January 2009
43 posts
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Presentation: I’ll Have What She's Having:... →
At Dickinson College, we developed a reference blog using Drupal that combines a public side, for sharing with a global audience the reference questions we’ve received and how we’ve responded, with a private side, for recording information about the transaction.
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Read the Most Popular EDUCAUSE Review Articles of... →
The ten most widely read articles from last year’s online edition of EDUCAUSE Review focused on open education, Web 2.0, virtual worlds, e-books, digital libraries, analytics, and the top issues facing higher education IT.
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New Drupal Book: Leveraging Drupal - Getting your... →
This is a book you have to read. This is a book you have to work through (by installing, wrapping your head around and reusing downloadable Drupal instances)… It is the author’s earnest hope that the contents of this book may be shared with many kinds of Drupal users…
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The Twitter Experiment →
Today, I thought I’d follow up by sharing the sweet, funny, interesting results of a Twitter experiment. It’s too entertaining for me to keep to myself.
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LITA and Top Tech Trends, Part 2: Digital... →
Live blogging and streaming video enables real-time access
Comments and participation solicited via Twitter and FriendFeed
A model for broader access to other LITA and ALA programs?
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LITA and Top Tech Trends, Part 1: Panel Ranges Far... →
Open versus closed data and access
Geolocation/mobile devices
Shift from Semantic Web to Linked Data
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Skateboarding is not a crime at the Mesa Library →
Today I visited Antoine Predock’s Mesa Library in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Before I ever entered the building I decided it has one of my favorite young adult spaces I’ve seen yet. Why? Because there is a skatepark attached to the front of the building.
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Beyond Open Source : Other Types of Open →
There are many reasons behind this upsurge of interest in open source, but I believe the most fundamental reason is philosophical. Libraries have a mission to facilitate open access to ideas and information for their communities, and that mission aligns itself perfectly with the open-source movement. Libraries are about openness, and open source is about openness.
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Drupal site: Menasha Public Library →
We’ve been using Drupal for about 2 years. Just finished a very long upgrade to version 6. Took this opportunity to work on a new theme for it, and to add a node carousel for new content.
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Pew Internet: Generations Online in 2009 →
Over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to surveys taken from 2006-2008.
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The Library of Congress Now Has an Official... →
You can find the official LC feed here: http://www.twitter.com/librarycongress
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Announcing ‡biblios.net, the world's largest... →
LibLime, the leader in open solutions for libraries, announced today the launch of ‡biblios.net—a free browser-based cataloging service with a data store containing over thirty-million records. Records are licensed under the Open Data Commons, making the service the world’s largest repository of freely-licensed library records.
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Your need to be relevant to your community →
People identify with those they share common interests with. They really bond with those they think are ‘the same’ as them. The more you have in common with the members and values of your online community, the better. This involves having a personality that is relevant.
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[Library] Tech Trends for Midwinter 2009 →
Drupal is a veritable swiss army knife which can be used in a variety of ways. I’m been playing with it for our library’s intranet, writing about using it as a library website CMS, and experimenting with using it for digital library collections. I’ve been nothing but impressed.
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British Library warns of 'black hole' in history... →
Historians face a ‘black hole’ of lost information if we do not preserve websites and other digital records, the head of the British Library warned today.
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Creating Your Domain Name →
With the Internet now a staple of our society, it seems as if everyone wants a web presence. If you dream of owning your own online business, you need to create a domain name. That’s a lot more complicated now than it used to be, but you can still craft a winner if you keep a few points in mind.
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Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review... →
How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major...
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Introducing NYPL Mobile →
Today we’re rolling out a beta release of NYPL Mobile (http://m.nypl.org/), a miniaturized version of our site for iPhones and other mobile devices. We have noticed a small but growing number of mobile visitors to our web sites, and this new site is an effort to launch a platform on which we can experiment with ways of delivering content to users via the tiny screen.
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How to make a Facebook Application for your... →
Build a Facebook app so that patrons can search for library resources without ever leaving the comfort of their profile.
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YALSA Pre-Conference: Serving Today’s Diverse... →
Providing adequate, friendly service to new Americans has always been a central goal of the public libraries, but where the mission was once understood as one of ‘acculturation’ in a very colonial sense, we can now look at it as a mission of mutual understanding and learning and, above all, helping immigrant teens preserve their sense of identity while still being active participants in their new...
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Wanting to follow ALA Mid-Winter via Twitter? →
Plugging this link into your feed reader will help provide you with tweets appropriately hash-tagged:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23alamw09
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Proposing new acroynms for open source ILS →
I’ve been writing a lot about open source stuff lately, and I find my back getting up everytime I have to refer to Evergreen or Koha as an open source ILS. You see, I think the ILS (Integrated Library System) is exactly what we’re trying to get away from with open source products…
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Perceptions 2008: an International Survey of... →
This report describes the results of a survey conducted to gather data regarding the perceptions of libraries toward their automation systems, the organizations that provide support, and the quality of support they receive. It also aims to gauge interest in open source library automation systems.
