We have all heard this warning. You may have heard it just now for the first time, but you are sure to hear it again. And in fact, there is some truth to it. If you use Dreamweaver’s visual editor, it will write HTML its way. Often the result can be strangely indented code blocks or text on the wrong side of a tag.

Today I am going to give a few pointers on making Dreamweaver obey your commands without biting you (ambiguity intended.) I use Dreamweaver for 90% of my page and CSS editing. I have used it for nine years, and I can say it is reliable if used properly. Here is what works for me:

1. Start seeing code. If you don’t want Dreamweaver to put odd bits into your html, you need to be able to see the html. The first thing you should do when you open a file in Dreamweaver is select the split view:

View menu -> Code and Design

You get a visual preview at the bottom of your screen, and a nice, pure code pane on the top. Dreamweaver shows how smart and nice it is by remembering your view preferences for each file.

2. Edit the code, not the output. When you edit the code, you will not see changes in Design View until you refresh. Hit the F5 key to refresh. But before you type, edit, or delete anything, make sure the code pane is active. Not sure? If you have line numbers turned on, the left margin turns blue when the pane is active. But if you want to be sure, just click on the code pane before editing. I have gotten in the habit of clicking the scroll bar rather than the code itself. You’ll see why in a moment…

3. Make selections visually, edit textually. The Design View helps you navigate your document. This is one of the biggest time savers in Dreamweaver. You don’t have to pick through all those nested div tags (or worse, tables.) Go to the Design pane, and click the thing you want to edit. The tags representing this item are highlighted in the code. Now click on the scroll bar up in the code view, and you are ready to edit what you clicked. If you click the text of the code it will place the cursor where you clicked, and lose your selection. If you click the scroll bar, it keeps your selection.

4. Nesting instinct. One of the most tedious tasks in html editing is finding the proper start and end tags of nested containers. Even free of tables, a complex layout of divs can be confusing. Again, click inside an object in the Design View. At the bottom of the pane you will get a breadcrumb trail like this:

<div.pageNavColumn> <ul.leftCol> <li> <a>

You can read this right to left, from inner to outer container. This means you clicked on an anchor tag inside a list item inside an unordered list which is nestled in a div. Plus it tells you what class is applied to each element. To top it off, you can click any of these nested items to select it. And yes, if you then click on the scrollbar on the Code Pane, the html code representing the same element remains selected for you.

5. Make some personal space. Dreamweaver can seem cluttered, with palettes and toolbars crowding in from all sides. If all you are doing is typing code, you can make room by hiding all that extra stuff with a touch of your F4 key. Or:

View -> Hide Panels

Hit F4 again to bring it all back.

Now Dreamweaver is tame and docile. You can enjoy its many nice features, such as code completion as you type, a robust, multi-file find and replace, instant browser preview (F12), and of course, that contented purring sound it makes when happy. Or maybe only I can hear that.

We are definitely keeping an eye on RDA, but so far there has been nothing that is, as we say, machine-actionable, so being ready has mostly involved monitoring the progress of the Joint Steering Committee.

At the moment, the timeline for RDA’s emergence as an accepted standard seems somewhat in doubt, given the Library of Congress’s recent call to suspend all work on RDA until the business requirements for proceeding can be articulated and large-scale testing of FRBR can be carried out with real data.

Diane Hillmann (from Cornell University) met with AVIAC (Automation Vendors Information Advisory Committee) at ALA in June to talk with vendors about what RDA might involve for us.  We had an interesting discussion about the ways in which vendors have used the MARC format to transmit information beyond bibliographic description embedding invoice and order information, item record and holdings information, and other local uses that leverage 9xx fields and other parts of the MARC record.  Diane assured us that RDA would have extensible sections for vendor use, and I am now working with Diane and some other vendors to try to capture some of the ways in which we have used MARC that might need to make it into RDA.

Diane also indicated that a preliminary data sample might be ready as early as August 2008 (that’s this month!) so I am looking forward to seeing what there is to see.

For more information about RDA:

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/jsc/rda.html

The enthusiasm of the library staff made our kickoff stimulating. Being on the road a lot can be very wearying—but I get an instant energy burst with a group like this: energetic, enthusiastic, and asking good questions to move their Encore implementation forward very quickly and successfully.

At the end of the session, I was very pleased to hear that they were ready to go live immediately with Encore. Quinnipiac University was live with Encore while I was still in the plane flying home. The whole operation took just two hours. Academic Systems Librarian Terry Ballard had the HTML in place to put Encore forward as their default keyword search as soon as he got the okay. (Did you know that the Encore search screen is just an HTML form that you can embed where you would like? Library homepage, WebPAC Pro front page, or wherever best fits your library’s needs!) Terry told me, “the installation was quick, and our staff were absolutely thrilled with the implementation.”

Although install times do vary, Encore Services strives to bring a “no fuss” installation to your library. All you need is your network information, a logo, and a webpage to put the search box in and it’s done. Members of the Encore Services, such as me, finish each launch event with an on-site presentation to staff. No training required! Just contact Encore Services for more information on the kickoff process and the suite of services we provide. More from the road soon!

http://csdirect.iii.com/documentation/cir/weblogs.shtm (password required)

Many people here at Innovative worked hard to make this a useful feature for analyzing visitor traffic to your catalogs. What I have tried to do is write an introduction to this feature, just to help people get over the initial learning curve. I would also like to thank the libraries that invested hours or days of time trying out the procedures. You have helped make the process easier for everybody!

