Just to let everyone know that there will be a poster session on Five Weeks to a Social Library at the ASIST 2007 conference this October in Milwaukee.

I must say, I'm quite chuffed!

Specifically for content contributors:

I would like to encourage all of you to consider depositing the wonderful content created for Five Weeks to a Social Library into E-LIS, which bills itself as "the open archive for Library and Information Science." I am assured that the underlying software can handle audio and video objects.

As many of you know, my work places me in the middle of the Open Access movement. While hardcore OA is focused on the peer-reviewed research literature, I take a broader view; I believe it is vital that we disseminate openly and take due care of all our hard work.

Hearty congratulations to Five Weeks contributors who are Library Journal Movers and Shakers for 2007!

• Amanda Etches-Johnson (organizing committee)
• Helene Blowers (content contributor)
• Kelly Czarnecki (content contributor)
• Beth Evans (content contributor)

And it is of course worth mentioning at this point that we have other Movers and Shakers among us: Meredith Farkas (2006), Tom Peters (2005?), Matt Gullett (2006), and very likely others I'm not immediately recalling. (Identify yourself in the comments, and I'll add you!)

Some of you have reported problems logging in this week. There is a simple fix for this: Simply go into you internet browser and delete your cookies and history. That seems to be working, but if your problems persist, please let us know.

I just had a report from a participant that the Lundeen screencast on blip.tv didn't want to work properly in Internet Explorer. The same participant had it open and play normally on Firefox, so if you're having similar difficulties, see if a different browser solves them.

As always, ping one of us via IM or email if problems persist, and we'll do our best to get you running. 

I am absolutely blown away by the level of dialogue and participation that has taken place on the blogs so far! You're making really valuable insights and, by sharing them with others, you are helping your fellow participants to come to their own conclusions. I am thrilled to see the learning process going on here.

I just want to remind everyone of certain course requirements:

1. You should write at least one blog post per week.
2. You should do the activities listed for that week.
3. You should attend at least one of the two live Webcasts each week (note: there is only one Webcast for Week 3). While you can access the archived presentation later on, if you do not attend, you will miss out on an important opportunity for discussion. Also, these presenters are taking time out of their schedules to share their expertise with you; it would be awful if no one showed up!
4. You should attend your weekly chat group session.
5. You should watch the screencasts and listen to the podcasts created for the course.

Other things that aren't required, but we hope you will do as well:

This post is in response to Jini's questions about how to format text in Drupal; particularly, how to create a link.

We installed a WYSIWYG (rich-text) editor to make it easier for you to do these things without needing to know any HTML. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get and it basically means that rather than typing in HTML, you can just click a button for format your text... sort of like with Microsoft Word or Adobe Dreamweaver.

This image will show you what some of the key formatting buttons are (I figured you already know how to center things, make them bold, create bulleted or numbered lists, etc. so I didn't identify those). If you are linking to something, it would be wise to use the linking tool rather than just pasting the link so that people can click on it. Otherwise, they'd have to copy and paste the link into their browser toolbar.

For those of you who weren't able to make Nanette Donohue's excellent talk yesterday, the archived presentation is available online. Once we have a Webcast arcihved, the links to it will be provided on the page for that Week. So in this case, the presentation is available on the Week 1 page.

There were a few glitches in the audio due to trouble with the Internet connection at Nanette's place of work (so expect a few silences in the recording), but this ended up being a great presentation that will offer you a lot of food for thought. Nanette really got into a lot of the practical issues many of you have been asking about like what to write about, how to get your colleagues involved, how to deal with comments, how to avoid blog fatigue, etc. She runs three (yes, three!) blogs at her library, so she's really dealt with many of these practical issues.

In addition to the weekly live Webcasts and the group chats, many of our presenters of screencasts and podcasts have been kind enough to make themselves available to you for an hour for a discussion of their presentation and to answer any questions you might have. The schedule of the chats is here on the wiki and the chats will take place in the Drupal chat room.. Presenters for future weeks may add chat times in the next days or weeks, so keep an eye on this page to see what opportunities for discussion are coming up!

Today, during Anne's chat, we had some technical glitches that caused the site to slow down significantly and kick some people out of the chat. We think we may have identified and fixed the problem, but other things can happen, especially with software we have not been able to test with as many people as are in this course now.

If the chat interface in Drupal ever does not work, we can re-group using our AIM accounts in a chatroom called fiveweeks. I have put instructions for how to join a group chat in Meebo, GAIM and Trillian right here. People have had trouble connecting to a group chat from AOL's chat client, so we don't recommend using that one.