Web Design
The website for the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine Library, where I currently work, was generally uninformative, ugly and rarely updated, as no one in the library department had taken responsibility for it. I wanted to create a brand new site that reflected the changing values of the institution, which focused on utilizing online technology to support instruction. In order to bring things up to speed, I started from square one and used Joomla CMS to create a brand new library website. New additions included whole new branches of the website, such as the Research Help section, which includes an APA citation guide and tutorials. The newest addition, custom Pathfinders, can be viewed here.
I also introduced many emerging technologies to the library website, including basic widgets such as a calendar of library hours, the ability to request interlibrary loan materials online, a IM chat widget, and a blog. The blog has been especially great, as we are able to keep students and patrons up to date on technologies, new library material, and community events that we believe they will be interested in.
In keeping up with changing technology needs, the library has been transferring our VHS collection of OCOM seminars and lectures to DVD. I wanted to give students the option to be able to stream video from their computers, so I opened up a Vimeo account and created custom-HTML widgets for our website. I originally converted the videos myself, but we are now having the work study students who are time-shifting VHS and creating DVDs furnish us with digital copies, cutting down the steps taken in this process. I will be giving a short lightning talk on this process at the upcoming 2010 Online NW Conference.
OCOM’s Digital Repository of Student Papers
One of the most exciting projects undertaken my work on the library website has been the creation of a digital repository to house graduate and doctoral student papers. As we were still testing the waters, the papers have formerly been added on an “opt-in” basis, though starting next year the policy will be changed to be an “opt-out” system. I am pursuing the option of opening this up to the entire institution, allowing faculty to participate in the preservation of institutional knowledge. The digital repository can be found here.
For LI813 (Web Design), I collaborated with classmates Ross Belzer, Pinn Crawford, Carson Mischel and Ian Terrell to create Guybrarian.com. We wanted to make a fun and informative distraction for librarians using WordPress, in which I believe we were very successful.