I would love to hear how you are using your web access logs and I invite you to post your comments here. I also expect people to find new features within log analysis. If you want to share what you discover, we have a new for you WebPAC Wiki (password required).

Until later…

Then, in early July, Jerry Kline and I made a visit to Scottsdale, Arizona, (see picture below) where Aimee Fifarek had been kind enough to arrange for the temperature to be under 110 degrees especially for me!  (July is often one of the colder months of the year in San Francisco, so you can imagine the shock to one’s metabolism when it’s suddenly 50 degrees warmer!)  Our visit was to launch a development partnership with the Scottsdale Public Library, one of seven development-partner libraries helping Innovative build a new digital library solution called Content Pro.

L to r: Aimee Fifarek, Technologies & Content Manager; Richard Howley, Lead Cataloging Librarian; Rice Majors, Content Pro Product Manager; Kathy Schoepe, Technology Coordinator; Rita Hamilton, Library Director; Jerry Kline, Innovative’s Chairman and CEO; and Leigh Conrad, Lead Librarian in the Scottsdale Room.

We had an enthusiastic response to the demonstration we gave of the Content Pro system and it sparked a lively brainstorming session among the library managers and their Content Pro team as to the possibilities that this could open for them to engage their community in capturing and describing their local history.

June brought me to my very first ALA conference, which came as something of a surprise even to me! I had a terrific conference experience in all, from getting a chance to see so many of the library staff members that I speak to by phone and email so often to getting to show a brand-new product (Content Pro) in the Innovative booth. I even got my photograph taken with Thomas Leonhardt from St. Edward’s University in Texas (left) when he was signing on to become a development partner for Content Pro!

In other ALA news, I attended the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) FRBR Interest Group, where Rich Greene from OCLC announced that due to shifting job responsibilities it would be appropriate for him to step down as Chair. I found my hand raising itself when a volunteer was sought to be the Chair for the remainder of Rich’s term, and thus I’m now the Chair until ALA 2009, when the new Chair-Elect will take my place!

The power outages I’ve been experiencing for the last week at my office in New England are nothing, I know, compared to what our libraries have gone through in the Midwest; but they do bring on a new appreciation of how dependent we are on the niceties of life – like - electricity!

No laptop, no monitor, no fax, no printer, no desk phone when the reserve battery dies, no fans, no cell phone when the local tower is hit by lightning, no…. You get the idea, back to paper and pen.

I watched an old favorite movie the other night when I did have power, Faulkner’s The Long, Hot Summer with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward (she went to high school with my neighbor Jean!), and the fabulous Orson Welles. Talk about heat, humidity, and no air conditioning! Dramatically, speaking, of course. Wonder if Faulkner was high tech and used a typewriter….

Please know that we at Innovative are thinking of our librarian colleagues and that we stand ready to support you during tough times. Let us help you develop a disaster plan for your system. Call us. Let us know what you need.

I hear thunder. Here we go again.

We hope you enjoy this presentation, Trends from the Front Lines of Change, which will give you a taste of what’s coming next in the online world.

This is our first narrated presentation, so please do let us know how you like it.

You’ve just experienced a common ailment called the blog lull, familiar to many as a symptom of life getting very busy for that blogger. In this case our lull was a result of the preparation for and multitude of questions subsequent to the annual Innovative Users Group conference. We had a great time getting to talk with librarians and hear what everyone’s been working on and wants to see us working on next. Now that we’ve begun to surface from the post-conference piles of email you can expect to see more happening here on the blog again.

Back before the IUG conference though, were two interesting ones I attended in March: South By Southwest Interactive and NISO Discovery. In a separate post, I’ll bring you the technology trends highlights from SXSW, but first I want to talk a bit about the Discovery ‘08 conference.

I was very impressed by how much was fit into this two-day forum. The title was “Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards” and the speakers covered a good overview from that central point about what’s happening with discovery tools and where they impact information standards.

Here are a few highlights to give you a taste of this fascinating meeting of the minds.

Richard Ackerman of NRC CISTI delighted me by bringing Ranganathan into the API world with his principles “Every web resource its machine reader” and “Save the time of the machine”. One thing about next generation interfaces is the whole user category of non-humans they may integrate or interact with.

The potential for exposing more metadata from datasets within documents was raised by Robert J. Sandusky of University of Illinois in Chicago in his discussion of deep indexing of tables and figures. This is a level of granularity below the usual focus of libraries, but certainly one of interest to patrons in many academic and business contexts.

There was a nice concise overview of the next generation catalog landscape from Peter Murray of OhioLINK. Interestingly he chose one of our non-Millennium systems for his Encore examples which was fun to see presented by someone other than me.

There were many more sessions and great conversation over lunch. I definitely recommend this conference to others with a keen interest in the intersection of metadata, standards, and technology.

And I’ll close with a great quote from John Dove of Credo Reference which reminded us of how accustomed we can become to our special vocabulary to the point where we’re out of sync with what will help our users take advantage of the tools we provide: “I no longer use the word database because my wife doesn’t use it.”