libSite.org

I am interested in feedback on this site. I don't know how much of a role the director of the library, Brad Stephens, played in the design and set-up, but I remember him from NEO-RLS as one of the best voices of library technology in the biz, able to explain the arcane to someone as lowly as me. The Salem News seems to be an off-shoot of the library, as well, similar to the Lakewood Observer in Lakewood, Ohio. A curious direction and intriguing morph of the Library in Society.

Italian blog whose aim is to involve in library related discussion non only professionals but also library users. The blog pays thus great interest in services to the public, relation among libraries and users, users rights. There is also interest for library technologies, web 2.0 and free software.

This blog was born in Liguria (NW Italy), thus it has a certain specific attention to that territory, but such attention is in no way exclusive and all library related themes can be discussed. Users from all over the world are welcome, and posts or comments in langueges other than Italian are allowed, though Italian is the main language of the blog.

Nice clean site. Puts what you need at your finger-tips in a well-ordered way. See the E-Research Tools or Ask-Us Page for an examples. The initial search box that greets you on the home page is also a good example.

On the con-side, the help and general info pages aren't that inspired.

Extremely well-done library website done in Drupal. This together with FSU are probably my two most favorite library sites using Drupal at the moment.

The site's database page is almost a reenactment in the flesh of my screencast "Creating a Library Database Page Using Drupal". The SFX integration for journals looks interesting.

On their 'Ask-a-Librarian' Page they have three Meebo widgets -- interesting approach.

Visually the site and clean and extremely well done. No blog-look here. I also like flexible widths of the layout.

All-in-all a very good job!

New-ish design from Johnson County Library, a public library system in suburban Kansas City. Built in EpiServerCMS. Features include lots of RSS options and the ability to comment on news posts and booklists.

Also have a page dedicated to the usability studies and surveys that went into the planning and implementation at http://www.jocolibrary.org/usability

Nice redesign of the Franklin Park Public Library using Drupal as the content management system.

The site makes use of a number of helpful features that are sure to be of major use to patrons including the "Meebo" widget for Chat Reference, the Google Calendar and really neat Google Translator.

Knowbodies is a current awareness blog that provides news about websites, technology, resources, applications, trends and all manner of information that might be of interest to librarians and others with a professional interest in finding information. A secondary focus of the blog is international relations and public diplomacy; the reason for that is that the precursor to this blog, the now retired ircworld, originated in the community of nearly 180 information resource centers (IRCs), libraries and American centers located at U.S.embassies and consulates in more than 140 countries. The present blog is private, has no affiliation with the U.S. government, and welcomes postings from librarians outside the U.S. embassy community.

Knowbodies seeks to emulate the many useful library blogs and current awareness sites that exist on the net, and aggregates a selection of them in the Pageflakes pagecast "Knowbodies: libraries & technology."

You can get Knowbodies.blogspot.com postings via email (Feedblitz) or rss.

Librarians and others with an interest these matters are encouraged to become part of the community and contribute posts to the blog – if you’d like to join, send an email to signon@knowbodies.info Editorial guidelines are simple; content should be consistent with the scope and focus outlined above. Posts that are obscene, slanderous or disrespectful will not be tolerated, unless they are very funny.

The patron saint of this site is the fellow in Carl Spitzweg's 1850 painting "The Bookworm"

Nice if somewhat plain redesign of the Vancouver Public Library site. On the plus side, the bottom navigation is extensive and follows the current pattern on many well-designed sites in this respect.

Also, you can set any library branch as your 'home branch' at which point it appears on the home page. Nice.

On the not-so-plus side, the Calendar is kind of clunky and integration of reading lists is a bit better on other sites.

[h/t aaron]

Design is clear, concise and consistent and location of features is intuitive. Blog format provides RSS feed option and encourages repeat site visitation.

This page shows all the strengths of having a presence on MySpace: reuse of content from the main website including calendar events, a meebo widget for Chat, and finally a respectable number of "friends" (258) particularly among young people.