InfoSoup Development Blog

We have been working hard on preparing our new BookLetters subscription for public consumption. BookLetters are "annotated lists of new or noteworthy books covering a wide variety of subjects and genres." Most are updated monthly and you can subscribe to them to have them delivered to you via email or RSS feed. Take a look at the BookLetters page to see what is currently available. BookLetters also provides lists of award winning books. We have an adult Award Winners page and an Award Winners for Kids page. We have plans for an Award Winning Books for Teens page as well, but it's not quite ready for prime time. (NOTE: some of the headers/navigation on the BookLetters pages don't match, but we're working on it!)

Prepping the BookLetters info fed into a bigger idea for a Readers' page and a much better version of a Kids page, now called Family Page. We wanted to pull together info from the catalog, BookLetters, InfoSoup booklists and some outside resources to make pages that would be interesting, timely, and helpful for our patrons. Evan spent a good deal of time reviewing relevant sites for these pages based on the guidelines we presented earlier this week, so these pages will show you more tangible examples of what we were describing in the guidelines. Even though a good deal of work has been put into these pages, we are hoping that you will have feedback on what you like, don't like, sites that we could consider adding (or removing), etc. We're very excited about them and are happy to be posting them for your comments.

Headers that have an * by them are looking for good names if anyone has a great idea! And overall site navigation on all of these pages will be tweaked once we know what will stay, go or change.

Also, we are working on a Teens page and hope to create a Movies page, a Music page and possibly an Audiobooks page based on the models above.

We look forward to hearing what you think.
Thanks!
Beth and Evan

As promised, we have drafted a Teens page following the design of the Readers' and Family pages already discussed. Please take a look and post your comments and/or questions. Thanks, Beth and Evan

For some time now we have been thinking about and working on a Local History page for InfoSoup. We hope this will be a good way to highlight and promote new digital collections, local history websites and indexes from InfoSoup libraries, local history materials in InfoSoup, and our two genealogy database subscriptions. Again, as with the Readers' Page and Family Page, we wanted to focus on our libraries' locally developed resources, what's available in InfoSoup, along with a very limited list of well-established web resources.

We have two pages for you to look at. Local History @ Your Library focuses on material in InfoSoup libraries and online indexes to library materials. Digital Collections focuses on full-text and image resources from InfoSoup libraries and other statewide digital projects.

On the local history page I (Evan) did my best to identify libraries that had appropriate local history web sites and libraries that had census records on Microfilm. Please let me know if I missed someone. We will also be working with technical services to make sure that appropriate online resources linked to from these pages are then cataloged in InfoSoup.

Please take a look at the new pages and add your comments & questions here by Friday, June 15th. Thanks!
Evan & Beth

At the last AAC meeting, I shared one of my insomnia projects - an interactive map of InfoSoup library locations. I realized today that I never posted it here for others to see! So here it is. It's linked to on the Libraries page on InfoSoup. At the AAC meeting, someone asked if they could link to it from their library's web site, and the answer was yes! Feel free to link to and use however you like. And if you see anything that needs to be fixed or changed, just let me know.

Thanks,
Beth