There's an interesting (albeit preliminary) discussion about organizing a 'Library DrupalCamp' for ALA in DC this summer on the Drupal Group for Libraries.
If that piques your interest, have a gander at:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/32822
I'm delighted to report that we had a wonderful Drupal4Lib BoF with maybe 25-30 people (agenda here). You know it's a good sign when after the thing is over, you wish it had lasted maybe another half an hour or more!
Round Robin of Participants
People introduced themselves and discussed their interest in Drupal. This being ALA, we had people from all parts of the country (Nevada, New York, LA) and from all library types (academic, public, consortium). Some had already implemented Drupal in their institution while others were still in the planning stage.
Drupal4Lib LITA IG
We discussed our 'Drupal4Lib LITA IG' and how maintaining the IG conferred a number of advantages, namely, the continuing support from LITA as well as the availability of a meeting room come conference time.
Ron Peterson from Univ. of Delaware generously offered to serve as Chair for next year and to help out with arranging our meeting in DC. Yea Ron!
Upcoming Version: Drupal 7 ('D7')
We next proceeded to the actual meat-and-potatoes of our get-together, the first topic being the upcoming version of Drupal, affectionately known as 'D7'.
We were fortunate to have among us the Drupal expert Cary Gordon. Cary is a Drupal Board Member and maintainer of the Drupal Group for Libraries. He was particularly helpful in explaining some of the finer points of the coming release.
This gave people, I hope, not simply an insight into the particulars of 'D7' but also a general idea of the life-cycle of Drupal projects, when to upgrade and what to expect.
Discussion of Websites & Projects
Alas, we only had time for three presentations.
The first was by Chip Halvorson of the Alachua County Library District who discussed the redesign of his institution's website using Drupal.
Next up was Sean Fitzpatrick of ALA who showed us a Drupal installation -- on his netbook, no less -- that he was working on to make publishing news easier on the ALA site.
Finally we had Lauren Henderson from the Troy Public Library (Mich.) who gave us a sneak peek of her library's new site, also based on Drupal.
Conclusion
And that was all the time we had!
I'd like to thank all of the participants, particularly Ron Peterson for agreeing to be our new Chair. I look forward to seeing everyone next year at ALA in DC and before then maybe through our ListServ Drupal4Lib.org or through the Drupal Group for Libraries.
Thanks again to you all!
LEO
Chicago, IL.
Usability is a major objective for Drupal 7, the new upcoming version -- so much so that they've set up a site entirely devoted to it called, 'Drupal 7 User Experience Project' -- or 'D7UX.org' for short.
You've got to love a site which wears a declaration like this on its sleeve:
"Our UX Principles: 1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable. 2. Design for the 80% 3. Privilege the Content Creator 4. Make the default settings smart"
It's the first thing you see!
Okay, it's official: thanks to the wonderful help of our friends at ALA, we have a meeting room for our Drupal4Lib BoF on Sunday, 7/12.
DATE: Sunday, July 12 (3:30p-5:00p)
LOCATION:
McCormick Place
West Building, Level 1
Conference Center Rm #11b
Chicago, IL.
I looked up the event listing for our Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Chicago (Sun. 7/11, 3:30p-5p) and was happy to see we have more than a dozen sign-ups!
That's a good sign.
I see from Jenny Levine's comment here, that ALA Connect was afflicted (at least momentarily) with comment spam. It's a common affliction.
On most of the sites I support, I now pretty much have to moderate all comments. Even on sites where users have to set up accounts like LibSite.org, I still get spam.
While most of the sites are personal, it's the community or institutional sites where things get interesting/scary.
I'm currently working on a project, for example, where four different units of an large academic department are going to run their own blogs. This is precisely the kind of environment where comment spam can be a huge problem -- especially because the people running the thing from day to day are average (albeit web-savvy) staff members.
I'm just working on this at the moment, but my solution(s) is something along the lines of karenS' Comment Manager. Basically, it's to give a list of all the unpublished comments for the posts that the current logged-in user has written. From there, using Views Bulk Operations, they can either publish or delete the comments.
At the moment I'm trying to figure out whether I need Comment Manager at all, or whether I could get away with just putting the thing together using Views.
I don't really think this is a solution for ALA Connect but it's something I'm working on at the moment.
Update: I'm also looking at Show unpublished comments.
This is still a while off but I thought I'd put out an initial request before the holidays officially begin. It's a request for ideas and suggestions for the meeting of the LITA Drupal4Lib Interest Group at the 2009 ALA Conference in Chicago.
Feel free to leave comments either here or on the LITA Blog at: http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago
In observance, I guess you could say, of ALA's Banned Books Week, NPR did a segment on how The Grapes of Wrath was banned at the end of the 30's.
It was good but I really wish they had focused on more recent titles. Going over the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2007 might have been more relevant. At least it would have helped people understand what librarians and advocates of free speech are dealing with in this day and age.
UPDATE: WBEZ did something slightly more along the lines of what I was thinking with yesterday's segment, 'Celebrating Some of the Best Banned Books'.
Okay, today was the official launch of the new community site that I've been working on for the Public Library Association: PLAspace.org
The announcement reads:
Today marks another milestone in the rollout of PLAspace. We officially open the doors to new CoPs and new participants.
We created PLAspace to give Public Library Association members a place where they could share ideas and work together on common interests. Today, the first official day for the site, we already have several dozen members and a half-dozen CoPs.
We're doing a 'soft-launch' of PLAspace.org -- the community website that I've been working on together with some very nice people from the Public Library Association as well as a number of volunteers.
It's open to the public but it won't be officially announced till sometime in September. Anyway, have a look:
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