While at Internet Librarian, I learned about the Maintain IT Project. This three-year Bill and Melinda Gates funded initiative is designed to identify best practices for maintaining public access computers. Right now, they are collecting stories from library folks about working with public access computers and keeping them running. From these stories of success and …
Michelle Boule by Etches-Johnson I want to wish a hearty congratulations to my good friend (and “wing man”) Michelle Boule, for being chosen by LITA to represent them in the ALA Emerging Leaders program. There are few people in this profession with such passion and enthusiasm as Michelle, and she is someone who is really …
Tom Ipri, La Salle University At Computers in Libraries in March, I had told Tom how excited I was about going to his talk and then I promptly went and missed it by having a way too long lunch. D’oh! So I gave him my solemn word that I would come and see him give …
Roy Tennant, University of California While I was very interested in all of the talks in the social computing track today, I really wanted to expand my knowledge of certain topics that I know very little about. I knew that Roy would be likely to give a very practical nuts-and-bolts introduction to developing institutional repositories …
I have been ridiculously busy getting ready for the five talks I have coming up in the next three weeks. I have to have the slides for them all totally done this week because I’m going on vacation from the 13th until the start of Internet Librarian. And, for the first time in a long …
I’m so pleased and excited to see how Five Weeks to a Social Library is shaping up! We have a terrific group of presenters involved in the course who will help to teach participants all about social software and how to successfully implement social technologies in their library. You can see a very preliminary preliminary …
Friday was the deadline for proposals from content creators for Five Weeks to a Social Library. At the beginning of the week, some of the planning committee was beginning to sweat because we only had 8 proposals total. After having planned HigherEd BlogCon, I knew that most would come in over that last week (and …
Friday is the deadline to submit a proposal to provide content for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. While we have gotten a lot of proposals on certain topics, there are others on which we have not gotten any (or have gotten very few). If you have experience using or know a lot …
This is why. You’ve got to check out the actual ad; it had me half laughing half furious. I don’t write much about politics on this blog, but I have to admit that this has gotten me kind of riled up. Vermont just isn’t the sort of place where people have really vile, manipulative, negative …
Remember way back when I was talking about wanting to do some sort of a free online educational extravaganza? Well, the wheels have been turning behind the scenes, but I didn’t want to announce anything until I had something concrete. This summer, I asked five other amazing women to partner with me in creating Five …
Our talk today went really well! Considering who we were up against (Yochai Benkler!!!), I was surprised and pleased that we had a pretty decent crowd at the talk. Update: Audio from our talk can be found here in the Wikimania archives. I had no idea we were being recorded. I was so thrilled to …
Can I tell you how nice it is to have free wireless EVERYWHERE at this conference? Not only that, but the seats are comfortable, and the desks or armrests have power adapters in them. Every conference should be at Harvard Law School. 😉 Seriously, if you want bloggers to cover your conference, make it as …
Considering that I have initiated many MediaWiki projects of my own, I was very excited about hearing from other folks who have experienced the highs and lows of running a wiki. Transitioning to a Wiki: The wikiHow Experience Jack Herrick is the owner of wikiHow. Their mission is to “provide useful instructions ot help people …
Sins of omission? An exploratory evaluation of Wikipedia’s topical coverage Alex Halavais & Derek Lackaff Looking at authority/authoritativeness of wikipedia articles. Accuracy is obviously an issue, but authority is more than that. It’s also about breadth, timeliness, etc. Encyclopedias are thought of as being authoritative, but what about the Wikipedia. Halavais and Lackaff took three …
Our Movement: Past, Present, Future Jimmy first showed the “Wikiality” clip, which I highly recommend you check out for a laugh. Fundamental Mission statement: imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Milestones of 2006: More than 1 million articles in …
I Want you … to Drop DOPA! Originally uploaded by davidking. I haven’t written much about DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act), though I certainly made my opinions about social networking software clear in my megapost on the subject. I was appalled, but not surprised, by the overwhelming support and passage of the bill in the …
For those of you who missed my wiki talk last week and wanted to watch it later, the archived presentation is up and is available as a podcast or as a video with the slides and audio. There are a lot of terrific presentations in the SirsiDynix Institute archive by some of the great thinkers …
On Friday, I had a meeting with the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies to discuss future plans for integrating information literacy instruction into the curriculum. On several occasions I brought up issues that involved communication problems between the programs and the library. In response, he discussed the internal communication problems he’s seen. He …
You know, I’m really going to end up running out of titles for my wiki posts, but that’s a good sign. It is so exciting and gratifying to me to see the number of people and organizations who have adopted wikis for personal and professional uses. I honestly don’t know of an easier or better …
My book is due in just over a month. This is a fact that is causing me a fair amount of anxiety. I know I’ll get it done in time, but will it be good? I don’t know. Roy Tennant, trying to be nice and give me advice a while back, told me that I …