Hacking Google Forms

A few months back I pitched the idea of using Google forms for all the forms on the new website. Our current forms were created through a Joomla-specific add-on, and I’m not proficient enough in PHP or SQL to feel comfortable recreating them from scratch. Also, the forms on our current site turned into a… Read more »

The Anatomy of a Crash

In accordance with Finagle’s corollary to Murphy’s Law, the website broke the day our sysadmin went on a 2 week vacation on another continent. What’s most surprising about this is how little it surprised me. First, what happened: Our library website is using a very old installation of the Joomla content management system (1.5.7 I believe.) Our… Read more »

MISSION: LIBGUIDES

I’ve been tasked by my director to somehow wrangle our LibGuides implementation into shape. Apparently the library subscribed to the software sometime last year, and librarians have slowly been migrating their subject guides from the CUNY-grown SRMS (Subject Management Resource System) to LibGuides. LibGuides offers much more flexibility and back-end usability than SRMS (which was… Read more »

Open access is easier than you think

I recently attended a talk by Jill Cirasella, a librarian at Brooklyn College, on open access publishing (check out the slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/cirasella/cuny-oa-ir-york). I kind of went as a professional courtesy to my colleague who set up the talk, because I honestly thought I was pretty well-informed on the topic. Turns out I was sadly mistaken… Read more »

Crappy image maps messing with my mind

Please, for the life of Brian, give adequate thought to creating image maps (images that contain multiple links, mapped to different areas of the image.) While they can be useful, and even creative, they can also be confusing. (The one in the linked Wikipedia entry is a good example of a creatively-designed image map, that… Read more »

Catching Up On the World of Library WebTech

So, I thought myself fairly knowledgeable in the area of library technology. Turns out, every aspect of library technology has its own communities, its own published body of knowledge, its own go-to gals and guys. Yes, you say, well, duh. I thought much of my experience in social media and online marketing would carry over… Read more »