Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0social software, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 3/9/2008 with 1 comment

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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Building 21st century librarians AND librariesinstruction, librarianship, library school, management, our digital future, reference, social software, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 3/9/2008 with 20 comments

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 …

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Tech-NO-lustlibrarianship, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 2/18/2008 with 5 comments

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 …

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Maintain IT Cookbookslibraries, our digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 2/17/2008 with 1 comment

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 …

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CTO of Americaour digital future, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 11/14/2007 with 2 comments

I think I just decided who to vote for (from VentureBeat): The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has given VentureBeat an exclusive look at his technology plan, which he plans to unveil officially tomorrow (Wednesday) before a visit to Google’s headquarters. The full plan can be seen below. It contains several new proposals, …

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Library Software Manifestolibraries, our digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 11/13/2007 with Comments Off on Library Software Manifesto

Roy Tennant has posted a Library Software Manifesto which was adapted from a talk he recently gave. It outlines the rights and responsibilities customers have in the relationship between libraries and vendors and libraries and patrons. This and John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill of Rights are two important documents that outline what we all should …

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Alternative ways to participate (or why I probably won’t be at Midwinter)ALA, free the information!, our digital future, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 11/12/2007 with 38 comments

I’ve written some posts critical of ALA in the past and have had a number of people encourage me to get involved so that I can try to make a constructive difference (instead of just complaining). So, when I was asked to be on two committees whose missions I felt strongly allied with, I said …

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Pennvibeslibrarianship, our digital future, reference, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 11/9/2007 with 4 comments

The University of Pennsylvania sure has some pretty impressive library tech folks! First they create PennTags, now they’re working on Pennvibes, which, according to this abstract from the DLF conference, looks like an exciting new way to create resource guides: Pennvibes is a framework for content delivery and organization inspired by Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes. …

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Reflections on Internet Librarian and LAUC-B Conferences (or 5 talks at 2 conferences in 1 week)free the information!, librarianship, our digital future, reference, social software, speaking

by Meredith Farkas on 11/6/2007 with 7 comments

Today [Note: This part was written Monday] will be my first day back at work after the marathon that was Internet Librarian and the LAUC-B conference. I ended up giving 5 talks in one week, which is a record for me (and probably for most people other than Roy Tennant, Stephen Abram and other similarly …

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