Happy 2007! The ACRLog team hopes this year will be a better one for all of us. To get things off to a good start we have a new look and some new features for ACRLog readers that we hope will improve this blog and give you a better reading experience.
We’ve moved to a three-column layout that will enable us to offer some additional features. In the new left column you will find short lists of recent posts, recent comments and recent trackbacks. This should make it easier to quickly review what’s been added to the blog in the last few days, and to discover who commented and what they had to say.
In our recent survey we noticed some comments that indicated we needed to make it easier to participate in ACRLog, particularly as a guest poster. In response we added a new section called “Send Us a Tip”. Academic librarians can use a new form to submit an idea for a post or to share some news about anything that could be of interest to academic librarians. We do need to know who you are so we can contact you about your idea or tip, but we can certainly consider requests for anonymity in posts.
Our other new feature, found in the left column, is an event calendar. In our recent survey about half of you suggested that we offer more posts about ACRL events – and events of interest to academic librarians. The other half urged us to avoid turning ACRLog into a series of promotions for ACRL and other library events. We hope our solution satisfies all of you. The calendar will feature links to ACRL and other events of interest to academic librarians. We hope this will enable ACRLog to be a source of information about upcoming events such as workshops, conferences, and other continuing professional development programs, without taking away from your already limited time for blog reading.
You may notice there are still a few rough edges to this new version. We’ll be smoothing those out over the next few weeks, as well as implementing another new feature or two. We are open to your ideas for new features as well. Do let us know if you are aware of a blog feature you’ve seen elsewhere that may help to improve ACRLog. Please also provide us with your feedback using the comment form. During December we suffered from spam attacks that required us to occasionally turn off comments. However, both ACRL and the ACRLog team remain committed to allowing comments at this blog, and we will do all that we can to continue to invite you to share your thoughts and ideas in response to our posts. For us and our readers, that is a critical part of ACRLog.
The ACRLog team wishes to thank three individuals who helped to make ACRLog V.2 possible. Many thanks to Olivia Hodges and Dawn Mueller, our colleagues at ACRL, for using their design skills to develop and implement our improved blog. We also thank Kevin Clarke, our own ACRLog team member and technical expert, for his assistance in the transition from V.1 to V.2.
We look forward to continuing to improve ACRLog – and making it one of your “A-List” blogs in 2007.
I like the new look, but the one thing we seem to have lost is the name of the author of individual posts. Any way to get that back?
Scott – well I said there were still a few rough edges. thanks for picking up on this one. we will check that out to see if we can restore it.
I don’t know whether this is a change, but ACRLog is now one of those !*#()% unprintable blogs–that is, I can’t just print out a lengthy post, at least not in Firefox. You’re in good company, to be sure.
The comments RSS feed doesn’t seem to be working quite right any more…
The title for each post (the HTML title, that is) is not showing up anymore, which makes posting stuff to social bookmarking tools really annoying, plus, if you have multiple tabs open, it just shows a URL for the tab header, making it harder to ascertain which tab is which.
The time stamp for comments is also way off. Little by little, it will iron out, I’m sure!
Hi
Perhaps until the name of the individual poster comes up “automatically” the posters could add their names as part of the post? It is useful to know who has said what.
Thanks for all the posts and happy new year from the UK!