The hyperlinked library

I had the pleasure of attending two excellent professional development thingymabobs last week (aka I sat and listened to people speak but calling it training would imply I had a formal-ish teacher).

The first one was called The Hyperlinked Library and was held by Michael Stephens of TameTheWeb. What a fascinating day. Not only did everything he said ring home, I also got to shmooze with other library staff who are interested in the Brimbank Libraries website which is being developed in Joomla. I got plenty of business cards and, unfortunately, have managed to lose the one I got from Michael Stephens. Ah well, he's easy enough to find an email address for.

It turns out that other libraries have tried using Joomla for their website. One lovely lady from *unnamed country library* did not like it at all. She'd used an older version of Joomla and remembered only problems in creating a community portal. After 3 months of glaring at Joomla, I'm apt to believe her. But I will make this work if it kills me (or, more likely, if it kills my job-share partner Andrew).

In Brimbank-Joomla news, we finally have a visa card which we can use to order things online. I don't think council appreciated us asking for a cheque for US$2 for our hosting for one month. Ah well. Visa it is! Huzzah! Because of our Visa, we now have a lovely new location for our Joomla site (previously we were using the boss' webspace).

For those interested in having a squizz : http://www.brimbanklibraries.com . Isn't it wonderful? Tricked ya! Maybe by the time someone reads this post I will actually have the website there, but currently it's a splash screen. We have a sandbox with the actual trial website on it.

The second personal development thingy was a leadership forum where library 'leaders' spoke about what they had done and then we split up into little focus group-esque things to talk about the issues that leaders face. It sounded very much like something I could have slept through but actually turned out to be very exciting. Hurray for training.