Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Concepts key to our future web efforts

Just so you know where my mind is as we look forward to redeveloping our website on the Drupal platform... I have some key concepts that I'd like to manifest:
  • portability and modularity of the resources we develop for the web
  • support for linked data, the Semantic web, use of RDFa - we should concentrate on publishing out our unique resources in a way that others can take advantage of them more easily, mash them up, add value to them, gain meaning by relating what we've created to other bits of information
  • community creation - the library is often the heart of a community, be it a community of people who live in a specific geographic area, who are part of a specific academic institution, or people who have interest in specific areas. We've identified some of the "communities"/user types we serve, now we have to facilitate not only the conversation with them but also amongst them
One of the things I've been thinking about is a sort of base level market analysis. What is it that our organization does & who else offers these services & resources (who are our "competitors")? What makes us unique/distinguishes our work? (if there is no value added in what we do - if we're just repeating the work that others have done in the same ways they've done it, why bother?) We don't have enough staff and $ to cover every bit of ground, we just need to be the absolute best we can be at what we do that is unique... that's where we build from.

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