Top of the web – April 2013

Popular Christchurch City Libraries’ webpages and blog posts in April 2013:

Website pages

Monday 29 April 2013 was our busiest day of the month. This was due to our quarterly newsletter going out – the topics generating the heat were Freegal, Linwood, The Source, and NZ Music Month – all referred to in the newsletter.

Also popular this month was the kids ANZAC Day page and OverDrive.

April’s popular blog posts

• ANZAC Day for children – a 2010 blog post by Zac scoops the pool in 2013
• Come and test out the new Gloucester Street Reading Room
• New Regent Street

Photos on Flickr

Crikey! We got more than 17,000 page views on 6 April. Again this is an example of where sharing pushes your statistics up – The Colombo Street re-opening photos were well-shared on Facebook etc.

Top on Twitter

• Robyn’s anticipated Auckland Writers and Readers Festival highlights
• Freegal
• Linwood opening

Facebook favourites

• Re-opening of Colombo Street [photo album]
• Low cloud and deconstruction by Mike Hewson [photo album]
• Carolyn speaking at the opening of Linwood Library and Service Centre at Eastgate

 

Top of the web – March 2013

This New Regent Street plan from 1931 was popular in March.

Popular Christchurch City Libraries’ webpages and blog posts in March 2013:

Website pages

The famous library book sale rocketed into 3rd place this month, peaking on 18 March with over 4,000 page views that day.

Another popular page in the top 10 was our page on childrens’ books that explain mathematical concepts.

March’s popular blog posts

• New fiction buzz – Our selectors share cool stuff
• A sad tale of the librarian who stopped reading New Zealand fiction
• Easter Parade

Photos on Flickr

Our busiest day was 8 March, when people were checking out photos of previous Culture Galores and Ellerslie Flower Shows in particular.

Top on Twitter

• New Regent Street was beautiful even when it was just a twinkle in an architect’s eye. http://ow.ly/jgvZ0
• You can tour our libraries online via the power of Google. Here’s my workplace Central Library Tuam http://ow.ly/ilaGw …
• Riot Grrrl librarians, djs, guerrillas: The 10 coolest librarians alive. http://ow.ly/jtCJq @flavorwire

Facebook favourites

• New Regent Street was beautiful even when it was just a twinkle in an architect’s eye. (this time with a wee pic)
• Kia ora from Christchurch [Facebook album]
• Reading Crusade 2013 [Facebook album]
• Polish language collection launch [Facebook album]

 

Top of the web – February 2013

Popular Christchurch City Libraries’ webpages and blog posts in February 2013:

Website pages

Our Treaty of Waitangi page rocketed into third place this month. It peaked on 5 February with 926 page views.

February’s popular blog posts

• Cats r us
• Victoria Clock Tower
• Prudish New Brighton
• Christchurch – this week in history (11 February – 17 February)
• Christchurch City Libraries leaders answer questions on Twitter

Photos on Flickr

22 February was the busiest day on Flickr with 4605 views. Commemorative images were viewed as people remembered 22 February 2011. Popular images were the 185 white chairs and the Smile for Christchurch in the Re:START.

Top on Twitter

Linwood Library opening in Eastgate was definitely the top news. Next up was our leadership team answering questions on Twitter. Prudish New Brighton was number three.

Facebook favourites

• Arts centre repairs
• 22 February 2013 photos
• Great news about Linwood Library opening in Eastgate Mall …

 

Top of the web – January 2013

Kia ora, this year we will bring you information on what Christchurch City Libraries’ webpages and blog posts were popular each month. Satisfy your curiosity!

On the blog

31 January was our busiest day as Cats r us highlighted library cats. Also in the top 5:

• Crabby library bloggers celebrate 3000 posts
• Stepping lightly into twenty thirteen
• Rainy day brings new E-books for you!
• Best names in a novel. Ever.

Photos on Flickr

The last day of the month was our busiest day on Flickr as people enjoyed the library cat photos – especially this one of Barbara Collie and George.

