

I did not subscribe to this when I built the websites for Heath and Windsor, MA. I took the exact opposite approach, thinking I needed to tailor the websites to a specific patron base. I intentionally made the sites look less professional and focused on the small town feel. Randy Robertshaw (Tyngsborough), who presented Joomla, simply purchased a professionally designed theme, at a nominal fee, and tweaked the site when needed. The other presenters followed the same method. In this way I missed the boat on CMS's where using an established theme, created by a real designer, would have drastically cut down on my work load. The sites I created have a unique feel not otherwise represented in a cookie cutter style. However I could have approached the websites' appearance from the angle of the themes directory. Rather than go through rigorous questionnaires about color schemes and numerous mock-ups, a librarian could visually browse through a variety of pre-made themes. The information architecture could then be applied. And the website can then be designed on the fly until the site is ready for publication.

CMS's embody the 2.0 trend.

The two Drupal speakers Kate Sheehan (Darien and Paige Davis (Minuteman Library Network) used the social gadgets of Drupal to better the services. In the case of Darien Public Library, there is no better example for a library user focused site. Darien uses SOPAC to integrate library online catalog into the Drupal interface to connect library holdings to user accounts and social tagging. Darien Library uses an ILS vendor but you couldn't tell from searching their catalog. Davis implemented a intranet system for the Minute Man Network where Drupal is used as a web based communications tool for members of the region. Instead of countless meetings and endless threads of emails Drupal takes care of organizing the communication through a variety of modules. I point out the two Drupal implementations because such implementations are truly innovative. I would like to take aspects from Darien and the Minute Man Network and incorporate them into my future projects. For the most part my projects have dealt with un-unique features of a website; database links, about pages, catalog links, etc. Where as, more uniquely, interactivity allows for communication with patrons. In rural areas, as Jessamyn West pointed out and to my own understanding, users are often isolated; by weather, distance, etc. Despite the current state of internet infrastructure in rural areas that will change drastically in the future. With this conference CMS's have or will become the standard for building library websites. The interactivity currently prevalent on the net, in other venues, will continue to grow and continue to be an expectation of users.