Laura Blankenship January 12th, 2008
For the last two days, I’ve been at NITLE’s Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age conference. It’s been a great conference so far. Both Tim and Kathleen have been liveblogging the panels and have really good notes and commentary on each of those sessions. Here are what I think are some key points so far:
- Scholarship needs to change
- Promotion and tenure requirements often get in the way of pursuing new forms of scholarship
- Many issues about publishing digitally have yet to be worked out
- There are lots of interesting projects being pursued, often out of sheer devotion to a topic
- It’s difficult to get faculty to participate in projects, and to weigh in on the issues
I’m looking forward to a few more good sessions today.
aharding January 6th, 2008
I’ve been working on getting Wordpress Mu up and running for Bryn Mawr. It’s been up since the summer, running mostly on an experimental basis. One thing that I wanted to get working was creating a dynamic front page that pulled posts from all the blogs. Between not having the time and not being too good at coding, I just couldn’t make it happen. I’ve had Jim Groom’s (of UMW fame) post on how he created his front page bookmarked forever. I bucked some of his advice and still managed to get the front page working. I still have some work to do, sprucing up the sidebar and whatnot, but at least I’m now pulling all the posts to the front page.
Here’s how I did it. First, I took Jim’s advice and installed Userthemes, a plugin that I think will be useful all the way around. Instead of creating a separate front page and following his instructions there, I simply added the BDP RSS code to the main page template of my userthemes template. It’s very important that you first copy the them to your userthemes folder using the admin panel for that. Otherwise you’ll write over the main template page that everyone uses. There are a couple of downsides to this method. One, if you post to the main blog, it will appear after the feed posts. Since I’m not planning to post, this isn’t a huge deal for me. But I may move to Jim’s page method later. Right now, I don’t think anyone’s going to pay much attention to the lone post at the bottom of the page. The other downside is that you have to edit the main index page, which makes some people nervous. But it is a quick way of doing things.
The next bit of advice I ignored was not to use the sitewide feed plugin with BDP RSS Aggregator. Jim said it would choke. It didn’t on mine, but I suppose it could at some point, so I’ll keep an eye out for that.
I’m very happy with the results for now and am looking forward to seeing more posts appear on the front page.
Laura Blankenship January 3rd, 2008
As it turns out, those who are computer literate are more likely to use the library than most others. Young people between the ages of 18 & 30 who are internet savvy, those that some in older generations complain are less interested in such things, are twice as likely to use a library as those who are not. Interesting finding that bodes well for information literacy, if we seize the opportunity.