Mike Buhmann, Toby Greenwalt, Mick Jacobsen, & Frances Roehm walk us through the online communities at Skokie Public Library
By Mike Buhmann, Toby Greenwalt, Mick Jacobsen, & Frances Roehm July 15, 2009
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Hyperlocalism in libraries is nothing new. Long before the Internet became a household word, libraries have served as community information networks, gathering, organizing, and distributing local community information as part of their core mission. As more and more of this hyperlocal activity is taking place online, libraries need to develop specific tools to create, collect, and provide access to these resources. Skokie Public Library (SPL), IL, has been doing just that since 1995 with SkokieNet.org, its Community Information Network. SkokieNet began as an information portal very much in the Yahoo! model, using an organized directory system to pull a curated set of resources together. GoSkokie, later rechristened SkokieTalk, emerged as a platform for community members to create and submit their own content, much in line with social networks like Facebook. With the switch to the open source Drupal CMS (content management system), the two sites were merged, and SkokieNet was reborn as a comprehensive source for community information and dialog. Items are still organized in a directory, but there's also now an increased focus on Google-like search. As specific needs develop—such as resources for job seekers or small businesses—we are able to spin off smaller “boutique sites” that focus relevant content in one place. In this way, SkokieNet also serves as our online community laboratory or incubator—a welcoming space with which we can identify and respond to our public's information needs. From static to CMS SkokieNet was first created using only basic HTML. This served the purpose of conveying simple text-based community information well enough, but the interactive elements of the site are enabled by the Drupal platform (drupal.org). They can be traced back to GoSkokie, a site developed in 2004 by six Northwestern graduate journalism students, with advice from their professor, Rich Gordon, and Jeff Jarvis, then with Advance.net (sponsor of the project). GoSkokie was designed as an interactive community network where individuals could log in and leave messages, pictures, and stories. When the class ended, the site was presented to the library to use and modify with the caveat that it had to be taken off Northwestern's server. The library was interested, but the board felt that content should be moderated before being posted. This presented a problem since the blogging software used on the site, Geeklog, did not allow the necessary level of moderation. We compared various blogging platforms and CMS's using the CMS Matrix web site (www.cmsmatrix.org) and decided that Drupal offered the best features: flexibility, levels of permission that fit well with our community needs, and an active community of developers that offers strong support. The issue of permissions was particularly important. Representatives from village organizations, parents of our teens, and other residents were concerned about the site becoming too much of a free-for-all. Drupal enabled us to create specific permissions for each type of user. For example, village agencies or partnering organizations are given permission to create, edit, and publish anything they submit. Work contributed by teens and anonymous users must be checked before publication. The moderation of anonymous comments is time-consuming since we are getting dozens of comments and stories each month. But it is well worth it. One commenter's posting to our health page was a request for information that could be helpful to her sister, who had cancer and lived in another state. Our reference librarians found a nearby library and several other resources for her and posted the reply next to her question on SkokieNet. When the Chicago Housing Authority opened up a lottery for housing units for the poor, we received over 5000 page visits in one day, and instant messaged, emailed, and printed off hundreds of pages of information. Up and running with Drupal Once we'd settled on Drupal, we had to transfer the content and functionality from the GoSkokie site. We set up a shared server with a Drupal site installed and employed a learn-as-you-go strategy in order to mold and paste the content into it. It took approximately one month to make the new site fully functional. Drupal turned out to be more than adequate. It allows changes to be made on the fly—permissions could be turned on and off, new looks (themes) tried, and blocks of content added to or removed from the site as needed. We changed the site name at this time to SkokieTalk to reflect the interactive community networking. Two years later, we faced another challenge when we decided to combine SkokieNet and SkokieTalk. The core of SkokieTalk was fitted into a framework that would allow the community information from SkokieNet to be added. The transfer of SkokieNet's ten years' worth of material took approximately six months. Thanks to Drupal's flexibility, though, all this was done while both sites were active and functional. Throughout its development, SkokieNet has taken cues from library director Carolyn Anthony, who is involved with many of the agencies, organizations, and events in the community. For any given Skokie initiative, the library is usually at the table. Since 1997, SkokieNet staff members have regularly tapped both an advisory board, made up of individuals representing important constituencies within the community, including the Chamber of Commerce, village government, human services, the community college, and others, as well as individuals and groups that are most knowledgeable on a given subject. For the Indian community web, for example, we worked with individuals representing several different perspectives: a longtime resident and owner of a Muslim bookstore, the founders of our Gandhi Memorial Foundation, and a member of another active group of East Indians, among others. When we decided to offer more user-submitted content, we created another group, the SkokieTalk Forum, to increase participation in SkokieNet, encouraging others to get involved and contribute articles, images, and video. All in a day's work Building on our librarians' community relationships and using the technology we've developed, SPL has also produced specialized stand-alone web sites such as ChicagoJobTalk and the Skokie Business Portal (SBP), which can easily be found by their separate URLs or via SkokieNet. While