Facebook favourites

Albums of photos are often the most popular on Facebook. Visuals rule the day. In January it was:

• Vero House demolition
• Wongi and Ikarus art
• Kia ora Christchurch, how are you looking this week?

 

Get an international mentor today! (or maybe in September…)

The International Librarians Network is a peer mentoring program aimed at helping librarians develop international networks. They believe that innovation and inspiration can cross borders, and that spreading networks beyond our home countries can make us better at what we do.

Sounds like a good idea to me, such a good idea in fact that I’ve gone and signed up!

If you would like to know more, or even sign up (go on!) take a moment to check them out.

Come on September, only 177 days to go…

 

New Professionals Network – If you’re new (like me) then this is just the ticket

I’ve recently found out about a New Professionals Network for people new to the library profession. It’s all very new and jam-packed full of ideas.

They have a blog and this is what they say about themselves:

This blog will trace the evolution of the New Professionals Network in New Zealand from its humble beginnings in February 2013 onwards. It is a central hub of resources, conversations, and information where new professionals (and those not so new!) are able to share their ideas and enthusiasm and take steps into making this dream a reality.

I’ve made my blogging debut about this not just because I think the New Professionals Network will be great but because I think that us newbies at CCL can and should get involved, in fact they’re reaching out for volunteers to be:

• Website Moderator/Curators
• Round the World Blog Series – Facilitator
• Twitter stars!
• Facebook moderator(s)
• Skype brainstorming session – Notetaker

So, if you want do get your hands dirty – jump in!
PS: I’m keen to throw some ideas around about how we might collectively contribute, if you’re keen – post a comment on the blog.

 

Blogging flavours

You are cordially invited to use the wonders of the interwebs to share your opinions. Get posting!

I’ve been teaching some blogging workshops recently. Here are some of the links from those sessions – to places to start getting your blog on, and to blogs that are worth looking at for their content, style and the way they roll:

Blogging platforms

Some of the tools you can use:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Livejournal
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Typepad

Blog inspiration

These blogs are all different, but the common denominator is they are clear in what they aim to do, and they do it well. You might want to share some faves in the comments.

New Zealand

• Public Address
• Bat, bean, beam

Christchurch

• Art, life, TV etc
• Moata’s Blog idle
• Second sight
• Harvest Bird
• Adrienne Rewi
• What is that Christchurch
• Christchurch Arts Centre

Blogging tips

• Get used to reading blog posts before you start your own blog. Be a consumer, discover the good blogs and think a bit about what makes them effective.
• Use comments as a way to dip your toes in the blogosphere.
• Pictures are powerful – they tell the story, enhance it, and draw people in.
• Give your blog love, and give your commenters love too. Keep the conversations going.
• Look for feedback, ask questions and let people know you are interested in their opinions too.
• Use a notebook or some other device to jot down ideas. Once your brain is in full blogging mode, the ideas will come at all times and you want to catch them if you can.

 

‘bizarro breaking bad librarians’

Jason Scott is mad and he wants you to know it. In fact he’s bloody furious – people’s stuff is being deleted, the world’s nascent digital history is being destroyed, entire artforms are being erased and forgotten. But he and his “bizarro breaking bad librarian” friends “are going to rescue your shit” and if you’re really lucky it may even find its way into a museum.

Jason, @textfiles, is an archivist and historian with a particular interest in digital formats. He started out on BBS systems and has filmed a documentary about them. From there he started collecting textfiles and ascii art and this has developed into a network of archives. Some of the ascii art started out as teletype art and even typewriter art before being transferred to ascii.

Out of the Yahoo announcement that it would close down Geocities in 2009, the “human race coming online for the first time”, was born the Archive Team (not to be confused with archive.org) and his principles of RAGE (“I find hostility’s really worked out for me”), PARANOIA (trust no one with your data – companies are constantly being taken over and destroyed and with them goes your data) & KLEPTOMANIA (backup everything and download entire sites to protect them for posterity). With software such as the Archive Team Warrior, a virtual archiving appliance, they encourage site owners to capture their own sites to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts. But they can only grab public information and encourage everyone to make secure back-ups of all their private data. After hearing of the loss of the sole copies of recollections of deceased family members and entire family histories when Geocities was deleted we should all make this a priority. Recent projects include saving as much of MobileMe that they could get to – they have rescued 420 Terabytes of data over the past two years.

