Week of April 7, 2008-GOOD NEW/BAD NEWS

This week the Board of Trustees meet on Tuesday and discussed budget matters. It seems that the tax money which is the library's main income will be delayed due to tax problems at the county and state levels. The money usually comes in June as is now not expected until August or after. This is going to put a real crunch on the library as we will not be able to order books or videos or anything that isn't absolutely necessary until after the money comes in. It is going to be tough going this summer without new books and videos to please the patrons. But a great fall as we will have to make up for the shortages in those areas before the end of the year.

We have also found out that for a reason we don't know the state has cut our budget by $10,000. We are planning to appeal or at least ask why this happened.

On the good new side, the color printer which we thought was going to cost us $643 to repair only cost $125. A new part was not required after all. A small piece of paper got stuck in an area that is all but inaccessible. The technician was able to find it and remove it and the printer is working great. THANK YOU, FATES!!!

The computers have been busy this week. With the weather being better, people are getting out and coming to the library.

I have been working on a new big addition to the library's website. I am hoping to have it up and running come May or June. Look for it. It is called KID CLICK-EVERYTHING FOR KIDS AT THE ROANOKE PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Celia’s Twelfth Blog for Library Systems Class—Francis Ford Coppola is SAFE.

I have found going through the wiki process that things I thought would be easy really aren't. I could never get my computer to print screen or to get it to copy parts of pages which I have been able to do with other computers but for some reason not my laptop. Since I wanted to show different page parts and this wouldn't work I used my flip camera and took pictures of the page I wanted to show. This wasn't a perfect solution but at least I was able to give the user of the wiki an idea of what they should be looking at. I took on the project of writing my group's help page of the wiki so showing examples was useful and in some cases I believe necessary.

At out last wiki group meeting I took a video of Megan using the wiki as part of the training for the wiki. I thought this would be easy to add to the wiki. I was wrong again. First I had to edit the tape as at one point Megan stopped and started again. So I had to make two videos out of it, the first video ending where she started the part she repeated and the second starting where she restarted that part. It amazingly came together quite well. I then proceeded with downloading the video to YouTube. There is a feature in the flip camera software that allows for this fairly easily. At first, I kept getting an error message that it wouldn't transfer. I finally got one to transfer but when I checked it, it didn't work constantly. I ended up taking my laptop to the library and having one the patrons who knows more about YouTube help me. He figured out that the inconsistency was caused by there being to videos downloaded. He figured out that the bad one had to be eliminated for it to work correctly. So he eliminated what he thought was the bad one but it ended up he deleted the good one. I would then have to start over with downloading the videos to YouTube. The filtering in my library prevented me from doing it at the library so I went home and again downloaded the video to YouTube after first deleting the bad one that was still there. They download seemed to go well but I couldn't get the video to play from the wiki. I thus went back to the wiki and eliminated the link that was there and made a new one to the new working video. Now at last I think the video is working and working consistently.

After we made the training video more pages were added to the wiki. I am worried that this might cause some confusion but do not want to redo the video. The video still highlights the main points of the wiki. I was surprised when today I got an email from a library praising the video as one of the best they had seen explaining a wiki. I hope that everyone else feels that too!!