Arrived late yesterday…luckily my hotel is very close to a few restaurants..sampled my first authentic Austin breakfast burrito and watched the original Ugly Betty (Betty la Fea) before going to bed very early. I’m speaking at a panel workshop on the use of blogs and wikis as conference communications tools this afternoon. I’m really looking forward to it.
IMLS has awarded Annette and Godmar a National Leadership Grant to support the development of LibX over the next two years….They will be making an Edition builder interface so that libraries can build their own editions. Check this…Virginia Tech is still only using IE. Annette & Godmar plan to build a plug-in for IE..They will also be looking at usability with this grant…
Godmar is discussing the functionality of the LibX plugin and OpenURL technology…applause when he dragged the title of an article from a bibiliography on a pdf document to Google Scholar and the window opened up to the new source. Discussing “cues” now…
I’m at our NEASIST program today…SOLD OUT!! Annette Bailey is up now talking about LibX. LibX actually came about when she was interviewing for jobs last year. Bailey wanted to have something cool and useful to wow prospective employers. Annette and Godmar’s initial conversations included the LibX tool’s potential as a “virtual librarian.” She did this for an INTERVIEW…Follow today’s discussion here or on NEASIST’s event blog.
Library Camp East is underway…Lichen is keeping us in the know on her very prettyful blog. I wish I could hear Casey Bisson’s OPAC discussion. He’s my Innovative hero…I know, it’s too early in the week for puns. My consortium upgraded to III’s WebOpac version over the summer and I am on a task force that will recommend improvements to the interface to enhance its function. The OPAC is the public face to the library, not an earth-shattering statement, but sometimes its importance gets passed over in favor of discussions about federated search and hot databases. I’m the lone nondeveloper on the force. I have html and various scripting experience, but it’s not like I play with java/perl on a daily basis. I hope my role will be to keep the OPAC user-centric.
Before I left for ASIST on that snowy Saturday, I arranged with the Academic Media Services dept to have my workshop digitally recorded for podcasting. Guess what the response was to my request: “How did you hear about podcasting…? (w/o any judgemental inflection)” If that’s the type of response I can continue to expect, I’ll take it…
Today is a semi pay-it-forward day…It’s 3lOg Day The general plan is to introduce someone else to 5 new or off-the-beaten-path blogs. You tell someone, and so on, and so on… Here’s my kooky, mostly non-LIS related list:
- Birding Babylon – first heard about this New England soldier on the radio. Chronicles his hobby as a birder and observer of natural history while on tour of duty in Iraq. Read it.
- Megnut – Meg Hourihan is certainly not unkown (a co-creator of Blogger), but I found her blog while doing some research for a program. Megnut covers her side hobby as a foody and avid reader of epicurean lit. It’s nice to see someone else who appreciates this genre.
- Chocolate & Zucchini I am a long time lover of all things French, this is another foody blog authored by Clothilde, a software engineer living in Montmartre, one of my favorite parts of of Paris. C&Z also includes enticing photos of culinary delectables and high-end cookery (!)
- etc. You all know Amanda Etches-Johnson from her blogwithoutalibrary blog. I am still trying to teach myself to knit. In the meantime, I’m inspired by all of her crafty powers.
- Tales of whey, get it? Bovine Bugle blog. Stories of cows and a family running an organic dairy farm in Vermont. Doesn’t get more wholesome than this.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
After today’s painful rss lessons learned (all self-inflicted) over on the ASIST conference blog, I was rescued, yet again, by the fabulous support from Blake at lishost. Every time I think I’ve asked the most annoying question evah, he still comes through. I’ve been faking it on the RSS front, and that’s just lazy. I know what it means, I know what it does for me in my Thunderbird mail, in Bloglines, etc. but I haven’t done any real investigating on all of the possibilities. I’m just a user. .92, 1.0 or 2.0 — who knows, I’ve just been upgrading ‘cuz that’s what you’re supposed to do right? The higher version is always better, blah, blah. I’m not saying I’ll devote a lot of brain matter to said possibilities, but I will try to be more informed, like Ken over at rss4lib. I think that since my library has III and no rss capability yet, there hasn’t been a big rush for me to ponder its use beyond my PIM needs. I think rss clips in our subject guides will be an obvious first place in the future.
I’m back from the land of silence. Anyone playing with Google Talk yet? I’ve been pining for this for a while. You do need to have a gmail account. If you want to play with GT but somehow still need a gmail account, ping me. First come, first served of course.
