A Contest for Branding the Library

We discussed the importance branding and using a logo for using in various places to represent the library.

Cass County Public Library has a logo that appears to have been hastily assembled using free images from Microsoft Office.  It represents Cass County Public Library as an underfunded, unimaginative organization.  We are underfunded, but hardly unimaginative, so the logo misrepresents us in that way.

Cass County is a county sort of unaware of itself.  It is both urban and rural in different regions of the county.  It was part of the Burnt District cleared out in the Civil War by the Union Army frustrated with guerrilla fighters in the area.  But the image of a burnt out wood-frame house is a rather depressing icon for a place.  We have struggled to conjure an iconic image to represent the county and our library more imaginative than an open book.

Missouri River Regional Library recently changed their logo.  They did work with a graphic designer, but generated ideas but opening the project to public input.  Patrons submitted ideas, skeches, and drafts.

My hope is that many Cass County residents will have great ideas and maybe graphic design skills.

Google Apps

Our email service at Cass County Public Library is provided through our consortium membership.  It’s clunky, difficult to use, and does not support HTML.  It frequently cannot support the size of the attachments that our staff need to send to one another.  It allows for very little storage space requiring that we delete or alternately save emails.

So I was excited to learn about Google Apps.  Missouri River Regional Library points their emails through Google Apps so that their staff can access professional email accounts through a Google hosted interface.  The system is integrated with other single log-in features including a wiki, a blog, calendar, and a personal page.

MRRL pays a $50 fee/email account for extra security and features.  However the basic Google Apps is a free option for organizations. 

I hope to explore this further to determine whether or not this might be something that would work for Cass County Public Library.  It certainly sounds promising.

A YouTube widget

I lived on an outer island in the Kingdon of Tonga for two years while in the Peace Corps.  Here is a clip I took of the villagers celebrating the opening of a newly built school house.  The Tongan women get a little rowdy.

Seth Thinks @ SeThink

Here is my first blog entry at SeThink.  Today and through the rest of this week I’m immersed in the world of the Web version 2.0. 

I’m the assistant director at Cass County Public Library in Cass County, Missouri.  I’m interested in using Web 2.0 technologies to improve communication and the sharing of ideas between the staff at our library.  I’m also planning to intergrate some elements of Web 2.0 to enrich our website and encourage patron interraction.