Category: Technology

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”