GOLD/GALILEO review

Friday (8/1/08) I attended the GOLD/GALILEO Annual Users Group Conference. This conference gets better and better every year and I think the session offerings get better, too.

The keynote speaker was funny and enthusiastic (Cliff Landis) -- always a plus. I attended a session on website redesign, blogging, and the third, on the GALILEO Institutional Repository project.

The first session was on website redesign. I attended this because it is always interesting to me to see how someone else approaches redesign. I've done a few redesigns in the corporate and freelance world and I've assisted (minimally, just feedback) on the UGA Libs website. Most interesting and somewhat unexpected was a brief discussion on content management systems. I would have liked to have heard more about content management systems, but I understand the topic was simple web re-design. ;-)

The second session I attended was essentially blogging basics, which I also attended out of curiosity. I'm always looking for new ideas in library blogging to pitch to the Web Advisory Group (WAG) and the Blog Subcommittee (and now, DYG, the Dynamic Content Group), for the Libraries' News & Events. I'm currently working on widgetizing our stylesheet, and fixing a few minor stylistic things which do not work so well in the latest upgrades. The new style is going to be a radical and much needed upgrade.

I'm also teaching my own "Blogging Basics" workshop at the end of the month for the UGA Web Editors Group (Dweebs).

So, although I've taught or presented several blogging basics sessions/classes, I thought it might be good to see how others do it. Anyhow, overall, it was interesting and I got a couple of ideas which might work for the News & Events blog. I thought Jonathan Harwell did an excellent job of expressing just how easy blogging is and how anyone REALLY can do it. As for the Dekalb County Public Library portion of the presentation, what I found most interesting was the kind of content they put into their blog -- it goes way beyond the scope of traditional library services. Yet, I can see how it makes for interesting and dynamic reading.

The third session was on the GALILEO Institutional Repository project which WHEN funded will collate scholarly works into a centralized resource center. Even thinking about what little content I generate, collating it has been a huge undertaking. All of my papers from graduate school are floating around on zip disks, floppy disks, and in some cases CDROMs. Ditto with most of my early presentations. Photos, screenshots of webdesigns... sigh -- some are in the original file formats, some completely unconvertable and unmigratable.
Anyhow, I can not imagine what a treasure trove the GKR would be for researchers, as well as others.

I'll update with links when I sit down with my notes. I should delicious'ed the url while I was sitting there in each of the sessions!