American Library Association

Technology in Practice: Our New Website Is a Blog

Author(s): Meredith Farkas
Source: American Libraries, Vol. 39, No. 9 (Oct., 2008), p. 45
Published by: American Library Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25650091
Accessed: 06-02-2017 17:53 UTC

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Our New Website Is a Blog
Using Wordpress for content management by Meredith Farkas
Keeping a website cur
rent and engaging can
be a challenge for a
library without tech
sawy staff members. Many small
libraries have websites whose
content hasn't changed in months
(if not years), meaning that their
events and displays go unnoticed
by those who aren't frequent visi
tors. Often,
the librar
ians aren't These days, if you can
happy with use a word processing
the library's program, you can
current web
create web content.
presence,
but feel
powerless to fix things because
they have no one with web design
skills on staff to update the site.
Many new technologies have
reduced the barriers for adding con
tent to the Web. These days, if you can
use a word processing program, you
can create web content. This is mainly
due to the creation of WYSIWYG edi
tors. WYSIWYG stands for What You
See Is What You Get, and means that
instead of having to understand how
to format text online, you can format
text at the click of a button. So just like
in your usual word processing pro
gram, you'll see buttons for centering
text, making it bold, inserting URLs,
and more. WYSIWYG editors can be
found on many popular social tech
nologies such as blogs and wikis.
2.0 website solutions
An increasing number of libraries
are starting to use tools like blogs,
This content downloaded from 14.139.69.21 on Mon, 06 Feb 2017 17:53:30 UTC
In Practice | TECHNOLOGY H
wikis, and open-source content
management systems to manage
their website content. This makes it
easy for all staff members to add and
update web content in their areas of
responsibility without needing to
know HTML.
Wordpress (wordpress.org) is a
popular free, open-source blogging
platform that is used by many librar
ians in their
personal and
professional
lives. Many
libraries have
Wordpress
blogs that they
use to keep
their patrons up to date with what's
new at the library, to share knowl
edge, and to solicit feedback.
While Wordpress was developed for
blogging, some libraries use it as a
content management system for their
entire website. The software allows
for the creation and management of
blog posts and static pages, meaning
that libraries can use it to post both
timely and permanent content. For
instance, Park County (Wyo.) Library
System (parkcountylibrary.org) has
news content on its front page, with
links to static pages on the top and
side.
But just because your site uses
blog software doesn't mean it has to
look like a blog. Wordpress has hun
dreds of themes created by talented
users of the application. Choosing a
different theme allows the library to
change its website's look. Themes
can be modified by making changes
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),
or a library can design its own
theme. As a result, Wordpress
library websites range from the
simple to the polished. Few online
visitors would guess that Troy (N.Y.)
Public Library's sleek site (thet
roylibrary.org) was developed with
blog software.
Some organizations supporting
rural libraries have found that
Wordpress is a great tool to enable
web development in geographically
remote areas. Utah State Library and
BCR have teamed up to offer Web
site - in- a -Box (utahlibraries. org),
which has helped rural library di
rectors create websites in a single
day using Wordpress. The State
Library of Kansas and the Kansas
Regional Library Systems offer a
similar program, which is called
My Kansas Library on the Web
(mykansaslibrary. org).
While there are many other tools
for managing web content (some of
which I plan to discuss in American
Libraries' November and December
issues), Wordpress is simple soft
ware that's easy to install and use,
and is also a familiar interface for
many who blog. Wordpress puts 00
O
control of web content into the o
CM
hands of librarians regardless of
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-Q
o
their tech savvy, enablng them to t3
o
make their websites dynamic repre
sentations of their libraries. I
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TO
MEREDITH FARKAS is head of instructional JQ
initiatives and liaison to the social sciences at c
CO
u
Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. She
blogs at Information Wants to Be Free and <&
created Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki.
E
ro
Contact her at librarysuccess@gmail.com.
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