CIL2006 -- New Web Site Tools and Technologies

After sitting down with Chris Sherman and Paula Hane for a little while I went on to the next session, which was called New Web Site Tools and Technologies and featured Jason Clark from Montana State University and Karen Coombs from the University of Houston. Jason went up first.

Poor Jason, his presentation started with a bit of a trainwreck. He couldn't get his examples to work, and kept misspelling the places he was trying to go. Darlene Fichter tried to help him. Quote of the session, from Darlene: "You're going to have to spell Connecticut, I'm Canadian." This is even funnier when you realize she works at the University of Saskatchewan (I had to cut-n-paste Saskatchewan because I'm American.) Finally Jason realized that he had JavaScript disabled in his browser. Once that was fixed he could get back on track.

Jason talked about AJAX and the applications for the library. I knew about most of his open Web examples, though I hadn't heard of Sproutliner. I didn't know about most of his library examples, which were very, very cool, with some great examples of instant searching through sujbect heads. (Unfortunately the coolest example, which I wouldn't have minded going back and looking at further, was a local installation running off his hard drive. Drat! But in the meantime check out Phoenix Live OPAC-OCLC Research, at http://orhost.org:9997/)

Though Jason seemed knowledgable and he had good examples, I think the whole concept of AJAX was a little over this crowd's heads. There are some geekly librarians here but not many who would be like, "OH BOY! XML! YEEEEEE-HAW!" The crowd wore a general expression of "Huh?" Perhaps next time a talk like this could include some tools that either make AJAX tool creation really easy, or include thorough tutorials. (The last session I went to Wednesday was half about creating Firefox toolbars for libraries. While this was pretty geeky, the presenter included many, many online resources for creating toolbars and made a few recommendations for the way he learned on his own.) I'm sure that a lot of the audience would love to have the functionality of his examples, but don't feel like they have either their own tech skills or the juice with their institution staff to make it happen.

After Jason finished his talk Karen Coombs got up and talked about open source resources for libraries, including content managers and tools for Web wrangling. She talked about both the tools themselves and the real-world library applications of those tools. Good stuff. I learned a lot and got pointers to content management software and saw some library sites worth checking out -- Plone.org looks very very interesting. You can check out Karen's blog at http://librarywebchic.net/wordpress/. She has several posts up from CiL sessions but doesn't have an outline of her own session, which is too bad -- I got hung up on a couple of the early sites she was mentioning and missed some of the others.

Posted to Internet-Technology