CRRA Update March/April 2013

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CRRA Update
March/April 2013

• From the Board: Janice Welburn, chair, announcing CRRA as a nonprofit corporation
• From the Membership Committee: Evelyn Minick , chair, welcomes Mount St. Mary’s University
• Member News: Congratulations to Joe Lucia (Villanova), Morgan McIntosh Hodgetts (DePaul) and Maria Mazzenga (Catholic University)
• Feature Article: Indexing and displaying Encoded Archival Description files in the Catholic portal
• Committee Updates: From the Collections Committee on Treasures from the Catholic Research Resources Alliance: Women Religious; Newspapers Task Force on Survey of Member Holdings
• From the CRRA: Annual plan update and Member holdings in the portal
• CRRA in the News: Thanks to Diane Maher (University of San Diego)
• Portal Tech Tip: Using the comments feature
• Upcoming events: Catholic Legacies in Victoria (May 28-29, 2013)

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WordPress Finesse

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Greetings CRRA community,

We have been working on updating the blog and are in the process of adding new information in an effort to make it more user-friendly.  With this in mind, we felt it might be helpful to share our findings, what we learned about WordPress, with you, as you may find the information useful now or at some point in the future.  Feel free to share this information with colleagues, family and friends.

In this posting, we will present information on the following topics:

  1. Adding the “more tag” in blog posts
  2. Creating and displaying categories for blog posts
  3. Antedating blog posts
  4. Formatting a blog’s side bar

As an aside, please note that all the information pertains to blogs operated using the WordPress system. 

Adding the “More Tag”

The “more tag” is a very useful tool in blog posts.  Using the “more tag” will help to make your blog page look cleaner and sleeker and allow your readers to easily access the information they need.  Additionally, the “more tag,” allows users to quickly browse the most recent posts.

WordPress defines the “more tag” as a “tag that breaks a post into ‘teaser’ and content sections. Type a few paragraphs, insert this tag and then compose the rest of your post. On your blog’s home page you will see only those first paragraphs with a hyperlink ((more…)), which when followed displays the rest of the post’s content.”  The “more tag” is considered a Quicktag.  Quicktags are displayed in the tool bar at the top of the draft of your new post.  The “more tag” can be inserted at any point in your post.  Also, you can go back and edit previous posts and insert the “more tag” wherever it is most useful and then update the piece.

An example has been provided here.  Click this link and it will lead you to the rest of the content.  Continue reading →

CRRA Update Jan/Feb 2013

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This month’s update includes:

  • From the Board: Janice Welburn, chair, on Becoming a nonprofit federally tax-exempt corporation
  • Member News:  Villanova wins ACRL Excellence in Libraries Award!; Congratulations to Carol Johnson, Bob Skinner, and Stephanie Clark; CRRA in the Spotlight
  • Feature Article: Learning more about our collection through selecting materials for CRRA, by Lisa Gonzalez, Catholic Theological Union
  • Committee Updates:  From The Collections Committee on Updating the collection policy; the Digital Access Committee on EAD records, the website, and more; and the Newspapers Task Force on the List of Catholic Newspapers Online
  • Grant opportunities: CLIR Hidden Collections proposals due March 22, 2013
  • Upcoming events: The CRRA Annual Meeting (July 2)

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The Catholic Pamphlets Collection

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The Catholic Pamphlets collection at the University of Notre Dame contains a wide variety of pamphlets, booklets, and other documents pertaining to Catholicism or the Church in some way. The collection is located at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Hesburgh Library, and is currently undergoing digitization. These publications were intended to educate a particular audience regarding issues relevant to the Church. While the University of Notre Dame’s collection does not include any entries before the nineteenth century, there is evidence of similar pamphlets being published at least since the time of the Reformation in Europe. With the invention of the printing press, pamphlets became a convenient means to disseminate ideas to a wide audience. Such publications were produced by both Protestant and Catholic sources in an attempt to influence readers with respect to religious and social issues (Edwards). Continue reading →

Google Analytics and the Catholic Portal

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Through my experimentation with Google Analytics, it has proven to be a rather useful tool for tracking usage patterns for the Catholic Portal. However, it is only effective if one knows where to look for information. To that end, I have compiled a quick guide about where to find the answers to all sorts of questions about website usage. While I use the Catholic Portal for these examples, the instructions here should be applicable for any site set up to use Google Analytics. Continue reading →

CRRA Update Nov/Dec 2012

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FROM THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Janice Welburn, Chair

Last year, we adopted an inspiring vision describing what we want to achieve and an ambitious, actionable plan for getting there.  In this context, members, committees and the Board develop an annual strategic plan. The Board met on December 12, 2012 at Lauinger Library, Georgetown University. Committee chairs joined us for a discussion of goals and current activities for this year, which we all agreed was informative and helpful in creating a broad understanding of how the goals and activities of each group fit into the overall directions.  Continue reading →

“The Vault” as inspiration for CRRA

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Might we have documents as rich and colorful as a letter from Kurt Vonnegut, as found in the Vault?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault.html
Perhaps thismight be our new challenge:  to post to this blog new, interesting treasures form across our collections. Volunteers?  –pat

—–

Archives blog, “Welcome to The Vault, a new blog dedicated to history at its most beautiful, strange, funny, and moving.

Every weekday, we’ll publish one archival document or object of visual and historical interest. Here you’ll find carefully selected photographs, pamphlets, maps, buttons, toys, letters, ledgers, and the occasional lock of hair, along with a bit of explanation to give you some context for what you’re seeing. Just this week we’ll be looking at Benedict Arnold’s loyalty oath, a microscope set for girls of the 1950s, and a memo from a Nixon aide pleading with the president to call the Space Shuttle the Space Clipper instead.

British novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The Vault is on a permanent world tour; consider these objects your souvenirs.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault.html

Preview the Updated CRRA Website – Thursday, Nov. 8 at noon (eastern)

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Max Tolomei and I cordially invite you to attend a sneak preview of the updated and soon-to-be-releasted CRRA website. Max and I have been working to move the CRRA website’s content into the open source content management system, Concrete5, and re-evaluating the organization and function of the website as a whole. Using Concrete5 will bring our site into the 21st century, making it possible to dynamically update content, and allowing members to easily collaborate and share project information in a variety of ways.

Before taking the site “live,” we seek your input into how the site works for you and how it might be improved.

Demo of CRRA website and discussion

Thursday,  November 8 at noon (11 central, 9 pacific)

These sessions will include a live demo of the site and comments and suggestions from you (via text chat and/or telephone).

Please contact Pat Lawton plawton@nd.edu for instructions to join in. 

We look forward to showing you the website and hearing your suggestions for improvements.