Liberty Project 2014 ~
The beginning phase of the Liberty project has been completed with needed equipment purchased and installed. The Mengle Foundation Grant funds have been utilized to implement this part of the project. Working with a number of libraries Liberty has written a collection development policy.
The content management system is being hosted and maintained at the Crawford County Federated Library System located in the Meadville Public Library by System Administrator John Brice and technology staff. Meadville has purchased, with Liberty funds, two servers one for production and a second to work as a backup. KOHA has been installed onto the servers. (KOHA is the most advanced open-source Integrated Library System in use today by thousands of libraries worldwide.) The content server and the KOHA catalog is available at http://catalog.paliberty.net. This is a demo website that was distributed to the Liberty core meeting group. Meadville has also setup a separate server for non-DRM content hosted by Liberty.
Currently in the catalog are 500 cleaned up MARC records from Project Gutenberg, and two local history content samples from Meadville. We are currently adding book covers for the 500 selected books and will begin downloading the eBook files into Liberty within the next couple of weeks.
A plugin was created for the KOHA catalog that allows Liberty to spotlight various eBook selections on the main catalog page. It displays the eBooks’ covers with links to them in the catalog. Liberty will have the ability to feature different rows with the title covers such as new arrivals, most popular, mysteries, etc. Pictures of each individual title will be uploaded and saved onto a server to prevent broken links from occurring.
Mantis software was set up that will be used to track issues and provide formal feedback. It is a project management software and is also a bug tracker. Issues will go into a holding queue to have records fixed or duplicates deleted. Once items are completed they will be marked as done. A blog has been set up to keep the core meeting group updated on the progress of the project.
The Liberty Committee found that the MARC records will need thoroughly reviewed even when we utilize free eBooks. It was decided at the June meeting to start hiring staff to coordinate and implement the project. A Project Manager has been identified to oversee the project.
A logo for the project has been created, a tag (slogan) was developed and bookmarks are being created.
Liberty Staffing ~ The Liberty Committee has been working hard to implement this project. It was decided at our last meeting in June that we needed a project manager. We are pleased to announce our first staff member is Tamra Herring, Liberty Project Manager.
Tamra Herring recently joined the Liberty project in August 2014. She has 28 years of customer service experience. Tamra provided support as well as leadership to customer service over the course of her career that began in 1999. In 2007, she was assigned to lead staff that were merged from two separate organizations providing customer support. She assisted in cross-training to continue support coverage for both projects’ customers. Tamra was responsible for customer training both one-on-one training and group sessions to teach the software capabilities. Another duty she provided was technical support for in-house data repositories and also later for authentication software. She was the liaison between developers and customers to trouble-shoot customer issues and to provide usable feedback to developers. Also, Tamra worked with management and developers to schedule routine maintenance and new feature roll-outs to assist in minimal customer impact, helping to identify potential errors which would minimize wide-spread problems. Since joining the project on August 23, 2014, our Project Manager Tamra Herring has been working on the following tasks:
- Attended Liberty project training provided by Meadville Public Library
- Added content and fine tuned the Liberty website — paliberty.net
- Loaded book cover content
- Established a Facebook page for the Liberty project
- Reviewed MARC systems both desktop and web-based
- Learned the cataloging process
- Compiled and reviewed Liberty documentation
- Began research on grants earmarked for possible application in 2014 and 2015
- Proofread grant applications and assisted in filing grants
- Created a transparent logo image
- Reviewed marketing projects and developed bookmarks
- Researched and reviewed other eBook projects