LISNews: Librarian News

LISNews started on this day in 1999. LISNews has been through 4 web servers, and 4 different content management systems. LISNews remains an interesting place to read and discuss issues thanks to all the many people who work to keep the site going.

Every year I do my best to thank everyone who works hard to make LISNews. People Like Stephen Michael Kellat who does the podcast. Everyone who has submitted stories over the years, Lee Hadden, Bob Cox, Charles Davis, Gary Price, Steven Fessenamiar.

All the LISNews authors who've come and gone like Steven M. Cohen, Rochelle Hartman, Ieleene and many others. The current authors like Birdie, Bibliofuture, Great Western Dragon and everyone else who posts stories I'd never find. More authors make this site better. More collaboration, more cooperation, and more involvement from more people can only help make LISNews stronger. They bring diversity, breadth, and depth. There must be a nice slogan there somewhere. -- Read More

MaintainIT Has Cooked Up Something Special for You!
We're so excited about the new MaintainIT Cookbook, "Planning for Success"! Full of no fuss recipes for technology success, quick, easy and tested by our librarian chefs around the country. And best of all, like all of the other MaintainIT materials, it is FREE. Join us for a 20-minute introduction (3 different time slots) to hear about the exciting new content! Brenda and Stephanie will share 20 Samples in 20 Minutes—it'll be like Iron Chef on fast forward. -- Read More

Join us for these free webinars. Attend this session from your library, no travel needed!

At the MaintainIT Project (www.maintainitproject.org), we interview hundreds of librarians about how they maintain, support, and sustain their public computers. We then publish all of their experiences, successes, and challenges in FREE guides called Cookbooks, so librarians can learn from the experiences of others who’ve done it before them. The best part? Everything the MaintainIT Project does is FREE (thanks to a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant), and everything is on www.maintainitproject.org . We also produce free webinars every month!

Sept. 30th Cookbook Book Club: How Much Help Should You Provide Patrons With Laptops?
When: 09/30/2008 9:00am - 10:00am Pacific
Where: Register on MaintainIT's webinar space. https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/schedule/display.do?rfe=1aboa5dakke0&udc=1sjlixarncf42 Download and read the Cookbook chapter (pdf) here: http://www.maintainitproject.org/files/CB2_Meal%20Plan%20Three.pdf
This month Brenda Hough will lead a lively discussion where you can share ideas, feedback, and ask questions about providing help and support to patrons using laptops. Find out how other libraries have handled troubleshooting, security, parking lot surfers, space issues and more!

Oct. 8th Train-the-Trainer: The Power of Stories in Technology Training
When: 10/08/2008 11:00am - 12:00pm Pacific -- Read More

LISNews has been running on Drupal for about a year now. Before that we ran on Slashcode for a few years, before that it was PHPSlash for a couple years, and even before that I did it all by hand. If you run (or read) blogs you know comment spam is a big problem. If all you do is run or read a blog you actually have NO idea just how bad it really is. I'd estimate about 80% of all POST requests to all the LISHosted sites are spammers. When I have LISNews on the LISHost servers I worked hard at fine tuning the mod_security rules to combat spam.

Within hours of moving to Ibiblio I could see they have very different rules, and I'd need to do something else. I'm actually surprised just how good my rules were working. So I turned on CAPTCHAs. I tried some images, reCAPTCHA, Math, and finally the basic text CAPTCHAs to fight spam. They also worked. A few weeks ago I got a complaint that the CAPTCHAs were getting in the way. This wasn't the first time, so I thought I'd try something new, I turned to Mollom.

I was shocked that within a day the number of comments went up. It's been a few weeks now, and I continue to be shocked at the number of comments we're seeing. Mollom is doing a decent job blocking spam, but more importantly it's letting more people comment. The bad guys are kept out (for the most part) and the good guys have a very low hurtle to get over. (Or at least I think so. If the current trend holds, then I'll be convinced that it is indeed Mollom and not just a coincidence). Two charts that illustrate what I'm seeing on this end -- Read More