Poster Presentation  2012 KLA/KSMA Joint annual Conference    My poster presentation tells the story of how the other librarians and I, with very little budget, manage  the  website, ILS, and course management software for eight branch libraries of Lincoln College of  Technology in Kentucky and Ohio for about $15 / month.  Below are links to most of the sites I mention  in my presentation.  Laurie Henry, MFA, MSLS  Regional Librarian  Lincoln College of Technology  Kentucky and Ohio branches  http://linclib.com  513‐317‐1891 (cell)    Webhosting  Fatcow  http://www.fatcow.com/   Comes with many easy‐to‐install features to help create  a website without a lot of work, including: visitor statistics, WordPress, email addresses, guestbooks,  MySQL, pre‐made Website templates, Joomla and Drupal (mentioned below) and  shopping , counters.   About $ 7 / month  Amazon EC2  http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/  Because Fatcow does not offer the user access  to the Linux Terminal Command prompt, and we decided for reasons of economy to begin hosting Koha  ourselves, it became necessary to find a host that would.  We chose Amazon EC2. About $15 / month.   Kind of a steep learning curve for me, but doable.  Web‐Development Software (and similar)    

Joomla (open source)   http://www.joomla.org/ 

 

Drupal (open source) 

 

Wordpress (open source) http://wordpress.org/ 

http://drupal.org/ 

New ILS   

Koha (open source) 

http://koha‐community.org/download‐koha/ 

   

Koha Listserv for setup and maintenance assistance  http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha 

 

YouTube is also a good place to go for Koha assistance.  

   

Koha Live CD (free—helpful for running a demo instance)  http://sourceforge.net/projects/kohalivecd/  Another open source ILS you might find of interest is Evergreen at http://open‐ ils.org/downloads.php 

Organizing MARC records and transferring information from old ILS to Koha   

MARCedit 

http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php 

Course Management Software  Moodle (similar to Blackboard—make sure totake Security Level to Zero on IE to log on. Easy to  set up from Fatcow) http://moodle.org/  Links I mention in my poster  American Association of School Librarians Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning (check  previous years as well as current list)  http://www.ala.org/aasl/guidelinesandstandards/bestlist/bestwebsitestop25   

Wordle http://www.wordle.net/ 

 

Pinterest 

 

Khan Academy  http://www.khanacademy.org/ 

http://pinterest.com/ 

What We Needed A Web Host We realized we would not be able to host our own site. Our school’s IT administrator, who was not involved with our site, suggested FatCow, which costs us FatCo w about $5 a insta ’s Simpl e Scr lling ip M minu te pr oodle a s ts made month. oces i m p le fiv s. eWe looked at reviews of web hosting companies and decided that FatCow would be a good choice, and, indeed, it has provided us with excellent customer service.

Web-Development Software (ContentManagement Software) We used Dreamweaver to develop the site because the other librarian working on the website and I had access to it and were interested in using it. In retrospect, we might have done well to experiment with some other more accessible software as a way of making it easy for other librarians to participate in the project without learning html. Some freely available web-development tools include: Joomla Drupal Wordpress My first efforts with the site were actually in Microsoft Publisher, which I already knew well. This was basically a waste of time; for one reason, a Microsoft Publisher website tends to load very slowly, and speed was a problem when we first began our work. 

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Speed At first, even after I moved away from Microsoft Publisher, I was dismayed by how slowly the site loaded. This site Websiteoptimization.com helped me see that the very large the photos I was using were, and helped me minimize them. I’m thankful that we have not had bandwidth issues at our school within the last year: this may by now be a moot point for most people.

A New Server As we prepare to run our Koha server without assistance, we realized the need to move away from FatCow to a service that will allow us access to the Linux Root Server. We chose Amazon EC2 because of cost (about $12 / month for our small library’s database) and because of the recommendations of people on the Koha listserv and elsewhere.

Lincoln College of Technology Lincoln College of Technology is a for-profit college offering business, criminal justice, phlebotomy, medical assisting, dental assisting, computer networking, and nursing (LPN) degrees and diplomas. Lincoln has a campus in Florence, Kentucky, and seven campuses in Ohio. At some schools, more than half of the students are working on a GED at the same time they are working toward their college degree. Currently, our libraries have about 15,000 circulating items circulating among the eight campuses.

Our Challenge In 2008, like may similar libraries, the Lincoln College Library had no web presence and a rather basic OPAC that was available only to on-campus users—when it was available. The IT Department had its hands full with other projects, and Corporate’s website was geared toward prospective students rather than to those already on campus. While the four librarians were very computer literate, we had run websites only during library school or for personal use. Our goal was to create a usable and attractive library website for our shared campuses, along with an integrated library system (ILS), and other links and content to enhance the students’ learning and instructors’ teaching experience.

