Monthly Archives: November 2005

64 posts

Morphing into a Librarian

Wired News: Tags Sort Out Music Mess Nice piece at Wired about tagging music collections: To compensate, programmers invented tags, which are pieces of text and graphics that live in the MP3 file and can be parsed by most jukebox players. Tags that are complete and well-organized make it possible to find the perfect song to fit the mood of your intimate dinner party or Dionysian rager. Anything short of that and your guests will long have departed by the time you’ve located the tune. Soon enough, my hobby as a music collector morphed into one of a librarian.

Mashing Up RSS

I posted about the recent report about RSS and content here, and now these notes for publishers appear at Matt McAllister’s blog, and it’s oh so HOT to think about some of them for libraries, especially: 1) Do your own mash ups. Pick up content from aggregators, tagging tools, and other sources to complement every item you post. Every news article, product review, column and blog entry should be a microportal to relevant things that help readers dive deeper into that subject. In most cases, the best links will not be related links on your own site. I think libraries […]

Prepping ALISE Poster

Thanks to all who took my LIS Bloggers survey. I collected roughly 250 responses from Bibliobloggers from all over the world. So far, the results are very interesting! The questions about why we blog, community and the use of social tools yielded some intriguing data. Watch for more here as I mess with it. One thing that rattled me at first and then seemed so incredibly right, was Steve Lawson’s post about my survey, where he copied his answers out of the survey and into a blog post. Pondering with Dr. O’Connor down at UNT over a great cup of […]

The Online Library User Manifesto at ALA TechSource Blog

http://techsource.ala.org/blog/blog_detail.php?blog_id=96 Jenny looks at The Social Customer Manifesto, points to Blyberg’s outstanding ILS Customer Bill of Rights and proposes The Online Library User Manifesto. They all are incredible. I am particularly fond of: I want to help shape services that I’ll find useful. That’s the “involve your users from the get-go” part I mentioned here: “Are you planning for a new building or for a new technology initiative? I’m sure your technolust is in check, but are you involving your community from the get-go? Is the project/plan blog keeping folks “in the know” about how their tax dollars, student fees, […]

5 Suggestions for Upgrading to Library 2.0 (or Some Easy Steps to Get Started…Really)

Please think seriously about internally blogging the plans/meetings/notes/minutes for any BIG PROJECT that is in the planning stages. This is simple buy-in as well as a way to test the waters of social software. It will keep your staff informed every step of the way. Ask for comments as well and look to start conversations. I can’t tell you how important it is to give the staff a means to talk and that it’s okay to spend some time doing so. Then, move to external blogs for various services and users. Bring together some of your newer librarians with the […]

iTunes Sharing Marketing the Collection

A few of the shared libraries that pop up at SJCPL! Bruce Connoly has an article in the new Computers in Libraries that presents an incredible idea: use iTunes built in sharing capaibilty to share music with library users! Connoly discovers other folks music librraies showing up when he opens iTunes. His thinking, sparked by the recent EDUCAUSE conference and Joan Lippincott’s article on serving Net Gen users, leads to this: We started by creating a playlist called “Schaffer Library – New Music” consisting of about 2 dozen songs. We used complete songs, not samples. Generally, we included no more […]

The Unintended Consequences of Social Software (or Putting Yourself Out There)

With all of this talk about Social Software, it strikes me how much stuff we actually put out online for others to discover, discuss and develop into their own stuff. It’s like a huge ocean of folks’ professional and personal information, that some have found to be useful and somewhat addictive! I’m amazed by the glimpses into our lives we put forth — especially with flickr. We see folks’ homes, spouses/SOs, families, children, cars, dogs, cats, vacations, as well as happy times and moments of intense heart-breaking emotion. Throughout the Public Libraries track at IL05, many of the speakers referred […]

A Note of Thanks

Isn’t it astounding how so many people have been able to have a voice, and share, and collaborate, and work toward common goals in these spaces this year? I have met so many incredible, brilliant folks. So many wonderful experiences played out as well. I am truly grateful to have been involved. What a crazy year this has been. I want to thank all the folks who have inspired me and supported me through school, blogging, conferences writing and work. You know who you are. “All I ever wanted was to know that you were dreaming…”

Changing the Way Content is Delivered

Via Skagirlie: http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001518.html How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued, and consumed The first in a series of market reports by your friends at FeedBurner. You can download this report in PDF format (300 KB) from our Web site. Stay tuned to this weblog for future installments.

On the Radar: AIM Triton

Good review at the Social Software blog: http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000893069303/ To say that AOL’s new AIM program is an instant messenger is to diminish it unacceptably. AIM Triton, as the program is now called, is an online communicator that bundles IM, email, voice chat, video chat, browsing, bookmarking, and RSS aggregation into a two-window interface. This whopping upgrade to previous AIM configurations adds welcome features, but also—disappointingly for a program now out of beta—still houses a couple of bugs…