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Archive for January, 2005
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Wednesday, January 19th, 2005Exciting news from the world of ILS’s [as reported by Jenny at The Shifted Librarian]! I’ve been crawling out of my skin with anticipation, waiting to be able to announce this, and now it’s finally official! Sirsi will be the first ILS vendor to offer native RSS feeds out of the catalog, and they’ve gone [...]
Can’t write a word?
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005Clive Thompson at collision detection posed an interesting question in his blog today: “can you think better when you’re typing?” I’ve found, at least for the past 10 years, that the quality of my writing is far better when I type than when I write. I’m not sure if it’s because I can type very [...]
Get your feed out there
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005For those who have an RSS feed for their blog, you can now easily submit your feed to 15 aggregators using Feed Submitter by Thomas Korte. If you find that your submission fails on some of the aggregator sites, it may be because you’re already listed on there. [via Research Buzz]
Spamfighters
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005Is referrer spam getting you down? Killing refferer spam has become an obsession for Dorothea at Caveat Lector over the past week, and she shares some useful tips on how to eradicate it, along with a narrative of her own experiences. Don’t know what referrer spam is? Here’s a definition from Wikipedia: When someone accesses [...]
The Max Power way
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005According to Techdirt, a California state senator has introduced a bill that threatens developers of file sharing applications with jail time. John Borland at CNET, writes, “if passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don’t take [...]
On the hunt…
Monday, January 17th, 2005I will be flying up to freezing Chicago next week for a second interview for a job I am absolutely dying to get. I’d have to be VERY interested in a job to be willing to fly to Chicago in January! This job could hardly come closer to my description of a perfect job for [...]
Testing information literacy
Monday, January 17th, 2005According to the New York Times, ETS has developed a test to measure a college student’s level of information literacy in order to determine how well schools are preparing students for a world where IT literacy is increasingly necessary. The test is designed to show how well a student is able to use critical thinking [...]
Encouraging discussions at ALA
Saturday, January 15th, 2005While I’m kind of bummed about not making it to ALA Midwinter, I’ve gotten to hear all about it from the PLA Blog, Library Techtonics, and It’s All Good. A lot of what I’ve been reading has been very encouraging in terms of librarians and libraries embracing change and new ideas. Alice from OCLC wrote [...]
Folksonomies: Listen to Jessamyn
Saturday, January 15th, 2005Jessamyn said “learn this word: folksonomy” and I make it a point to always listen to Jessamyn. Actually, I’ve been hearing quite a lot about folksonomies lately, between my Theory of Information Retrieval class last semester and the recent discussion on Slashdot. Folksonomies are the taxonomic vocabularies generated from such sites as del.icio.us and flickr, [...]
A new corporate approach to intellectual property
Thursday, January 13th, 2005IBM is making 500 of its patents available for free to people doing open source projects. Rock on! From the New York Times: I.B.M. executives say the company’s new approach to intellectual property represents more than a rethinking of where the company’s self-interest lies. In recent speeches, for example, Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.’s chief executive, [...]
User-centered technology implementation
Thursday, January 13th, 2005David King wrote two responses to Michael Stephen’s 2005 library tech predictions. The first one highlights the importance of user-centered technology planning and implementation. This is something that cannot be stressed enough. There are libraries that are completely adverse to change and to technology, and there are libraries that are so tech-forward that they pass [...]
Web design resources
Thursday, January 13th, 2005I just discovered Spectacle today. It is a gorgeous site with lots of links to the coolest web design resources. From there, you can see Forty Media’s web design predictions for 2005, which list the trends they think we will see in web design this year. You can also find the CSS Playground, which shows [...]
PLA blog is up!
Thursday, January 13th, 2005The PLA Blog is now up and running! It will have some great public library-related reports from the ALA Midwinter Conference by some very familiar faces in the library blogging world. It’s almost as good as being there! I’d wanted to go, but couldn’t really justify the expense considering my current lack of employment. I [...]
Michael Stephens’ crystal ball
Thursday, January 13th, 2005I find myself often linking to Michael’s posts on Tame the Web. So much so that I would urge all of my readers to subscribe to his blog (most of whom already have, I’d bet). Instead of looking back at 2004, like so many others have, Michael listed Twelve Techie Things for Librarians 2005, which [...]
Serving two masters at the ALA
Wednesday, January 12th, 2005Dorothea has written a very interesting post comparing the ALA to the guild system in the Medieval world. She makes some great suggestions and observations about the ALA’s mission and whose interests they should be serving. I agree with her 100% that if the MLS is to mean anything, programs need to become far more [...]
Blogging about blogging about blogging…
Wednesday, January 12th, 2005Wow! This has got to be one of the most useful sites I’ve seen in a long time. Susan Herzog, a librarian at Eastern Connecticut State University, has created BlogBib, an annotated bibliography of all things bloggy, with a special focus on library/librarian blogs. It’s quite a resource — a one-stop shop for articles, studies, [...]
Archiving Digital Images from Film: My Approach
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005I’d mentioned in a previous story that i’ve set out on the horrid task of digitizing about 5,000 – 6,000 of my family’s 35mm slides, dating from the early 1960s until the present day. I want to free all our old pictures from the prison of the slide carousel, where they’ve sat for – literally [...]
Life gets in the way
Monday, January 10th, 2005I may not be online too much over the next few days. My grandfather is in the hospital, probably with a stroke, though they haven’t figured it out yet. When I visited him on Sunday afternoon, he was almost in a coma, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to talk with him again. [...]
The impact of open access
Sunday, January 9th, 2005Peter Suber at Open Access News pointed me to a very interesting pre-print article about the citation impact of open access journal articles. Citation Impact of Open Access Articles vs. Articles available only through subscription (“Toll-Access”) is still in the analysis stages, but they seem to have found that with physics and mathematics journals, those [...]
Questioning information literacy
Sunday, January 9th, 2005Here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that has been causing some controversy on the library-related listservs. Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions rails against the traditional ideas behind information literacy curricula. While I disagree with much of what the author has written, he does raise some interesting points. I’ve never [...]
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