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A President Librarians can Love | LISNews →
Librarians have a few reasons to love Obama, including the fact that he gave libraries a shout-out in his weekly address on Jan. 3: “To make America, and our children, a success in this new global economy, we will build 21st century classrooms, labs, and libraries.”
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ALA | Add It Up: Libraries make the difference in... →
Research and statistics to help advocates make the case for libraries at every stage of youth development and education.
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Twittering Tips for Beginners →
In the end, my impression of Twitter was right and wrong. Twitter IS a massive time drain. It IS yet another way to procrastinate, to make the hours fly by without getting work done, to battle for online status and massage your own ego. But it’s also a brilliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures you admire. No other...
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Josh Greenberg of NYPL at Brooklyn Public Library... →
My feeling is that public libraries with dwindling funds should start adjusting policies and job descriptions to support digital initiatives, and in turn position themselves well to shift their resources after this recession.
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Social Networks Grow: Friending Mom and Dad →
The share of adult internet users who have a profile on a social networking site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.
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Video From ALA: Tools to Help Libraries in a Bad... →
ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels discusses the economy, its effect on libraries, and what ALA offers to help libraries survive in tough times.
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The library as the source of community news? →
What if the library filled some of the gap by … providing brief news items about local people, organizations, and events?
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Community building: Getting members active and... →
Many community builders will tell you that getting visitors to register and become members is the easy part. The biggest challenge comes in trying to get those members active and addicted.
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The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for... →
Virtually everyone who’s engaged seriously in the practice of search engine optimization has found it to have surprisingly versatile results. Site owners will often start out optimizing in order to rank for a particular term/phrase that’s relevant to getting customers, only to find that secondary and tertiary benefits from branding to reputation management to raw traffic all have an...
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biblios.net and the future of cataloging →
I am quite excited about LibLime’s biblios.net. Not to be confused with just “Biblios“, which is LibLime’s new open source cataloger’s editor. That’s cool too, but I’m talking about biblios.net, which is basically a shared metadata store. That is, technological support for ‘cooperative cataloging’. That is, what we used to call a ‘bibliographic utility’. The Biblios editor uses the biblios.net...
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Librarians redubbed 'audience development... →
The change of job title was prompted by the decision to deploy “self-service borrowing systems similar to those found at supermarket checkouts”. Up to 40 librarians could be for the off, and those who do hold onto their jobs will be expected to “run computer courses, hold talks and encourage kids to read”.
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10 Librarian Blogs To Read in 2009 →
I hope you’ll find the list a nice place to find something new to read, or a place to gain better understanding of a part of librarianship that’s outside of your normal area. We all have much to learn from each other, and these bloggers are working hard to share their knowledge and understanding with you.
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An Open Letter to [Libraries] on Twitter →
Over on Museum 2.0, Nina Simon has a *great* blog post encouraging museums to get human on their Twitter accounts and provide more than just “spammy and dull” tweets. Pretty much everything she exhorts museums to do applies to libraries, as well.
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Ask-a-Librarian Services Need a Reboot →
In essence, you ARE discriminating. Discriminating against a growing, younger, web-savvy customer base. Customers who *almost* have all the tools in place to simply ignore you and your grad-degreed, professional information-retrieval services. Especially if they are treated like second class customers when they ask a question using their preferred, and handy, means of communication.
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Drupal Learning Curve →
There is an interesting post over at ALA Techsource about whether or not Drupal has too steep a learning curve for libraries.
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Doing Stuff at the Library’s Website →
What can you actually DO at your website? Can you do most of the the real “stuff” that your library offers as activities?
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Go the extra mile for members of your community →
I have written before about the importance of under-promising and over-delivering as a way of satisfying delighting your online community’s members. On a similar theme, today I want to talk about the importance of always going the extra mile for your members.
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People Don’t Go To Libraries For Information…They... →
What do libraries really offer? It’s an important question to ask because the answer helps to determine what the library’s core business is. And in seeking the answer we need to think less about the goods, services and content libraries provide, and to focus instead on the value that our user communities derive from the services and content.
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What do you have in common with your community’s... →
When someone introduces themselves in your online community, they are reaching out. They are reaching out to you and every single member of your community. They are taking a risk. If they are ignored, you might as well have told that member to get lost, to never come back and to tell their friends never to come to your community.
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Why doesn’t anyone use our website? →
Ideas on driving traffic to a website when folks are used to getting info in non-tech ways, such as a school district or library.