Navigating This Website

This website is the final group project of Becky Haagsma, Beth Snow, Emily Barney and Maura McKee in LIS501LEB with UIUC's LEEP program. We are showcasing our collection development plan for comic books and graphic novels using a fictional "library committee blog" and library "teen website."

Links to be used in the presentation:

• Our Grant
• Use & Users
• Collection
• Collection Development Resources
• Related Materials
  
• Organization & Access
• Description
• Subject Access
• Search & Retrieval
• Preservation

(You can find all these links listed on every page at the top right under "Categories")

We've put together a lot more information than we'll be able to cover in seven minutes with just those links. If you enjoy the presentation we hope you'll come back and check the rest of the blog out - you can browse by reading through each page, of course, or you can check out the list of individual tags we've used to see the range of topics covered in the posts.

Thanks for visiting!

Using WorldCat Lists for the big picture

by Emily Barney

WorldCat.org is an excellent tool to use if you would like to link to many sources housed in libraries around the world. To share these sources with other people, you can create a login and start making lists. You can make private lists, too, but public lists could be a great way to acquaint your local users with materials they could get using interlibrary loan if you can't afford to keep them in your collection.

Worldcat itself can sometimes be used for interlibrary loan - if your library is set up to do this, all the better reason to use these lists. You can annotate your list using the "details" tab or export citations in multiple formats by using the "citation" tab. We've created several lists for this project that you may have seen linked to in other posts, but here's the home page for them:

http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/GothamFreeLibrary/lists

I think it's pretty intuitive and fun to play with, but here's a little description if you don' t have time to play with it to figure it out:

You have to log in to add books to the lists or to make new lists. You can't comment on another person's list - it isn't a terribly "social" tool yet. It can also be hard to tell if you've already added a book when you work on adding new ones, but it still has some great features.

In the details view (the automatic tab) you can add notes about each book. The problem is, especially with long lists, you can only see 10 books at a time and it's hard to get to the end of the list.

In the "citation view" (the second tab) you can view a list of all the books in the list. You can sort the list several different ways, and you can choose between five different citation styles.

There are extra options only the person who makes the list can use:

You can write a short description paragraph that will show above the list, send the list to a group of people with a link to view it (how nice to use for a reading group or class!), or export the data. The Export data comes as a "CSV" file, which you can open as a table using most spreadsheet programs like Excel. And they have a handy print version too, that opens in a new window and will show all the books.

Blogger Tutorial

by Emily Barney

Here's a tutorial that explains the basics of setting up one of these group blogs for projects like this:



To edit posts you absolutely have to be logged in. Otherwise everyone could change everything! This isn't a wiki!

To add a post, you can start at your dashboard (that first screen that shows when you login) or click on the "New Post" option in the top right of your screen, on the "blogger ribbon" that appears when you're logged in.

To save a post without publishing it, click on "Save As Draft." You can remove a post you've already published from public view by opening it in edit mode and saving it as a draft again. You can do this two ways:

• Click on the small pencil symbol at the bottom of the published post. Click on the blue "save as draft" button and it's removed until you choose to open it and click "publish post" again.
• Or, click on the "Manage: Posts" button in the "dashboard" screen. This will take you to the full list of posts, where you can select "Edit" beside any post to start making changes or to save as a draft.
  

To get back to a draft post or just to make quick edits (without searching through your whole blog) you need to either start with the "Manage: Posts" link on your "dashboard" or get to the Posting tab and click on the "Edit Posts" link. There are two ways to get to the Posting section once you're looking at the blog:

• Click on the "New Post" option in the top right of your screen, on the "blogger ribbon" that appears when you're logged in. You'll see an empty text box appear - ignore that and click on the "edit posts" link (It doesn't look like a link - it isn't underlined in this view - but it will take you to the right place).
• Click on the little pencil symbol at the bottom of a post you've already started. (You won't see this unless you're logged in, of course). This works the same way as the "New Post" link, except you'll see that the text box is filled with information from the post you clicked on. Don't worry - it's been saved already. You can ignore that and go directly to the "Edit Posts" page.
  

See the second point above for information about the "Edit Post" list of blog postings.

I wish they had an easier way to get to the page where you can view all the posts, but those are my workarounds right now. Leave a comment if you need any clarification on this. I don't have time to make another flash tutorial right now, so I've tried to break it down into short steps.