The following report was submitted by a recipient of our new CMLE scholarship program.
Submitted by Alex Jarvis
With the generous support of the CMLE, I was able to attend the DrupalCon conference in San Francisco from April 17-22. Drupal is a free, open source content management system and framework that allows for the rapid development of websites and web services. The conference was an excellent opportunity that will have a direct impact on my work on Great Riverʼs web presence. The sessions were highly informative, giving me insights into new technologies Great River should consider adopting (such as Solr search), as well as optimizations and best practices for the online services we already provide. It also gave me the opportunity to meet with other libraries from across the country and talk with them about innovative ways of implement Drupal-based library products and services. These invaluable interactions have opened up exciting collaboration opportunities; some of the libraries I talked to have worked more extensively with Drupal than Great River has to date, and can help us improve our offerings, while others are still evaluating their options and would like to talk to us about our experience migrating a legacy site.
Attendance at the conference will also help further Great Riverʼs goal of eventually hosting a Central Minnesota Drupal conference for libraries. At DrupalCon I spoke to several conference organizers who were kind enough to share their invaluable insights and suggestions for organizing a successful Drupal-oriented gathering.
Overall the conference was a fantastic learning and networking experience, and I would like to thank the CMLE for sponsoring my attendance. I would also recommend Drupal to any library that is considering revamping their online presence. More information about Drupal can be found at www.drupal.org.
If you’ve been keeping up with the One Book, One Twitter idea, you’ll be happy to know that a book has been chosen! The book selected…by popular vote… is….
American Gods by Neil Gaiman!
Get involved by joining the discussion on Twitter with hashtag #1b1t! I can’t wait!
On April 25th, winners of the Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award were announced at the Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul. The 2009-2010 Maud Hart Lovelace award is a children’s choice book award presented by The Minnesota Youth Reading Association (MYRA).
The winner for division 1 (grades 3-5) was Champ by Marcia Thornton Jones.
The winner for division 2 (grades 6-8) was I’d Tell You I Love You, But then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter.
The award, established in 1980, honors Maud Hart Lovelace (1892-1980), the author of the popular Betsy-Tacy series about growing up in Mankato at the turn of the twentieth century. The goal of the award is to encourage recreational reading among school age children. Each year winners are announced on Maud Hart Lovelace’s birthday, April 25. More information is available at: http://maudhartlovelace.org.
This month the U of M Libraries will be sending resources to Google as part of a larger digitization project that was agreed upon in 2007 by Google and several Big 10 universities. The U of M will be working with Google to digitize resources on the topics of Scandinavian literature, bee-keeping, forestry, and area studies collections. In all, the U of M Libraries will be sending more than 1 million books and bound journals to Google for digitization.
