It's a great Monday ~ no posting last week due to the libraries being closed.

On the website front, we are working a lot on the internals - technical work that still needs to be accomplished and taking the website to staff for them to discover and interact with the site. I am so very pleased to report that the feedback has been so positive! Staff are interested, are setting up accounts and are posting their reviews on library materials! Wow - it is so intriguing to see what is being posted to the site - I hope you will be as interested as I am when it opens to you - the public - as well! (ps the image is a book cover of From Slave Ship to Freedom Road that I just posted to the new site.)

Progress!

Progress is hearing the sound of the school bus running again after the winter break....

Progress is not seeing the dust on top of the refrigerator, even if you had to get the step stool to reach in the first place.....

Progress is marking off "to-do" items from the website list and that is continuing on an ongoing basis. We made considerable progress in the mystery of "why won't some records import?" - and we think it has to do with accents and other such characters added to letters which somehow became a dam and prevented import. Now that we've got that working, many more records are now in our website. Whew - it did not help when the illustrator of the Harry Potter books became the "stop" because of her name!

On another front, we are updating information on sites such as Librarything Local and even our Google maps presence in order to be in the places where users might anticipate finding us. Should you see Arapahoe Library District in the virtual world with incorrect information, please post the link to this blog - your help is much appreciated!

Happy New Year of the Tiger!

For those of you who follow the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. In our extended family, we celebrate together with special foods (for luck and for health, of course!) and we find out which family members celebrate their "year."

The latest work on the website has been to prioritize our list of to do's. Part of this is based on the input received from our management team and part of it has been an internal list we've been keeping. In getting more organized we are moving away from our multi-tabbed spreadsheet to our internal ticketing system for better process and flow. We still have a number of known issues we are working on and ask for your patience as we continue to work through these. Continue to check the blog and/or the website for the announcement of our beta launch. The website will be previewed for staff during January.

In the meantime, health and happiness to you in the Year of the Tiger.