Month: August 2008

Categories
Tutorial

Add a search box to the State Library of Kansas Databases

Ever wanted to make a page devoted to resources external to your library? Resources such as the State Library of Kansas sponsored databases?

Oh you have, have you? Well funny you should ask… here’s how you do it!

  1. Log into the administration side of your site.
  2. Click Presentation
  3. Click Widgets
  4. Find an empty Text widget
    • If you don’t have a blank one, scroll down and increase the number of text widgets that are displaying, and click Save. Then use one of the new ones you’ll see in your “Available Widgets” box.
  5. Drag it up to one of your sidebars.
  6. Click the “Configure” box on the right end of the text widget you dragged up. A pop up will appear with a blank white area.
  7. Copy the following text and paste it into the box: 
    <form method="post" action="http://ksuc-agent.auto-graphics.com/homepages/customerwide/ValidateGlobalIP.asp?cuid=ksuc&amp;lid=kw9&amp;stfftype=Z&amp;defaultlang=english&amp;qmisc=&amp;s=ESS&amp;mode=S">&nbsp;<input name="term" type="text" size="18" />
<p></p>
<label>&nbsp;&nbsp;<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Go!" /></label>
  8. Click the X in the upper right corner.
  9. Click Save Changes (VERY IMPORTANT)

You will now have a SLK search box on your sidebar. Those of you a little more advanced with your HTML could paste this into a page and increase the size of the search bar area. The sky’s the limit!

Categories
Library News Tutorial

HOWTO: Integrating your Library’s KLOW site with an RSS Screen Saver

Today we have a guest post from Thatcher Rea from Basehor Library. Enjoy!

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Thatcher Rea
Technology Services Coordinator
Basehor Community Library

Hopefully your decision to use KLOW for your library website has been an incredibly enjoyable experience – Basehor Library’s move meant not only could we more quickly publish content to our website, we could have multiple librarians and staff authoring content as soon as it was ready, instead of waiting for a webmaster to massage and publish the content.

The use of KLOW brings a number of really helpful and interesting features – one of which is RSS. If you’re not familiar with this feature, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is quickly becoming the preferred method of keeping up to date with other web sites in an automated fashion, without visiting the website from which the content originated.

Users of KLOW will also have the added benefit of being able to create specific categories, and then use RSS feeds from those categories specifically (Which KLOW does for you automatically). Combine this with a freely available RSS Screen Saver and you now have a simple, yet powerful tool for prominently displaying information in your library. Update the website, and your information is automatically updated and displayed without any further effort on your part.

This sounds great you may ask, but what would we use it for? By being able to subscribe to an RSS feed for a specific category within your KLOW site means you can use this approach for a variety of different uses. For example:

  • Displaying helpful tips on your public access computers for patrons at your library
  • Display upcoming events on a public computer marquee
  • Any other creative uses – the sky is the limit!

One such product that we at Basehor have used is by NuParadigm – there are other free RSS Screen Savers out there, and you may find one that you like better, but so far this one has worked out well for us.

Click below to see how!

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