I was reading about the new LISWiki and the Shifted Librarian’s post about Best Practices for Wikis, and was reminded how much of a debate we had on the NEASIST program committee about the whys and what fors of using a wiki for our May program. We decided against it and went for blogs instead. The Events blog will get more use as time goes on, but our program committee blog is just, well, lying there. I think that’s mostly my fault, emailing is still very much in my bloodstream. We have some exciting program ideas in the works, some of them long range, so perhaps, we’ll revisit the wiki. At the very least, it will give the people unfamiliar with wikis some practice (unfamiliarity was a barrier during our program planning). The student chapter of ASIST in my region is of the “just do it” mind and have created a collaborative wikispace using jotspot.
My RI databases working group has a jotspot wiki and we’ve really found it useful as both an archival (all communications, documents, and email) record and deliverable of the work we’ve done over the last few months. You have to be willing to dabble, and more importantly, if it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to break-up with a technology that’s not working for you. Michael Stephens calls it “Techno-Divorce”. I’d point you to Stephens’ article in LJ online, but you now have to be a subscriber to read it. Good Librarian Beatrice that I am, here’s the citation: Michael Stephens, “Technoplans VS. Technolust” Library Journal, November 1, 2004. [Edit 7/15/05: Apparently the new for-pay feature was a mistake and LJ's going back to free, so I've put the link in to the Stephens article. Nice.]
Just combing the CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) announcement archives and I noticed that last month they announced their feed! So I subscribed to the feed vs the listserv and because I use Thunderbird as my email client (PC IT should cover their eyes at this time), I just refresh my inbox to read the new feeds…Suweeet [Steve Cohen-ism]
The NEASIST podcasts are almost ready, but in the meantime, for a full account, check out his Top 12 list from his NEASISTpresentation, but here are a few things that jumped out at me. I’ll be looking at this very closely because of some service changes that will be happening here over the summer..More on that in a bit. And, YES, unplug now and again. My current form of unplugging is fencing with RIFAC.
#1 Control your technolust…
Techno-divorce
Knowing when to quit…
Do a pilot project.
#2. Plan for your Users – make this a top priority – user centered info services
a. Telling STORIES – how do we tell uses what we can do for them
Article: “How Libraries and Librarians help”….Joan Dorrantz.
b. Case studies – start small/off the cuff
#3 – Do Your Research
– Evidence-based decision making
– Resources abound
– talk to other librarians
– field trip, anyone..?
Why blog at your library?
- it works/fast easy & cheap/internal: communication for staff/external: selling your message/Gorman?Cronin?
(more…)
Megan Fox’s Taste of New Technologies just began. We were felled a little by the Technolust sword (we don’t have wireless in the space we’re using), but IT was very cool and set up a wired hub. The program is being recording for podcast, so check back here or on the NEASIST blog for availability.
I’m still having trouble believing the Adam Curry and birth of podcasting connection. I know it to be true, but every I time I see one of those old MTV VJ photos of him, I waiver. The podcasting in Higher Ed talk given by Steve Ragalevsky from Apple was pretty interesting, and the podcasting how-to part was very intro as advertised.
Some uses in Higher Ed:
- lectures, language instruction
- gradable discussion sections
- self-guided campus tours
- add/drop period (delivery of course descriptions, syllabi via podcast)
I could see this used for oral history projects and field work.
Interesting stats:
MP3 pie in 2004 ( Flash 60+%, iPod 31%, Other 7-9%)
MP3 pie in 2005 (iPod 65%, Flash 29%, Other 4-6%)
Ragalevsky talked a bit about the iPod program at Duke, but if you want more specifics, you may want to check out the freeiPods in Education webcast happening today at 1pm Eastern. It will feature representatives from Duke University and Georgia College and State University. You’ll need to download a free player. This program will be recorded, so if you can’t watch today, you can catch a stream later.
Ragalevsky also demoed Tiger, Apple’s new OS. I have to say WOW. He showed us some cool features of Spotlight’s (desktop search) smart folders, email search, the little Dashboard widgets (a customizer’s dream), and the build-your-own widget capabilities. Now that I’m not in need of heavy duty computer processing, my next laptop purchase may see me on the other side. So yes, I may go Mac, and I said this in a room full of witnesses who collectively gave me the “we got another one” look and cheer. The alleged secret society of Mac users on my campus may soon come in out of the cold as my college is actually considering supporting the Apple Platform on campus.
I’m on Day 1 of a beast of a week, but I caught Audie Cornish’s piece NPR this morning discussing the new Computer Literacy test developed by the ETS people. They also discuss the info literacy movement at libraries, interview students about how they do research, etc. It’s only 4 minutes long, check it out. There’s isn’t a separate mp3 link and I didn’t have time do a tiny url, go here and listen in WMP or RA: eLiteracy on Morning Edition
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