TechEssence.info

Back in the "what shall we write about?" post, we were asked about large-scale website redesign, as well as research portals and pathfinder/research-guide management.

The latest issue (24:1, 2006) of Library Hi-Tech just got routed to me, and lo and behold, it's a theme issue on web content-management systems! An article of particular interest may be Goans, Leach, and Vogel, "Beyond HTML: developing and re-imagining library web guides in a content management system."

I'll be reading the whole thing—I hope the heads-up is useful to others as well!

It's hard to know whether to adopt a new web technology without kicking its tires. Which blog or wiki software works best for your library? What does a portal look like? Is a given app easy or hard to administer or redesign? How will you know, if you can't try it?

I suggest two ways of making your library a web-technology sandbox: building a test server, and signing up with a web-hosting service.

The title of this post is a fancy way of saying "we broke the site temporarily; sorry about that."

Some posts that had been categorized lost their categorization yesterday. TechEssence contributors

Every librarian should get friendly with a text editor—and no, NotePad, WordPad (both on Windows) and TextEdit (Mac) don't count. Neither does Microsoft Word. A good text editor (sometimes called a "source editor" or "programmers' editor") is the Swiss army knife of software. It does a little bit of everything, and a lot of things surprisingly well.

The term "digital preservation" gets thrown around a lot, usually in contexts designed to scare us about how little of it we're doing. Such discussions in my experience bog down quickly, because no two participants mean the same thing when they say "digital preservation."

So let's break it down into its component parts.

So what would folks like to hear about? Name the three technologies or tech-related phenomena you would most like to see encapsulated here. We'll do our best to oblige you!