LIANZA's new website : a successful rebirth

After much discussion, consultation, debate and time, the refreshed LIANZA website is now live.  The launch was just five days ago, on Thursday the 15th of April with a public notice to the community being sent out on nz-libs the following afternoon.  A nice and exciting way to round out the working week I thought.

Michael Parry, aka Dannevirkelibrarian, was the first to put up a forum post, utilising the new website's functionality, which I thought was brilliant.  So brilliant in fact that I manage to comment three times.  See, it has been noted that there are a few kinks, and things lacking that are quite vivid in the new website.  And we're all a bit sad about it of course, us techno dudes and dudettes or whatever the cool term is these days.  Well the three people that have contributed to the site in the five days that it's been live, are a wee bit sad anyway.

I have to say that I think we, (ok, maybe some of us) had/have unrealistically high expectations for the relaunch.  I was too-ing and fro-ing between putting high hopes or high expectations there, but I went with the latter purely because it really is my expectations.  Hope's makes it a bit more emotive and lets just say here that I can't really get tooo emotive about a professional organisation, however long it's been around.  Anyway, the LIANZA office has approximately 6 staff, possibly 4 full-timers.  It's amazing that this redevelopment happened, and it's totally fantastic that it did.  I'm happy.

I'm quite stoked to say right now, that in this short post, I've managed to link to the new website and the information it contains (including social discussion between industry professionals) a total of four times!
That's quite cool, and it's already proving it's relevance.  I know I could've done that with the previous site's content, possibly even more so.... (rebirth kinks etc), but the fact that conversation and discussion is happening on the site already, is awesome.

Speaking of conversation and discussion and sharing, we now have a totally cool Twitter account.  Yes kids, that's right. Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui LIANZA is on Twitter!  Can I link to it again?  OK, sure, here goes :)

And here's the profile without doing an a href - http://twitter.com/teup0ko

If you're wondering what Twitter is all about, wow, have I got some news for you....!  Why don't we start with their about page on their website, that's always a good start.  Yes, that is slanted, ok, so how bout we look at this review I wrote of a twitter workshop Magalie of Wellington City Libraries and Twitter fame held last month?

Oh, and if you're with SLIS - they have a twitter account too - http://twitter.com/SLIS_NZ.

So come on and join us in the conversation!  We won't bite, I promise :-)

Gig review: Twitter Workshop @wcl_library Thu 25 Feb 2010

Kia ora koutou

Just have to say that this was an awesome workshop and I'm glad that the committee decided to sponsor it. The workshop was held by and at Wellington City Libraries on Victoria Street. I got a lot out of it and am looking forward to more workshops that Magalie Le Gac, an enthusiastic staff member of Wellington City Libraries, facilitates.

The morning session focussed on learning the theory before getting into the application.

Such things covered were:

• How many people are using Twitter? It has a pretty fast growth rate. Here's some stats I found. There's a lot of people tweeting out there! Currently around 6% of the NZ population is on Twitter. 30 Libraries in NZ use Twitter at the moment.
  
  
• There are access issues for libraries in NZ to do with blocking the website. Particular problem for council's as two attendees at the workshop mentioned it was a problem where they worked.
  
  
• Uses for Twitter for Librarians:
  Online Reference
  Professional Development (sharing links to good articles)
  Monitoring library uses
  Disseminating information about the library
  Following useful Twitterers (e.g. @Te_Ara, @NLNZ, @citygalleryWGTN, @NZStuff)
  Marketing Tool
  
  
• Advantages
  
  
• Disadvantages
  
  
• Potential pitfalls
  
  
• Different platforms to use (other than twitter.com)
  Hootsuite
  igoogle gadget
  Tweetdeck
  
  

Now I didn't attend the afternoon session but I hear it was a good hands-on one using self-directed tutorials that Magalie had compiled earlier. Magalie actually included me in the email with the links to these so I could go through them and "self-direct" myself in learning about Twitter, but I think I'm good for now.

If anyone would like to share their experience of the afternoon session that'd be way cool if you'd comment on this post!

Hope you enjoyed it, and again, I'm really glad that LIANZA Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui decided to sponsor this event/workshop. Well worth it. Cheers Magalie!

Hana