Shelfari+Bookshelf+Steps+for+Destiny+Home+Page

How I Got a Shelfari Widget Shelf on McKelvie’s Destiny Home Page I had added a Shelfari Widget bookshelf to our McKelvie Destiny Home Page last week and Ellie asked if I would share what I did here so am posting my narrative that I shared on the Follett-Talk listserv.

To those of you who asked how I did it ,it is like the blind leading the blind since I am no HTML expert and I have only ever edited our home page from a template shared during our initial Destiny training. I have no instructions, I just look at the code that is there and try to copy and then change things that show up right and I want to change.

But I went to the Shelfari widget site, created an account and created a small 14 title shelf to havesomething to be shared to a Shelfari shelf if I was successful. I then followed steps on the Shelfari widget home page to get a Shelfari shelf and set up some basic preferences. I could only use the one that uses flash not java. That gave me a url to embed as Carl had mentioned and I found a spot when I edited my Destiny home page where I hoped it could show up and pasted in that url. I had to play with the sizing in the embedded code to get my shelf an appropriate size for my busy home page. I am trying to figure out how to eliminate my extra space. I will make the shelf bigger if I can without extra space, but right now I am just working on my space issue. After I saw my shelf where I wanted it I went back to my 14 book Shelfari shelf and choose" put my shelf on my blog" (I do not have a blog just our Destiny ahome page). The books showed up. My size is 600 x 220 which gave me five titles across and if I want my shelf to appear larger I will change that in my settings in my Shelfari account.

You HTML techies may have found a more efficient way. A colleague at another school wanted to know if I could link the shelf to our Destiny holdings, I am sure for call numbers, etc. but I do not think so. I am only putting our titles on my shelf anyway so they would still look it up to get call #.

I did it because students never really go to my New Book lists in my Visual Search and I am hoping this will move titles fast and frequently. We just got our large order and I wanted a way to broadcast those titles right away. I am now trying to figure out how to create a list to be able to add to my Shelfari shelf without typing in every title. I did figure this out, it has to be a tab delineated list in simple text, and I was able to turn a list generated by scanning book barcodes into word and saving as Rich text and importing to my list I created on Shelfari.

Good Luck everyone!

Kathy Fencil