INNOLIB

L!brary Project

At just 5 percent of a school’s total real estate, the school library is the most powerful and efficient way to reach 100 percent of the student body. But far too many of the nation’s public school libraries lack even the most basic resources to support learning and encourage achievement. The nonprofit L!brary Initiative, created by the Robin Hood Foundation, has been workingÊsince 2001Êto enhance student literacy and overall academic achievement by collaborating with school districts to design, build, equip, and staff new elementary school libraries.

Your library should order this book and let me check it out. Preorder available here : PaPress

This Public Works

Speaker Night #2
Friday August 21st 2009, 7pm to 10pm
Free!

Andrew Rafacz Gallery
835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago

Justin Fines – Demo
… is an artist and designer. DEMO, Fines’ freelance endeavour, was founded in 1997 in Detroit, MI. An award winning designer, Fines has worked in several design media, with projects ranging from record covers to corporate identity, tshirts, motion design and direction, skateboards, books and more. Recent projects include a line of snowboards for ROME, an artist series board for Zoo York, limited edition T-shirts for Nike, and a collaboration with Adidas and Chinatown Soccer Club. DEMO is headquartered on Rad Mountain at the Old American Can Factory, which is located in the beautiful Gowanus district of Brooklyn, NY.

Jason Teegarden-Downs – Delicious Design
… is one half of Delicious Design League: a two-man duo fighting out of Chicago, Illinois that specializes in graphic design and illustration for the music industry. Mostly recognized for their limited edition hand screen-printed music posters, they also create a plethora of anything that can and should be designed, logos and identity design, retail and promo packaging, magazine illustration, and so on. Their growing clientele includes Jane Magazine, Clothes Optional Vintage Clothing Boutique, John Brown Citrus Publishing (U.K.), Cilichili magazine (Czech Rep.), Metro Chicago, The Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza, Live Nation, Firebelly Design, Draft FCB, Mozilla, The Royal Order, and many bands such as, Gomez, Ben Kweller, Pelican, Office, Alla, and on and on.

Chris Eichenseer – Someoddpilot
… is a photographer, designer and musician. He has spent most of his life attending band practice, and this not only taught him how to be an entrepreneur, but determined the nature of his work. Chris founded Someoddpilot in 1999 and since then has built an internationally recognized body of work, including branding and designing the Pitchfork website, photographing musical luminaries such as RJD2 and Steve Albini, designing dozens of record covers for Consumers Research, Chocolate Industries, and Mush, and designing industry websites for Drag City, Windish Agency, Fat Possum, Mad Decent and many more. Someoddpilot calls Chicago home with an office located in the crook of the Ravenswood industrial strip on the city’s North Side.

Interview with Aaron Schmidt

Aaron Schmidt blogs about design,  usability , and library technology at www.walkingpaper.org. We were asked in my Communication for Leadership class to interview someone in the library world. I enjoy reading Aaron’s blog and decided to interview him regarding his leadership style. Although this was a school assignment, I found it enjoyable and hope you will too!

How would you describe your current role?

I’m the Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library.  I help the library plan and execute forward thinking web projects.  I’m part of a team that consists of some talented coders and the library’s Chief Information Officer.

Library Signage

There is a constant discussion of appropriate signage within the bibliosphere and it made me think, how can I contribute?

I noticed that most of the discussion focused on cellphone signage and appropriate use within the library. Call me progressive but I believe people should be able to use their cellphone in the library. I know I constantly use my iPhone in the library for texting, checking my email, and often times recording catalog numbers so that I don’t have to waste paper by writing them down. Most anti cellphone signs contain two things a clip art image of a cellphone and a big red line. One of Michael Stephen’s posts at Tame The Web is actually entitled The Red Circle and Diagonal Line is Very Popular.

I decided to throw together a quick appropriate cellphone use sign this morning.  I made the image in black and white so that you can print it out even if you don’t have access to a color printer.

This is only a thumbnail, full size image can be downloaded/printed from here.

Please feel free to use this image at your library!

Post #8 : Drupal Exploration Post

Recently the library bibliosphere has been chattering about Druapl. Drupal is an open source content management system which many libraries are using to create their websites. One of my favorite and undoubtedly one of the most famous Drupal library websites is from Darien Public Library: http://www.darienlibrary.org/ Drupal allows for a high level of customization on a website, blogging, commenting, and tagging.

I decided to configure and set up my own Drupal website just to see what the back end of the service looked like. This was a rather exciting and simple process. I’d like to use this post to explain how to set up a Drupal testing environment so that you can test Drupal yourself.

1. I am running Mac OS X, so I installed the MAMP stack : http://www.mamp.info/ Mamp stands for (Macintosh, Apache, MySql, and PhpAdmin if you are using Windows it would be called WAMP)

2. Download Drupal : http://drupal.org/ (Do not unzip/install yet)

3. From here it gets a little tricker but hopefully I can explain it. Run the MAMP stack, when it opens it should look like this you want to click on “Open start page”

4. This will load the MAMP stack admin page. Drupal runs through a database, so we have to create a database for Drupal to run in. Select “phpAdmin” from the top bar.

5. Click Databases.

6. Enter a name for your database under “Create New Database” and make sure to select “utf8_general_ci”

7. Click Create

8. Next you want to create a User ID & Password with admin access within your database. Click on phpMyAdmin again and select click “Privileges”

9. Click Add a new user.

10. Fill out the user information page and makse sure to switch from “Any Host” to “Local”

11. Do not change the “None”  button selected under the “Database for user” section. Do not select anything under the “Global privileges” section. Click Go in the bottom right hand corner.

12. When you arrive at the next page select “Database Specific Privileges” and make sure to select the Drupal database we selected.

13. Make sure you select ” SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX and ALTER” and then hit Go

14. Now you want to unzip/unpack Drupal in the htdocs folder within the MAMP folder in your applications.

15. I suggest renaming the folder to just Drupal, it will make the next step easier.

16. Go to http://localhost:8888/drupal/ and follow the install instructions. Use the USER ID and Database we created. From here you should be able to play with Drupal!

Here is what it looks like from the Admin End:

Drupal Home Page:

I hope this quick tutorial will help some of you experience Drupal hands on. If you have any questions please feel free to ask and I will do my best to help!