Can 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 …
Ever since I first started screencasting almost two years ago, I’ve been really surprised how few people are talking about how cool it is. It can be so hard to teach students at a distance how to use databases, and screencasting is the only tool that allows you to concretely demonstrate how they work. Add …
Jennifer Macaulay mentioned today (at least I think it was today — though by the time you see it, it could be three days from now) that she’s noticed her feed isn’t updating very frequently in Bloglines: This is highly frustrating. But ultimately, I know I wrote a post, so I didn’t worry about it …
Ken Varnum, of RSS4LIB, and I were both speaking at the Dartmouth Biomedical Library’s Fall Conference on Friday, and we were talking about Feed2JS (which I talked about with Paul Pival at IL2006). He told me about an experience he’d had with sploggers using his Feed2JS installation (and bandwidth) to do their dirty work. This …
Wow! What an amazing conference! I can honestly say that I didn’t go to a single bad/boring/irrelevant talk and, although I was sick and sidelined on Day 3, I got more out of this conference than any I’ve been to in the past. I didn’t go to a lot of the social software talks because …
October 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 …
Staying 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 …
by Gabriel Rios, University of Alabama, Birmingham Mobile devices are another way to get content into the hands of our patrons. Types of mobile devices – PDAs/Smart Phones, Cell phones, ipods, MP3 players, tablet PCs PDAs are often required in nursing and medical school programs. More and more doctors are starting to use the Blackberry …
Our Content, Their Device: Three Uses of the iPod – Sarah G. Wenzel, Columbia University The librarians at Columbia University have developed library content that can be used on an iPod. They created a call number guide (visual) that can be downloaded on an iPod. They made downloadable map photos of the stacks available. To …
Using 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 …
I 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 …
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 …
Jeff Wisnewski and Frank Cervone I haven’t really looked much at federated search tools since my post on using MetaLib well over a year ago. So I was very interested to hear Jeff and Frank talk about the recent developments in federated search technology and how many federated search companies are partnering with search companies …
by 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 …
Judi 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, …
Jason 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. …
Michael 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 …
I am in beautiful Monterey now, having left the Wine Country this weekend to head to Internet Librarian. The vacation was everything I needed it to be and I’m here at the conference, refreshed and excited to learn new things. Sadly, wifi is a bit hard to come by around here, so I’m blogging on …
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 …