Presentation: Everyone Can Contribute: Making Support Effective Through Contributions

Everyone dreams of talking to someone who can solve their problem. Opening up ways for Support team members to contribute to documentation and code will improve the customer experience and the company’s efficiency and we can prove it!.

Presented at Support Driven Expo 2022. Continue reading “Presentation: Everyone Can Contribute: Making Support Effective Through Contributions”

Making Your Website Accessible Part 4: WCAG 2.1

The latest revision of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.1, was recently published. While it’s a few years old, I still often refer to my series of blog posts that break down WCAG 2.0 because unlike many of my other articles on web accessibility, it refers to the WCAG criteria by number. This extra part to the series is to specifically cover what’s new in WCAG 2.1. Continue reading “Making Your Website Accessible Part 4: WCAG 2.1”

Horizon Primer in Brief: Circulation Rules

I have spent hours mapping out circulation rules the last few weeks in preparation for a pilot project we are about to run at my library. In the process, I have learnt a great deal about circulation parameters and privileges that I’ve put together in a brief primer below. If I missed anything, please let me know. Continue reading “Horizon Primer in Brief: Circulation Rules”

Article: A Practical Guide to Improving Web Accessibility

What’s that? Why yes, it’s another article! Open-access, peer-reviewed article, this time written more for the content creator (as opposed to the developer).

Check it out issue no. 7 of Weave: Journal of Library User Experience.

Copy of abstract

This article is intended to provide guidance on making library websites and other digital content accessible within the constraints of most organizations’ technological environments. Accessibility can mean different things depending on the context, but the focus in this article is on web accessibility, which the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines as “enabling people with disabilities to participate equally on the Web” (W3C, 2016). Many existing articles provide an overview of the big picture aspects of accessibility, including benefits to the organization, legislation, statistics , and general principles. The focus of this piece is on specific best practices and guidelines, as well as their benefits for content creators, who frequently have limited access to edit digital content and cannot always apply recommended solutions that assume full control and access.

Thank you

So glad this article is now published.

Article: A Practical Starter Guide on Developing Accessible Websites

After years of prepping and months of writing and editing, I finally published my first article!

The article is focused on accessibility and assumes that you are a web developer or can understand web development to at least an intermediate level. The idea was to fill a bit of a gap since so many accessibility guides focus on the most basic, usually content bits, and we wanted to go a step further.

Published July 18, 2017 in Issue 37 of the Code4Lib Journal, authored by myself and Michael Schofield: A Practical Starter Guide on Developing Accessible Websites.

Yay!

happy quokka

Learning to be a Systems Administrator for Horizon ILS

This is one of those presentations that never was, but I thought it would be interesting to write up anyway as a reflective piece. Interestingly, I didn’t find out that I would be the library’s ILS administrator until after I started the job. It didn’t really make any difference, and if anything, I was glad to be doing some of the operational work on the systems side. I have never actually been a systems librarian so I had a lot to learn and I have been grateful for the opportunity. Continue reading “Learning to be a Systems Administrator for Horizon ILS”

Reviewing and Improving Workflow and Productivity: Methods and Tools

Most of our libraries and organizations have been around for numerous years, sometimes hundreds. Often that means many processes are created, changed as needed, and left in place long past their due date. Unfortunately, that means we are frequently working inefficiently, following old processes or cobbled together workflows.

The first part of the presentation will suggest methods for understanding and reviewing workflow. In the second half, we will take a look at various simple and lightweight tools and ways to use them to make work more efficient, especially in processing text, files, and data in batches.

Originally titled Tools, Tips, and Tricks to Making Work More Efficient. This webinar was presented for Florida Library Webinars on March 8, 2017. https://floridalibrarywebinars.org/events/16003/ Continue reading “Reviewing and Improving Workflow and Productivity: Methods and Tools”

Adding Custom Reports to Horizon

I have been putting a lot of our reports into Horizon so that staff can take a look at them any time and do not need an intermediary. While not even SirsiDynix could help me put all of them in Horizon, I have a few in and I am adding more as I encounter them. Unfortunately, custom reports do not seem to be documented very well (or at least not that I could find, the one article I found did not make a lot of sense to me the first time I read it), so I figure I might as well post it online.
Continue reading “Adding Custom Reports to Horizon”

Tips and Error Fixing When Using the Save As DAISY Word Plugin

I’ve been using the Save As DAISY Word plugin a lot lately, and while the documentation is pretty good, there are some bugs and other things that pop up. Since the plugin is no longer under development, I thought I would document here some of the workarounds and ways to fix errors caused by existing bugs. Continue reading “Tips and Error Fixing When Using the Save As DAISY Word Plugin”

A Community Supported on Obsolete Technology

This was first posted on The Pastry Box Project on September 21, 2015 with the same name. I encourage you to go read it there, since lots of great articles are written on The Pastry Box. Re-posted here for my own archiving purposes. Continue reading “A Community Supported on Obsolete Technology”