Subscribe to this blog
our digital future
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Early Impressions at CIL
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007Meredith Farkas on Social Software Originally uploaded by madinkbeard. I did a lot of blogging at the last two major national conferences I attended. I decided this time, given that I’m giving so many talks, doing the book signing, etc., I would just kind of take things in without writing everything down. I’ll still write [...]
Conference season begins!
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007And what a season it’s going to be! Last year, I gave my first conference talk ever at Computers in Libraries. Since then, I’ve given around 18 talks and I have 10 talks scheduled between now and the end of June. Insane! And it all starts Friday! On Friday, I’ll be giving the keynote (another [...]
Lead, follow or get out of the way
Sunday, February 18th, 2007I always tease Roy Tennant about how so many geek girls (me included) — and probably geek boys too — are totally crushing on him. He doesn’t really “get it”. I think his recent post in TechEssence, “Open Letter to ILS Vendors” is a great example of how smart, pragmatic and (as John Blyberg puts [...]
Making things happen!
Monday, February 12th, 2007I have always been an idea person. I probably get that from my dad who has had dozens of business ideas in the 29 years I’ve known him. However, before I became a librarian, I rarely pursued any of the ideas I had. I usually either didn’t know where to start or I didn’t think [...]
‘Age’-old hangups
Monday, January 29th, 2007I have received many e-mails in regards to the first article in my tenure as a columnist for American Libraries, “Balancing the Online Life” (wish I could link to it, but it isn’t online). Most of them have been very positive, but I did get a few complaints. All of them were from librarians who [...]
Nintendo Wii: Meredith’s Mii
Sunday, January 7th, 2007Nintendo Wii: Meredith’s Mii Originally uploaded by SirStan. I have a Mii! I have to say, I thought I could wait until the summer or next Fall to buy a Wii, but after playing it at a friend’s house last night, I’m really starting to get the itch! Adam bought me a Nintendo DS Lite [...]
Casey rocks and everyone knows it!
Monday, December 4th, 2006I just wanted to take a moment out while slogging through my book galley (more on that at a later date) to congratulate my friend Casey Bisson on being awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for his development of the WPopac, a groundbreaking catalog with WordPress as the front end. Casey deserves a ton [...]
MaintainIT
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006While 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 [...]
Firefox 2 is my new best friend
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006Can I just tell you how much I love Firefox 2? I’m usually the last person in the world to download an update, but I’d heard such good things about it that I threw caution to the wind. And the hype was definitely warranted. Some cool features include: Spell-checking in forms (it’s doing it right [...]
Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Wrapup
Friday, October 27th, 2006October Conference Wrap-up – Roy Tennant Roy discusses the salient points from each talk. Wikis: Creating Collaboration in Libraries Wikis are a low-threshold way to collaborate. Doesn’t need to be open to everyone to change. Search capability. Requires trust among a community (though it is easy to rollback changes). Many potential uses. Don’t even have [...]
Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Mystery Topic
Friday, October 27th, 2006Staying Informed by Bill Garrity, Dartmouth University “Being geeky doesn’t make us losers.” We all have personal requirements for how we get information. Bill doesn’t want to have to go somewhere to find info. He wants it pushed to it. He designs his browser environment to keep up. He has a tabbed browser and multiple [...]
Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – RSS Panel
Friday, October 27th, 2006Using RSS to Promote Scholarly Publications – Ken Varnum, Tufts University RSS stands for real simple syndication. It’s an xml-based data format for syndicating content. Way to send a title, URL and abstract to aggregators, websites, etc. How do you let the world know that your feed is updated? By pinging aggregators or by including [...]
Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Keynote
Friday, October 27th, 2006I just got home last night from California around 8:30 PM and am now, at what was 6:10 am for me yesterday, sitting at Dartmouth at a terrific conference they give every year. This year’s theme is Cool Tools and New Technologies and I’m thrilled to be part of a terrific roster of speakers today [...]
IL2006 Day 2: Delivering Individualized Library Content: Portals and the Future of Library Web Sites.
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006Tom 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 [...]
Internet Librarian Day 1: The Basics of Web-Based Experience Planning
Monday, October 23rd, 2006by David King, newly of the Topeka and Shawnee Public Library David showed a whole bunch of library Websites that give users a really bad experience. There was one where they actually asked users whether they wanted a Flash or HTML Web site before they could get to the front page. Crazy! Then he showed [...]
Internet Librarian Day 1: Using Ethnographic Methods to Know Your Users
Monday, October 23rd, 2006Judi Briden, Katie Clark and Isabel Kaplan from the University of Rochester. They did a two year project to determine what undergraduates really do when they write research papers. They had a multi-disciplinary team including an anthropologist who taught the team about ethnographic methods. The findings from this would inform their Website design, instructional design, [...]
Internet Librarian Day 1: Innovative Uses of Web 2.0 Technologies
Monday, October 23rd, 2006Jason Clark (Montana State University) and Karen Coombs (University of Houston) Incorporating Web 2.0 into Library Websites by Karen Coombs Web 2.0 concepts – Radical decentralization – usually you have a Web manager who puts the content online. The University of Houston’s library has 1500 pages, so responsibilities for Web development needs to be decentralized. [...]
Internet Librarian Day 1: Public Library 2.0: Emerging Technologies and Changing Roles
Monday, October 23rd, 2006Michael Stephens, Jenny Levine and Helene Blowers Yes, I know I’m not a public librarian, but I thought this would be a really interesting talk. I’ve never actually heard Michael and Jenny speaking together before (am I like the last person on earth?). Michael Casey unfortunately couldn’t make it, but I was extremely excited that [...]
The good, the bad and the utterly hillarious
Sunday, October 8th, 2006I 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 [...]
Why transparency is important (or, how to lose your customers)
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006Let me preface this by saying that when I first started my job over a year ago, I was a big fan of EBSCO. Students found their interface easy to use, they were always improving their interface and offerings, and our local Rep was really responsive to our e-mails and questions. But something has changed. [...]
« Previous Entries Next Entries »