Reflecting on My Library Web Presence - It's Never Too Late to Start


The recent TL Cafe Webinar on Web Presence got me to thinking about my slippery slope to a web presence of late.
Early on in my tech career I chose to create an Electronic Portfolio because it seemed silly to print out paper colour copies of web pages I made for kids and teachers for lessons to put in a 3 ring binder with plastic page protectors. (and because there weren't any rules for it - since I was the first in my county and I could go my own way! Muuwhaaaaaa! )

Forget the java and the html!
Created in 1997 with Netscape Composer and posted to Angelfire because my county didn't have a web server yet, my first portfolio was pretty raw - just a list of links really. It's now a quarterly updated iWeb site that has pages for my academic, professional development links.



Fast forward 8 years and a lot of simple but functional hot link pages, web quests, directed Internet tasks, and a smugmug digital photo gallery later and I was inspired by a presentation by Francey Librarian of Gargoyles Loose in the Library about having a library blog at the 2005 AASL Pittsburgh conference.

Though slow to start my MHMS Library Media Blog has been a great communication piece with the kids and my community.




That same year I created my first Steam-Powered Prof Dev Ed Tech wiki and that really changed my life. With the ease of the read/write web no more did I have to fetch or FTP my code to an outside server. Immediate gratification and the ability to create and adjust web pages on the fly for kids, teachers, and the community made me an instant wiki convert. I made a lot of mistakes early on and it took me a while to go transparent and create my own professional blog, I still need to brand myself and my program but I really think it's vital to have a web presence out there for my kids and for my career.

and here's an early webpage of mine to giggle at
http://www.angelfire.com/md2/ntti2000/index.html

a collage of my web presence as it is today...(click for full size)



other libraries talked about how to create a web presence a early as 2000

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