our digital future

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2.0 or and bust

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Since before my brain was hijacked by baby stuff, I’ve been thinking a lot about how many third party Web 2.0 vendors libraries are dependent upon (not to mention all the ones we’re dependent on personally!). I actually wrote a column for American Libraries on the subject, but 600 words could not reflect the whole [...]

Looking beyond the technolust

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Let me preface this post with the statement that I hate the term Luddite. I think it’s often used to dismiss people and ideas that differ from our own. It’s much easier to dismiss someone as being anti-tech than to try and understand what may be their very rational argument against something you love or [...]

I’ve been provoked!

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Steven Bell commented in a recent ACRLog post that there hasn’t been much reaction to the Taiga Forum Provocative Statements. I’ve seen a few reactions online and here’s mine — YAWN.
Seriously, I found a lot more to like about John Dupuis’ crititicisms of the Taiga Forum Provocative Statements than about the statements themselves. I’m just [...]

Congrats to the 2009 Movers and Shakers!

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Take a look at this truly amazing group of people that Library Journal chose to recognize this year. I’ve never known more folks on the list and so many are folks I absolutely adore:
Sarah Houghton-Jan – it’s kind of amazing that she had not been recognized as a Mover and Shaker before this given the [...]

It’s not all about the tech – why 2.0 tech fails

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Yesterday, I gave a talk for the ACRL Virtual Conference entitled Can’t Get There From Here: Achieving Organization 2.0. If you’re registered for the Virtual Conference or the regular ACRL Conference, you can access the archive of the talk, and if not, my slides and links to what I discussed are provided on my presentation [...]

Online conferences – the future is now

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

I’ve been lucky to have had some recent involvement with two online conference models — one that recently happened and one that will be happening soon. I’m really pleased to see more organized professional development opportunities being offered online in light of the current economic situation and, selfishly, the fact that I personally won’t [...]

Separate but not equal?

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

When I read David King’s post about Ask-a-Librarian services last week, I didn’t have a strong emotional response to it. That was, until he wrote a follow up which brought my attention to some of the responses people had made to it. With email reference, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not a synchronous medium. We [...]

Technology education and the “real world”

Monday, December 15th, 2008

I just love that feeling of serendipity when I find that people are thinking about the same things I am at the same time. Karin Dalziel made an impassioned case for every librarian to learn how to program. Dorothea Salo responded to it and described how she thinks technology should be taught in library school. [...]

What’s new at Maintain IT

Friday, November 7th, 2008

The Maintain IT project is awesome, so when equally awesome Stephanie Gerding asked me to pass on info about their new offerings, I didn’t hesitate:
The MaintainIT Project is pleased to announce the latest Cookbook! “Planning for Success, a guide for the overworked librarian” http://www.maintainitproject.org/cookbooks/planning-for-success
This free online resource brings together the most current ideas and best [...]

Fomenting revolt in Iceland

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

I got back from Iceland this weekend just in time for a storm to knocked our power out at home. It’s back on and I’m slowly recovering from the travel, jet lag and mountains of emails and to-dos. Iceland was absolutely amazing! The landscape is so unique — I got to see lava fields, double [...]

SOPAC 2.0 at Darien Public Library

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Run, don’t walk to check out the Darien Public Library’s awesome new Drupal-based website along with the John Blyberg-designed new-and-improved SOPAC 2.0. I, for one, am totally impressed with the site and the catalog. One of the biggest things about SOPAC 2.0 (short for Social OPAC) is that its component parts are going to be [...]

Not without the Web

Monday, July 28th, 2008

A week and a half ago, I was giving a talk in South Florida (where I used to live) and it’s made me a little reflective about how much my life has changed since then.
Four and a half years ago, I was a Library Assistant I at the Boca Raton Public Library, working in [...]

Value in the online world

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we value online things in light of a few interesting posts I’ve read recently. The first was Walt Crawford’s post about some negative reactions people had to his charging money for the electronic version of his book. One critic wrote:
But seriously, Walt, $29.50 for a paperback is bad [...]

Building Academic Library 2.0

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I am on a roll with this travel mojo! On Monday, I visited the Annual Conference of the Association of Christian Librarians in Quincy, MA to give a preconference entitled Building Academic Library 2.0. Like Puerto Rico, it ended up being a terrific experience. Everyone was so friendly and I was fortunate to have a [...]

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s new to you!

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I don’t write much on this blog about the gadgets and applications I use, but I’ve recently started using several things that I thought people might want to know about and try for themselves (if they don’t know about them already). I often assume that everyone already knows about the things I’ve discovered, but after [...]

Collecting blogs in archives

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

One of my former students from SJSU had an interesting question for me about archiving student and faculty blogs:
I am in the midst of reading Varsity Letters : Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities and I realized that a major hole in our archives is the documentation of the teaching and learning that is taking place. [...]

Computers in Libraries (CIL2008) – My Brain is Full

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

the group – for Connie

Originally uploaded by cindiann

I had a really wonderful time at Computers in Libraries, as always. While there are always certain talks where the delivery is disappointing or where you don’t learn anything, I went to a lot of talks that were [...]

Computers in Libraries: In the Beginning

Monday, April 7th, 2008

This week, I’m at Computers in Libraries, one of my very favorite conferences. This year’s schedule seems to be even better than usual an I found myself torn between two (and sometimes three or four) talks during most time slots. Kudos to Jane Dysart and the organizing committee! I was also thrilled to see that [...]

Cloudbook: The Update

Monday, March 24th, 2008

For the past few weeks, the Cloudbook has been a real disappointment, and it’s not like I was asking for much. All I wanted was to be able to access the Web and to use a word processing program. I got 50% of that. I was never able to really connect to wireless in a [...]

Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

First Monday has a great issue covering Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0. The articles look at Web 2.0 phenomena (user-generated content, interactivity, social networking, etc.) from a socio-political-economic perspective and bring up some interesting paradoxes inherent in the movement. So far I’ve read “Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0″ and “Loser Generated Content: [...]

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