Thanks to digitizationblog, I just found an amazingly cool blog that I wanted to share with you. Digitization 101 is a blog created by Jill Hurst-Wahl for Hurst Associates. Hurst-Wahl writes some fantastic posts on just about every aspect of digitization (from the practical to the existential), including such topics as “finding digitization vendors”, “Digital …
I just found this very interesting website via TangognaT. John Kupersmith, a reference librarian at UC Berkeley has collected usability survey data from various libraries as well as the library terminology used on library websites to create Library Terms That Users Understand. In it, he suggests best practices for library website usability testing and the …
Ever since I started this blog, I’ve made a big effort to post regularly. Unfortunately, I slacked off last week. Well, I don’t know if packing, putting our junk into storage, and moving to the other side of the country is considered slacking, but I do feel badly about falling out of the loop and …
I was very excited to hear, via Research Buzz, that Firefox has been downloaded more than 25 million times! That’s fabulous! Hopefully we’ll see it replacing Internet Explorer more and more in libraries. Most of the library bloggers I know seem to use Firefox (or Safari), but I really haven’t seen it on library public …
The Linux Librarian has a great post on why open source and blogging are so great: This is why open source works. From my comments, from yesterday, from James Robertson: Hi, I’m the main BottomFeeder developer. What system are you trying the app on? What specific version did you try? Thanks This is why open …
Thank you Librarian Avengers for spelling out what most of us say to ourselves day after day as we navigate library websites and library catalogs: most library websites suck. In one of the classes I took for the MLS, we had to critique library websites, and we certainly found no lack of terrible websites to …
Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt (the Batman and Robin of the library blogging world) will be presenting The Library Blogosphere: Toward a Working Taxonomy at the Online Social Networks Conference, which is an amazingly affordable and accessible conference for busy (or unemployed) people. According to Michael, they’ll be discussing “what libraries and librarians are doing …
I know this article isn’t new, but it’s new to me and it may be new to you. Jon Udell wrote a concise and tremendously insightful article in InfoWorld entitled The network is the blog, in which he defines a blog in terms of the network it is connected to (the blogosphere). Like the “sound …
Feedmelegal is a blog all about RSS and blogging in the legal field. The author has a great list of links to tools for the growing world of RSS. Included are search feed creators, feed aggregators, feed creators for HTML sites, RSS to email tools, etc. All of this is meant to supplement his 16 …
I’ve applied and interviewed for jobs that I have not gotten. I’ve gotten used to rejection letters and all that. Usually I don’t get my hopes up, so it’s not so bad when I don’t get it. But for the job I interviewed for in the Chicagoland area two weeks ago, I did get my …
I’ve had many interviews, both in the social work and library fields. Some have gone great and some have been disasters. But the disasters haven’t always been mine. I’ve read plenty of books that talk about how to do well in an interview as an interviewee, but are there books for teaching people to be …
If 2004 was the year of the blog, I think 2005 will be the year of the Wiki. Wikis first came to my attention in 2003 in the form of the Wikipedia, which I thought was a fascinating and fabulous idea. What I didn’t know at the time was that Wikis have been around since …
If you haven’t already, go check out A9.com, a yellow pages for the future. More a reference work than simply a “phone book”, A9 allows users to not only search the yellow pages but it lets you leave notes on the places they find, it shows you what else is in the neighborhood, and sometimes …
Are you torn between using furl, del.icio.us, and the growing number of similar sites? Well worry no longer friends! Steven Cohen just posted about one of the cooler bookmarklet tools I’ve seen. Delicious Furled Tea Bookmarklet Maker allows users to post websites to several bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, furl, Connotea, etc.) at the same time. It …
Right now, my hubby, Adam, and I live right near his parents and, like many people in our generation, Adam is their tech-support guy. Since we’re moving to Chicago in two weeks, we’ve both wondered how his parents would fare without his frequent support visits. When I saw a review of Surviving PC Disasters, Mishaps, …
For those interested in developing open source software based on the patents offered for free by IBM and others, PatentCafe has come out with OSS Patent Search Engine, a natural language patent search. It’s a new search engine and only has the 500 IBM patents in its database so far. It’s free to search the …
NPR this morning had a great story about how Brazil is switching 300,000 government computers from Windows to Linux. Not only are they switching to Linux, but they are dropping all proprietary software. The Brazilian government wants access to the source code of the software they use and control over their information (which includes security …
Steph at TechnoBiblio wrote about an interesting observation at a recent panel discussion she attended: The final panelist came forth with a statement that seemed to take the audience by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have… “Users don’t care.” They don’t care that the subject specific databases will bring back more relevant hits. They don’t …
So many great library related things to listen to online! Libraries of the Future From WBEZ (soon to be my public radio station — woo hoo!) a fabulous discussion about why people are still visiting libraries in the digital age and what innovative things libraries are doing to keep patrons coming back. [real audio] Greg …
TangognaT turned me on to Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café from Burningbird. It’s mega meta-post on folksonomies and the Semantic Web. Technorati tags, controlled vocabulary versus folksonomies, the spam and abuse factors, Clay Shirky, Rebecca Blood, Tim Bray, etc. Insanely comprehensive and quite thoughtful insights on the subject. If you’re going to read …