If You Build it, Will They Come?

Goodbye to the Old—Mostly While we were all eager to move on from our previous ILS, we realized that some of the modules of the old system—all opensource or freeware, including IrfanView (an image-converting source useful for creating desktop icons) and Firebird (a database management system), were still useful. We learned more about these software options and download updated versions.

Koha One of the most practically useful things that came from my trip to the 2009 ALA Annual Conference was information on open-source integrated library systems. I decided to use Koha but knew we would not be able to host it on our school servers. In 2009, LibLime offered a product called KohaExpress, which offered web hosting and basic set-up of the most recent open-source version of Koha for about $365 per year. Although this price provided no customer support, I jumped at the deal.

Your web host will provide statistical information about site usage that may surprise you. Where do your visitors come from? Which of your users is still using Netscape? What search terms have brought them to you from Google? Why are our most visited pages the ones on APA guidelines and dental assisting? I’m guessing because of faculty input and buy-in. Students have also requested links; for example, for sites offering keyboarding instruction.

Fun Stuff The web is full of fun (and free) software and other features that will help you arrange and display the content on your site. One of my favorite places to look is the American Association of School Librarians’ Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning page. Khan Academy Tagzedo

Customer Assistance The Koha users’ community has a very active listserv with many people willing to help out even with basic difficulties. All of my problems came during the time I migrated my MARC records over, and while various experienced Koha users were able to push me in the right direction, there was still a lot of frustrating trial and error involved.

Live CD You can download Koha yourself, and many people do. It’s not easy, I know from conversation on the listserv. I probably wouldn’t have felt comfortable moving over to manage Koha myself on a hosted server without knowing more about Linux than I do, had it not been for the Live CD, which I tested on my own home computer before committing to Amazon EC2.

Pinterest

(Look at the Top 25 from previous years as well.)

Students tend to be glad to have their photos up on the site—but we do ask, first.

Moodle If your school doesn’t have Blackboard, one option is the free Course Management System Moodle. FatCow makes it very easy for users to build a Moodle site.

MarcEdit The free software MarcEdit (which also has a very active listserv) made it possible for me to move the MARC records from our previous ILS, edit them, and upload them into Koha. Learning to use MarcEdit and Koha, then editing the files and uploading them took about two months. Since I only had about 3,000 records in 2009, I might have done better to re-enter them by hand.

Moodle allows you to post assignments and links, create discussion boards and quizzes, embed PowerPoints and videos, and post grades and announcements.

What We Learned Have a Plan B When LibLime stopped offering the very economical KohaExpress feature, we felt fortunate that they didn’t immediately kick us off their server. However, because we weren’t willing to pay thousands of dollars for our ILS to be managed, we had to be willing to research a new solution.

You Can’t Do This Alone (or you shouldn’t) Probably, you know—or believe you know—more about what your site should have than anyone else. But you should make sure to involve other stakeholders in the planning stage, especially if you hope they’ll take an interest in contributing content site and doing some of the design, maintenance, and updating work.

You Can’t Do This Alone (Part 2) Remember your user. An interest the librarians had was in creating a reader’s blog to highlight new library Goodbye, little acquisitions. After awhile, we realreader’s blog! ized the need to move on to spend our time on features likely to be appreciated by the site’s actual users—students as well as faculty.

Some Things Will Be Harder than You Expect (but Other Things Will be Easier) We continue to work to improve our programming and design skills. I know that many librarians have managed more useful and beautiful sites than we. The most difficult thing I did was migrate the MARC records. It probably took me two months to move them first to Excel, then to MarcEdit, and finally to Koha. Considering that we had only about 3,000 records at the time, it might have been faster to redo everything by hand. Having a good understanding of MySQL would have made the process easier. On the other hand, setting up Moodle on FatCow was delightfully effortless.

You Can’t Do This Alone (Part 3) People you expect to be able to help won’t always be able or willing. For example, it’s possible that the IT department will have no interest in the site, or time to spend with it. Ask a variety of people for input, especially instructors, whose support you need to attract students. If faculty members have classroom blogs or websites, ask permission to link to them.

Don’t Take Anything for Granted Even if setting up a very low-cost website and ILS seems like a no-brainer to you, brainstorm with others to come up with answers to kinds of questions non-librarians might have. For example: What about security? What if someone tries to hack into our Corporate site from the library page? Why don’t you just use Microsoft Access to keep track of the books? Isn’t this something the IT Department should administer, rather than the librarians?