Lots of Web for Little Cash: Shared Hosting at the academic Law Library

Intranet, repository, HTML 5 video, and electronic signange, all for $10 a month.  Say what?! 
 
The St. Mary's University School of Law successfully launched an institutional repository complete with OAI-PMH capabilities, a .edu URL, and a digital preservation plan.  There's nothing special about that, but here's the shocker:  The repository is housed on a $10 a month shared hosting account.  The same catch-all account is used for electronic signange displayed in the building, a photo archive, and an intranet.  One-click installs are used as much as possible, to avoid the need for custom coding.
 
This presentation will cover:

• How to get a subdomain of your university's .edu to work with a shared hosting account.  You will see the backend, so you know what info to give your IT, how to check your IT's DNS settings without having access to their system, and how to talk to IT so they let you on the .edu .  The setup is straightforward, but documentation is hard to find, because so few institutions do this.  Unless there is a big bucks vendor who talks to IT on behalf the library, library projects like blogs and other side projects tend to live on .coms .orgs etc. or to run on a box on campus.  But they don't have to.  You can be on the .edu and not have to deal with server administration.
   
• How to work with out of the box options, one click installs, and how to avoid customization.  (The benefit here is that the less you customize, the less projects will fall apart later without your documentation.)
   
• Cross training issues.  Law librarians tend to have the J.D., and that's 3 years not spent learning to program a computer.  One coder in an organization is almost worse than none, if cross training becomes impossible.  The presentation will cover what level of cross training is worthwhile, give a short list of skills that can be easily learned (pretty much click and drag in FTP, and WYSIWYG), and give a list of considerations for how to constrain innovative projects so that cross training a non technical person is possible.
   
• A short tour of library projects, including Piwigo content management system for electronic signage, Omeka for institutional repository, and user engagement issues in a library intranet.

 
This is a unique chance to see under the hood of a repository platform with $10 a month in fixed costs and no upfront equipment needs or hardware purchases. 
 
For People:  Repository is here:  http://lawspace.stmarytx.edu/ 
For Robots:  OAI-PMH calling card is here:  http://lawspace.stmarytx.edu/oai-pmh-repository/request?verb=Identify