Progressive Librarians Guild
PROGRESSIVE
LIBRARIANS GUILD
radical views on library & info issues

About the site

Site's features, updates and other clues for navigation

 

On May, 2017, PLG renovated its website to reflect new times, new users, new media, and the new uses of information... With the launch of this, the third incarnation of PLG's website, we thank Edgardo Civallero, and extend deepest thanks to Susan Maret and Sarah Henriksson who for the last years dedicated time, energy, and expertise to the building and tending of its second incarnation, as did Rory Litwin to PLG's first website. The work of coding and maintaining PLG's website has always been a labor of love, and that chain of commitment and creativity continues!

The general structure is presented in the site map, and a search by subject is available in the site index.

The picture used for the header was adapted from "Flying books". The ones illustrating the different pages of the website, on the other hand, are pieces of street art [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] and small fragments of Progressive Librarian's past covers.

This website complies uses valid HTML5 and CSS3, and is best viewed with web standards-compliant browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera.

A number of .pdf files are included in this site (Progressive Librarian journal and other documents). To read them, you will need a .pdf viewer program such as Adobe Reader, which is free to download.

Updates to this site are made on a regular basis. You can check the news at the home page or the news section, or subscribe to the news feed or to the PLGNET-L email discussion list to stay informed of important updates.

PLG contact information (including the webmaster's) is on the contact page.

 

From the webmaster

The revision and renovation of PLG's website, developed during the last months of 2016 and the first ones of 2017, was not a simple task. Many aspects were considered regarding design and contents, goals and priorities.

Once pre-formatted solutions (e.g. popular options as Bootstrap) were considered and discarded, a simple-coded, visually spacey layout was built, tailored to answer PLG's needs. The code was kept clean (html5, css3), as it was the design.

Contents were checked once and again; some were discarded, other were cleaned and adapted; most of them however, were left untouched, since they are true archival documents. Links were updated or changed whenever possible, and the format for each page was kept as homogeneous as possible. An "error 404" page was added, as well as a very necessary FAQ list, an updated RSS feed, an "en español" section for Spanish-speaking colleagues, and a number of documents regarding PLG's goals and activities.

The archive of Progressive Librarian issues, probably the most valuable part of this website, was totally re-formatted. Each issue's .pdf file was divided into individual articles, and all of them were OCR-ed; basic metadata were added, and the tables of contents were corrected and updated.

These were just some of the actions taken during this first stage. Because it was just a first step, indeed. Ahead there is still a lot of work to do: creating new contents, developing a social media strategy, recovering PLG-related articles hosted in external places/servers and adding them to our own archive, building a number of indexes to help the meaningful organization of our documents, adding metadata and labels to make contents semantically relevant, making the website more accessible and responsive (especially for visitors using small-screen devices), and a long, and exciting, and a little bit dizzying, etcetera.

It is a pleasure to be a link of the chain of webmasters that made this virtual space possible. As the ones before me did, I'll try to do my best.

Edgardo Civallero