I’m in the last week of my traineeship at St John’s College, Cambridge! It has been a wonderful experience, which I will expand upon more fully at a later date.
One of my proudest achievements during my time here has been the launch of a redesign for the Cambridge Graduate Trainees’ website, CaTaLOG. We provide information on careers in librarianship, and an insight into life as a graduate library trainee in Cambridge. The CaTaLOG website was designed and created by the graduate trainees of 2003-2004. At the time, the decision was taken to write the code from scratch using Notepad to allow for real understanding of how HTML works and how pages are constructed. Since then, generations of library trainees significantly developed the site, but by 2012 it had become unwieldy to navigate, and both updates and backups had to be made manually. The appearance of the website was dated, and couldn’t be upgraded without using much more advanced coding than we were capable of. Because of these reasons, the graduate trainees of 2012-13 decided to use a CMS (Content Management System) to manage the CaTaLOG website. The CMS that we chose is WordPress; this decision was made because of its popularity, support network, and user-friendliness.
I was primarily responsible for the actual installation of WordPress onto the server. It was a tricky business which really stretched my technical capabilities, but luckily it’s all up and running now! There was a very hairy moment where I nearly deleted everything on the server, but thank bananas I noticed in time and cancelled the operation!
My fellow trainees, Pippa, Tim, James, Kirsten and Rachel have been absolutely wonderful at pitching in, helping to migrate website content over to the new platform, and I think it’s definitely been a team effort. I’ve really enjoyed both working and hanging out with them over the past year!
Anyway, if you have a moment, please check out the brand spanking new CaTaLOG website!
The Adventures of YiWen the Librarian 