these sites have unique identities, they function interdependently with both SkokieNet and the main library web site, linking to each space when more information is needed. In turn, we can use RSS to make sure dynamic content—new books from the library catalog, local news from SkokieNet—is placed front and center on each portal. SBP (business.skokielibrary.info), unveiled in May 2009, brings together tools such as Yahoo! Pipes, screencasting, and Drupal to help small businesses succeed. With Yahoo! Pipes, we created a master RSS feed from multiple RSS newsfeeds (Google News, Crain's Chicago Business, Chicago Tribune, and a few more) filtered by the keywords “Illinois” and “business.” Using Camtasia Studio, we produced screencasts (stored on the library's Vimeo account) told from the perspective of a local pizzeria owner and a stationer who used library resources to drum up business. ChicagoJobTalk (also known as ChicagoJobs.org) has served Chicagoland job seekers and career changers since 1998. At that time, there were few job sites, particularly any that served the metropolitan Chicago area. Since then, sites such at Monster.com (1999) and Yahoo! HotJobs (2002) have flourished, but the larger sites' focus on datamining and the selling of a user's personal information only underscores the importance of having a library, without an agenda other than providing assistance, to post quality information and make it available 24/7. ChicagoJobTalk partners with the Skokie office of Jewish Vocational Service to answer posted questions promptly and completely and with a human voice. Questions are then archived and made available to all site visitors, along with helpful articles written by these area professionals. Not surprising given the current recession, January, March, and April have been the three most active months ever in terms of web site usage since we implemented Google Analytics in October 2007. Evolving with the community SkokieNet underwent a usability study in spring 2004. Participants were videotaped as they worked their way around the site in search of specific information. We were delighted to find that users “got it,” that this was a web site about all things Skokie, and that they didn't have any trouble navigating it. The only thing we changed after the study was the name of our resource for recent immigrants. Two of the participants were immigrants and didn't understand that the “New Americans” page was designed for them. In our effort to be welcoming, we had instead confused them. Since that time, we have proudly called this space the New Immigrants' Information Center. As with any community-defined space, the success of these sites depends on feedback from local users. Our SkokieTalk Forum members viewed the previous iteration of SkokieNet before it went live and helped keep it simple with suggestions about the placement of items and the wording. For example, they asked that we use the term communities instead of ethnic groups. Our responsiveness is reflected in the traffic each site receives. SkokieNet regularly gets more traffic than the standard library web site. We have viewers from as far away as southern Illinois and India who have made comments or posed questions. The most used pages are currently “Skokie Employers” and our childcare guide. And while the site has been up and running for less than three months, the Business Portal is already seeing a steady increase in page views. The real benchmark for SkokieNet and the related portals comes from user participation. We have over 350 registered users, many of whom routinely post stories and upload media. But registered users don't tell the whole story. A Holocaust survivor, now in her 80s, writes moving vignettes or snapshots about her life in longhand. A volunteer types up the story, then we edit and publish it for her. Regina Samelson has been writing these stories for us since 2006, and we have since connected her with the local schools so she can speak to them about growing up in war-torn Poland. This spring, Regina was among those honored at the opening ceremonies of the Illinois Holocaust Museum. On SkokieNet, our message is simple: “Join the Conversation,” and they do. More to come keeping up Ideas currently under consideration are a Testing Portal and a Do-It-Yourself Portal. The Testing Portal would be designed to highlight all of our test-preparation resources, from college entrance exams to the Cisco Network Associate certification. The Do-It-Yourself Portal would highlight car repair and home improvement, perennially popular with our patrons. While each of these portals will have its own look and feel, we can use one of several RSS plugins for Drupal to send and receive content from each site. In doing so, we can push important information to multiple resources simultaneously without sacrificing the specific mission of each portal. We use these features to broadcast announcements and stories on the SkokieNet Facebook page and Twitter account and take advantage of the conversations that ensue to generate new material for SkokieNet, or to drive traffic to relevant library resources. Our village has recently welcomed a number of new immigrant populations, making it more important than ever to provide quick access to accurate, necessary resources. There is also fresh competition, as many newspapers have launched hyperlocal resource portals (such as the Chicago Tribune's Triblocal.com) of their own. Rather than treating them like upstarts moving in on our established territory, we see this as a new opportunity for collaboration. Many of the same tools we use to direct content around our portals can also be used to send materials to (or extract from) these other gateways. As everyone else catches up to this concept of hyperlocalism, we are working to show just how valuable it is for all these resources to coexist.
| Author Information |
| Mike Buhmann (mbuhmann@skokielibrary.info) is Business Librarian and Career Specialist, Skokie Public Library (SPL), IL. Toby Greenwalt (tgreenwalt@skokielibrary.info; theanalogdivide on Twitter) is Virtual Services Coordinator, SPL; he also blogs occasionally at www.theanalogdivide.com. Mikael “Mick” Jacobsen (mjacobsen@skokielibrary.info; mickjacobsen on Twitter) is an Adult Services Librarian, SPL, and a guest blogger on tametheweb.com. Frances Roehm (froehm@skokielibrary.info) is SkokieNet Librarian, ChicagoJobTalk webmaster, and Community Liaison, SPL. She is also manager of the Illinois CLICKS! statewide portal and coauthor of The Guide to Internet Job Searching |
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