our digital future

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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 fun or educational or both. And of course [...]

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: [...]

Building 21st century librarians AND libraries

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

There were three recent posts that got me thinking a lot about the growing necessity to have tech-savvy people in public services positions. The first was Dorothea Salo’s post about how many librarians outside of Systems see learning about (or doing anything with) technology as being something outside of their sphere of responsibility. The second [...]

The CloudBook has landed!

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Today my CloudBook ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) arrived. It just came out on Friday and is only being sold by one company thus far. I was lucky enough to be one of the first people to pre-order it and, as a result, I’m one of the few people who have it today. Kudos to ZaReason for [...]

Tech-NO-lust

Monday, February 18th, 2008

After reading Rochelle Hartman, Steve Lawson, Jenna Freedman, Dorothea Salo and Laura Crossett’s posts about their “Tech-Nots”, I started thinking about what it means to be tech-savvy. I was once I was eating lunch with some people I just met at a conference and one said “well you must have the new iPhone right?” Even [...]

Maintain IT Cookbooks

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Over a year ago I wrote about a project called MaintainIT, a three-year Bill and Melinda Gates funded initiative designed to identify best practices for maintaining public access computers. Well, since then, they’ve been awfully busy. In addition to going around the country talking to librarians who maintain computers, they’ve published two cookbooks, which are [...]

Flu trumps blogging (and pretty much everything else)

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

I probably owe a lot of people emails and I’ve been wanting to write up my tech trends and talk about some of the cool things I learned at the OLA Superconference last week. Unfortunately, I’ve come down with the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had, which has turned me into a coughing, [...]

Some great Library Technology Reports

Friday, January 25th, 2008

As I’ve been spending more time than I would like in waiting rooms over the past few weeks, I’ve had the chance to catch up on some reading; namely Library Technology Reports. Michelle Boule wrote a terrific LTR called Changing the Way We Work, in which she covers tools for online collaboration. Michelle is really [...]

The essence of Library 2.0?

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

I found John Blyberg’s post, Library 2.0 Debased, very interesting and in many ways, a breath of fresh air. I agree with him on a lot of levels. I agree that mistakes have been made. I think there has been a lot of confusing rhetoric about Library 2.0. I think a lot of people lost [...]

YALSA Teen Tech Week Mini Grants

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

I hadn’t heard about before Stevie Kuenn sent this the info to me, so I thought some of you may not have either. The folks at YALSA are giving out 20 grants of $450 plus $50 in Teen Tech Week products for a library to celebrate Teen Tech Week: Have a great idea for Teen [...]

Saying goodbye to 2007

Monday, December 31st, 2007

When I look back to the beginning of 2007, I’m really surprised at how much has happened in just one year. At the end of December last year, we were just contacting the students we’d accepted into the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. I don’t think any of us knew how incredibly successful [...]

Code4Lib Journal Launches!

Monday, December 24th, 2007

I am so pleased that The Code4Lib Journal’s first issue is out. The projects described are really interesting and what I like most is that they include an explanation of how they did it (with code!). Far too often, you read articles about a library-related project that really don’t give you any idea how it [...]

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