This is the first in my series about the American Library Association Mid Winter Conference in Seattle. I gathered some valuable information from many exhibitors and will be sharing the newest and neatest innovations throughout the next week or two. Enjoy!
____________________________________________
When I was in library school, I started to really notice the variety of user experiences provided by library websites, notably online catalogs. At the time, it seemed the ones I liked the most were employing software by BiblioCommons.
I was thrilled when my local library system, The Seattle Public Library switched to BiblioCommons, and equally thrilled to have a chance to speak to the enthusiastic representatives at the ALA conference.
Seems like two relatively recent innovations are Summer Sites and BiblioCMS. The BiblioCommons Summer Sites platform manages every aspect of kid, teen and adult summer reading clubs. I used this product this past summer through SPL and was amazed at not only the ease of tracking my summer reading, but the thrill of earning badges, penning reviews and rating materials. The product is social, practical and, from a user perspective, immensely gratifying.
BiblioCMS allows integration of the entire library website with the BiblioCommons catalog experience - essentially extending the reach. Through a tagging taxonomy developed for each library, this system can pull relevant content from blogs and pull related events into a sidebar creating dynamic content. This opens up myriad possibilities for cross promotion and curation.
Some libraries employing BiblioCMS currently are the Santa Clara County Library District and the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Australia.
Finally, since I am a bit of a design aficionado, I must mention that I love the BiblioCommons branding overall and the site simplicity has always been a draw for me. Exciting stuff!
No comments:
Post a Comment