When we were walking through the aisles at a conference last year, we came across a company called Anode, showing a digital signage solution they call FireSign. They used FireSign with our Room Reserve and Events product to create an impressive touch screen display. Shortly thereafter, we began talking with the team at Anode to learn more about their products.
We recently wrote a brief document that outlines how Evanced products work with FireSign to help your library develop an interactive and informative display. You can read that document here.
What do you think? What type of signage works best for your library?
RSS and XML are a handy option for those of you who want to show your Events and Room Reservations on your homepage or if you’d like to provide links to events by event type.
Two libraries that do a great job of this are the Monroe County Public Library (Indiana) and Johnson County Library (Kansas).
Visit the Monroe County Public Library website and you’ll see this about half way down their homepage:
Those are the most current days events listed for everyone to see!
Visit the Johnson County Classes and Events page and you’ll find links to specific types of events. Click an event type and the page leads you to a list of events on the far right hand side of every page that looks like this:
That’s just a small portion of the links they have available and…hint, hint…that list was built with RSS!!!
Interested in learning more about RSS and XML? You can watch this tutorial video to find out how to build and use them:
But the key to taking RSS feeds and fully integrating them in to your website homepage is the incorporation of an RSS feed reader. You can go online and look up “free rss feed reader code” to look at your options. By using the right code and coding it to your website, then pairing it with the RSS feeds, you can bring your Events and Room Reservations front and center. A great way to get more from Events and Room Reserve investment.
We got a lot of comments to our post about Worthington’s Drupal integration. Suggestions about additional CMS systems and such. While we certainly will look at what we can do to assist in those areas we are not likely to be deploying any new such CMS integration widgets ourselves in the next 6 – 9 months. However we are certainly open to supporting customers and other integration partners who want to do their own integration with our systems.
Here is a link to information on our Knowledge base explaining how our XML tool set works. This is the same tool set that libraries such as Worthington (OH), Howard County(MD), Orange County (FL), and King County (WA) have used to create their custom integrations. Support for the use of these tool sets is included in the support of your software so our team can help if you get stuck or have some trouble with any of those features.
Calendar of Events & Webinars
ROOM RESERVE: Session 301 ADMIN ONLY › Thursday, May 17, 2012 - 10:30 AM Where: Evanced Solutions at Live Meeting Webinar This session is able to be taken by Administrators who have completed Sessions 201.This advanced...
