Guidelines for Contributing to NYPL Labs
Purpose/Goal of this Blog
NYPL Labs provides a window into the overall digital experience of The New York Public Library. Our goal is to not just invent the digital future of the NYPL, but to blog it along the way. This site will document, comment on, and reveal our practices and processes as we start experimenting with new applications and interfaces.
Guidelines
These recommendations are meant to help bloggers/commenters create effective, pertinent, and respectful posts and comments. Bear in mind that this site is still a work in progress; we’re all learning together, and we all expect to make some mistakes along the way. We’ll all do our best to learn from every experience and make adjustments accordingly.
- Be respectful.
Contributors should refrain from spam, flaming, personal attacks, and hate/discriminitory speech. Posts or comments of this nature will not be tolerated and may be removed at the discretion of NYPL Labs. - Be responsible.
This site is available not only to the staff of NYPL, but also to members of the public. As such, contributors should respect the institution’s confidentiality and proprietary information.Bloggers should check facts, correct errors, and check spelling and grammar before posting. Please include links to any other sources you reference.We want to hear your opinions; we also want to create dialog. Try not to simply say “This sucks!” or “This is great!” Tell us why you think that! Be sure to back up your opinions with examples or explanation.
- Stay on topic.
Contributors should keep the purpose and content of this site in mind when they post to NYPL Labs. We welcome and heartily encourage new ideas, opinions, and news items; just stay more or less on topic!Additionally, comments should be relevant to the specific blog post they are attached to.
Seems like you started well by thinking to limit the number of rules and by thinking that rules might be too strong a concept. Groundswell’s 13 are way too many and complicated to keep in mind when you are trying to write a comment. Your first list was a good start and easy to remember. How about: Be respectful, responsible, relavant, accurate, truthful and brief?
(Did I ever tell you to color inside the lines?)
I just edited our guidelines in the following ways:
1. I changed the title to “Contributing” rather than “Blogging.”
2. I removed the links to other policies, so as to limit our own policy to the principles of “be nice or be deleted,” more or less.
I wanted to let you know about the web development services we have put together here in Eugene Oregon. Yourlibrarysite.com was recently launched to serve public libraries with cost-effective development services that are built on Drupal open source content management.
Yourlibraysite.com is an initiative built by CraftySpace, L.L.C., an Internet technology company focused on website and web application development services for education and professional organizations. Some time ago, the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System (MCLS.org), an association of 33 public libraries located in the greater Los Angeles area approached us to respond to their needs for a new site. Our proposal won the contract and we developed their current site, followed by sites for several of their member libraries. We learned a lot about the needs of public libraries and how to respond to those needs using Web 2.0 thinking and technology.
Yourlibrarysite.com encompasses what we learned working with MCLS. By standardizing our technical approach and tools; and by using Drupal, we believe we can provide public libraries with powerful websites at costs that rival in-house development. We have a subscription-based solution for small libraries with a very low cost of entry. These sites can be launched in under 30 days.
Anyway, we want to reach out to folks like you for feedback and hopefully approval of our approach. We also would like to offer our expertise in Drupal and web development to support your efforts working with libraries.
Please visit our website and let me know what you think. If there are any questions you have about Yourlibrarysite.com or any issues you have with Drupal where we can be supportive, feel free to contact me.
Paul Berger
YourLibrarySite.com
541 485-7220 Direct
877.878.1794 Toll-free
paul@yourlibrarysite.com