Library websites often include widgets of various sorts. Hours widgets, chat widgets, and so on. Often these are built by outside vendors, and plopped into library pages by librarians. The intention, I suppose, is to provide functionality that the librarians may not want build themselves. I have contradictory feelings about widgets. First, the bad things:… Continue reading Widgets
In praise of the Springshare Lounge
At some point not too long ago, CUNY’s Office of Library Services signed a deal with Springshare for a wide range of Springshare products. Springshare makes various tools to help run libraries, of which the most well-known is LibGuides, their CMS. Since CUNY signed this university-wide deal, our library has actively started using many of… Continue reading In praise of the Springshare Lounge
Maintenance
Once a project is built, one important thing that doesn’t get discussed enough is maintenance. Maintaining web projects is essential but mostly underappreciated. It usually doesn’t get you much reward. But web applications are living things that need tending to. This means updating dependencies, but also thoughtfully revisiting the project on a regular basis to… Continue reading Maintenance
Data
With some time off over the holidays, I took the opportunity to do a deep dive into Google Analytics. This was prompted by an article by Erin Crane which I found quite interesting. Erin shows how putting some time into your GA setup can provide interesting insights about how your library website is used. It’s… Continue reading Data
In praise of Zotero
It’s hard to believe this blog has been running for almost 7 years and I have yet to write a post about Zotero. Time to remedy that. Many of you are probably already familiar with Zotero. It’s citation management software. But if you having a passing familiarity, I’d suggest that it’s worth a closer look.… Continue reading In praise of Zotero
Git
Git is useful, but troublesome at times. You can pull to the wrong branch and all of a sudden your nicely organized project is a mess. Of course the prickliness of git is not new news. But people don’t use it for the friendly UI; they use it because most of the time – when… Continue reading Git
Idée fixe
There are some well-travelled paths in library research. I came across one of them this week when I was looking for articles on LibGuides. There are a lot of articles by librarians about LibGuides. On the one hand this is great (we have a comprehensive literature!), on the other hand, do I really have to… Continue reading Idée fixe
Thanksgiving debrief
So I followed through on my plan to spend the Thanksgiving holiday by myself, working on the Open Journal Matcher. It went fine. I put in four straight days in front of vim, and I’m pretty sure that I more or less cracked the problem that I was trying to solve. The goal was to… Continue reading Thanksgiving debrief
E-resources (part 2)
It’s now been several months that I’ve been handling our library’s eresources, and I have a few thoughts. It has been mostly positive, with a few frustrations. My predecessor in this role prepared me well. Her system for handling the function is sensible (spreadsheets!) and effective. I’m grateful for her guidance. Administering eresources makes me… Continue reading E-resources (part 2)
Thanksgiving
I’m going to spend this Thanksgiving weekend at home by myself, with my dog to keep me company. When I tell people this, they promptly invite me to their family’s celebration in New Jersey or some such. But I’m actually really excited to spend the weekend at home alone. I’m going to focus on a… Continue reading Thanksgiving