Jason also has a very famous cat Sockamillion @sockington.

 

Pizza tastes better than broccoli

So last week I went to the amazing Webstock conference in Wellington. I have gone to this most years and always there seem to be a few themes that seem to creep into many of the talks given. Because usually many of the speakers are American its not uncommon for the ‘themes’ to be heavily influenced by whatever is going on over there, but this is valuable because many of the trends we see in the US eventually make their way here as well. This year a major ‘theme’ that I picked up on is that the news media is broken.

Clay Johnson @cjoh talked about “industrialised ignorance” where a highly politicised media is based on affirming the reader in their existing beliefs, not in informing them. One of the stunning examples he gave was that of the leaked AOL document, The AOL Way, available as slides over on the Business Insider website. It demonstrates how every click that we make reinforces the demand for more of that type of content and therefore is an ethical choice. He showed how today ignorance is caused by the consumption of information, not by its lack, and recommends that we all go on an Information Diet, become a conscious consumer, shift our focus to the local and focus on producing quality content ourselves.

Miranda Mulligan @mirandamulligan was equally critical about the news media although more from a design perspective. She says that journalism is important for democracy but that too few journalists understand the current mediums. They need to understand how the Internet works, not to become developers, but to understand how their content will be consumed. She’s worked in the news media for years trying to teach them but it hasn’t worked so now is trying to get web designers to be journalists as she sees them as being “uniquely positioned to have global view on how the business works”.

Meanwhile Robin Sloan is a media inventor and writer. We have his book Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore, but his talk wasn’t about that. Rather he discussed some of the inventions of the past: printing and the development of italic script, movies and Edison’s rotating ‘black maria’ studio (one of his early ‘movies’ featured cats boxing) and his own invention of a new type of media, the ‘tap essay’ available in the Tapestry app for iOS.

I thought that all of these sessions were very interesting as they demonstrated how different sectors are handling the tremendous changes that have been occurring in information format and delivery over the past decade. I think that there’s a message there for librarians too, like journalists our job is still being transformed by the internet and we need to understand how it works, not just at a surface level, in order to be able to help our customers. Karen McGrane talked about throwing away any idea of there being a ‘primary’ medium and focusing on the content and that’s part of this too. Finally we need to become more mindful consumers of information so that we can better assist and teach our customers – if we all need to be on an information diet maybe librarians need to learn to be information dieticians.

 

Down with blobs, long live chunks!

The weaknesses of content management systems (CMS) have always been pretty obvious to me so I was not at all surprised when Karen McGrane referred to them as “content mis-management” in her content strategy workshop at Webstock this year. CMS just substitutes one set of problems for a set of different problems where people can just shove any old garbage onto the internet with no editorial process or standards. The CMS, she said, is “not your editorial staff, its your printing press” and therefore only a part of the content life-cycle, not the final solution as many try to treat it.

Blobs vs. Chunks

Separate content from form and create presentation-independent content. Don’t encode meaning through visual styling – instead, add structure and metadata to your content.

A big part of the problem is that we’ve gotten sucked in to believing that content creators need a MS Word-like WYSIWYG interface, but this allows them to dump unstructured ‘blobs’ of styled content onto the web. These blobs are inevitably unsustainable and in the face of the need to now re-style content for various forms of delivery, including but not limited to mobile, they are extremely limited.

What we need, Karen says, is systems that create more structure around content, to create content in reusable ‘chunks’, not amorphous ‘blobs’ and systems that can deploy the most appropriate content for the platform. So we need to create content packages: for example, we might have 2 or more variations on the page title, of different lengths or keyed to different audiences, a short and long page description, the page content itself,  appropriately structured with subheadings that can be reused as in-page contents links, several sizes of each relevant image and a range of metadata.

The content management system would then be set up to fit with the various tasks of its users and to publish the various chunks in the most appropriate way. Karen gave us ten ‘rules’ for content strategy: