I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and WordPress.
Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.
agreed. There is so much information out there, organising it is the great task. Google can always index your content, and serve it to the world, but for those patrons of your website or blog … making it accessible increases your value immeasurable. There are all sorts of approachs — tags, thumbnails, even random posts! …. a different solution for each content site. CMS is a fascinating issue … and something like wordpress can act as a rudimentary way to arrange your content. No good blogging and creating good content if it stays hidden in the dark of archives!
this is definitely where the expertise of librarians comes in. So much more than a Dewey Numbering system … taxonomies of information are your domain.
This was a great conference! I learned so much about CMS and how real librarians can actually create websites with ease using open source programs like WordPress! I went home afterwards and registered a domain name and got it hosted through Dreamhost; registered for a WordPress account; installed WordPress 2.8 through Dreamhost (soooo easy) and then began to create my library’s new website!
Thanks to NELA and all the presenters for a great day!
Hey Jessamyn – Spotted you at the DMV yesterday but didn’t give a shout as was too crowded for my comfort level. Guess Monday is not the day to hit the DMV! I’ve been working on switching over to wordpress for our website. I’ll have to try to look at your presentation later to see if I can pick up some hints. Wish I could have seen this one live – Rhonda