SEMLS Members Making Their Mark on the Web

A couple of cool things have come up during the past week involving SEMLS members and their travels on the Web.

I posted this on the SEMLS home page, but I wanted to mention it here as well. The Dartmouth Public Library's Voter's Guide was recognized by LJ Insider last week. LJ Associate Editor Raya Kuzyk says, "(Dartmouth) produced one of the finer pages I've seen in my ongoing survey of public libraries' election-education initiatives: easily accessible, simply organized and straightforwardly designed, seriously informative, and with a winning catch phrase: "Smart Voting Begins at the Library."

Dartmouth has been working on a library Web site redesign for a few months, and, like anyone doing a major redesign, is struggling to balance its time between keeping the current site fresh while also creating a new one. It looks like they've done a great job on providing a valuable service to their residents while going through this transition. Kudos to Sharani Robins for her work on the site.

My next story doesn't involve a library Web site, but is about a burgeoning blogger in the region. Daisy Delano from the Taunton Public Library created her The Games Afoot blog as part of the recent SEMLS Learning 2.0 class. She learned last week how powerful blogging could be. After a frustrating experience trying to sign up for a Facebook account as part of the class, she ranted about it in this blog post. The problem was that she wasn't receiving confirmation e-mails after trying multiple accounts, including her Comcast account. Well, somebody from Comcast stumbled across her blog post, ultimately contacted Facebook to discover the cause of the problem, and fixed a problem that was preventing confirmation e-mailsl from getting to Comcast accounts. You can read her account of it here.

Imagine how many potential Facebook users with Comcast accounts were getting frustrated by this problem. And now, because a librarian from our region ranted about it on her blog, Comcast users can now start signing up for Facebook accounts again without any trouble.

Daisy - I hope you keep your blog up after the class is done because I am definitely subscribing to your feed!