Subscribe to this blog
Archive for February, 2005
« Previous EntriesScreencasting? Finally something I can get behind!
Monday, February 28th, 2005I think Podcasting is cool, but not for me. I’m a visual learner, so listening to my favorite bloggers takes more mental energy to absorb than reading their blog entries. In graduate school, I hated listening to real audio lectures from my professors unless they were accompanied by lecture notes, powerpoint, or something visual. That’s [...]
Email lists in my bloglines?
Monday, February 28th, 2005Over at The Blog Driver’s Waltz, Geoff has offered up a step-by-step way of subscribing to email lists via Bloglines. The amazing thing is that you can still use traditional email functions from Bloglines (like reply to posts). I must admit that these days I use Bloglines far more often than I use the email [...]
Google Maps: Oh the possibilities!!!
Monday, February 28th, 2005When I wrote my first post on how excited I was about Google Maps, I had no earthly idea what the broad capabilities of the application were. I don’t think Jon Udell even did at first, but he quickly discovered some really amazing stuff and illuminates these possibilities for us with fantastic screencasts (using my [...]
Neil Gaiman isn’t a fan of Michael Gorman
Sunday, February 27th, 2005Neil Gaiman isn’t a fan of Michael Gorman either (welcome to the club). I’ve been really amazed by the reaction of people outside of the library world to Gorman’s piece, but I was thrilled to see an author — whom I’m a big fan of — write an excellent, witty post about the whole ridiculous [...]
Michael Gorman and “Revenge of the Blog People”
Friday, February 25th, 2005Blog people… Sounds like creatures from a cheesy sci-fi movie you’d see on MST3K. I know this has been talked to death, but as a dues-paying member of the ALA, I wanted to offer my two cents on Michael Gorman’s opinion piece in Library Journal. I thought about writing last night, but I thought it [...]
Google Movies!
Thursday, February 24th, 2005Yes, another new Google search tool (it seems like there’s been a new one every day over the past few months!). Google Blog reports that Google has come out with Google Movie “just in time for the Oscars.” It’s not a whole new search engine, but an operator that you can use to search for [...]
Sometimes we all need a little reminder…
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005Sometimes we all need a little reminder why we got into the library field in the first place. When you hear about the lack of a librarian shortage, the low wages, the closing libraries, the bureaucracy that keeps change from happening, etc., it can all seem pretty discouraging. From the listservs I subscribe to, I’ve [...]
RFID in Berkeley?
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005This month’s big library RFID news came when the Berkeley Public Library announced that it was spending $650,000 to place RFID tags on 550,000 library items. This is a library that has already exceeded its budget and has borrowed $500,000 from the city for the project: The library has slashed its books and materials budget [...]
Good tips for beginning bloggers
Sunday, February 20th, 2005Starting a blog can be indimidating. I remember when I first started, I’d considered it more of an exercise in writing commentary than something I was writing for an audience. That was mostly because I never thought anyone would actually read my blog, and I had no idea how to get people to read my [...]
Bill Maher and I are on the same wavelength!
Saturday, February 19th, 2005In the LA Times yesterday, Bill Maher echoed the sentiments I expressed yesterday about what is going on in our country and how it is reflected in today’s high school students. Of course he’s way funnier than I am and somehow finds a way to make even serious concerns hilarious (and thus, more palatable). Take [...]
What is happening to our country?
Friday, February 18th, 2005I was more than a little frightened when I saw the survey, sponsored by the James L. Knight Foundation, which found that 35% of the high school students surveyed thought the “First Amendment goes to far in the rights it guarantees.” The study also found that three-quarters of the students think that flag burning is [...]
WikiBibliography
Friday, February 18th, 2005The WikiBibliography pulls together articles and commentary on Wikis from a variety of areas. Most of the citations have links to the actual article, so it’s a great resource for those of you who are interested in what Wikis have to offer. It’s a really comprehensive webpage, and very useful if you can ignore the [...]
Digitization 101
Friday, February 18th, 2005Thanks to digitizationblog, I just found an amazingly cool blog that I wanted to share with you. Digitization 101 is a blog created by Jill Hurst-Wahl for Hurst Associates. Hurst-Wahl writes some fantastic posts on just about every aspect of digitization (from the practical to the existential), including such topics as “finding digitization vendors”, “Digital [...]
Questioning library terminology
Friday, February 18th, 2005I just found this very interesting website via TangognaT. John Kupersmith, a reference librarian at UC Berkeley has collected usability survey data from various libraries as well as the library terminology used on library websites to create Library Terms That Users Understand. In it, he suggests best practices for library website usability testing and the [...]
Fabulous maps
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005Ever since I started this blog, I’ve made a big effort to post regularly. Unfortunately, I slacked off last week. Well, I don’t know if packing, putting our junk into storage, and moving to the other side of the country is considered slacking, but I do feel badly about falling out of the loop and [...]
Firefox is on fire!!!
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005I was very excited to hear, via Research Buzz, that Firefox has been downloaded more than 25 million times! That’s fabulous! Hopefully we’ll see it replacing Internet Explorer more and more in libraries. Most of the library bloggers I know seem to use Firefox (or Safari), but I really haven’t seen it on library public [...]
The community in computing
Monday, February 7th, 2005The Linux Librarian has a great post on why open source and blogging are so great: This is why open source works. From my comments, from yesterday, from James Robertson: Hi, I’m the main BottomFeeder developer. What system are you trying the app on? What specific version did you try? Thanks This is why open [...]
Library websites that don’t suck
Monday, February 7th, 2005Thank you Librarian Avengers for spelling out what most of us say to ourselves day after day as we navigate library websites and library catalogs: most library websites suck. In one of the classes I took for the MLS, we had to critique library websites, and we certainly found no lack of terrible websites to [...]
Online Social Networks Conference
Monday, February 7th, 2005Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt (the Batman and Robin of the library blogging world) will be presenting The Library Blogosphere: Toward a Working Taxonomy at the Online Social Networks Conference, which is an amazingly affordable and accessible conference for busy (or unemployed) people. According to Michael, they’ll be discussing “what libraries and librarians are doing [...]
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Monday, February 7th, 2005I know this article isn’t new, but it’s new to me and it may be new to you. Jon Udell wrote a concise and tremendously insightful article in InfoWorld entitled The network is the blog, in which he defines a blog in terms of the network it is connected to (the blogosphere). Like the “sound [...]
« Previous Entries