| No Kindle 2 Under The Tree This Year |
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Apparently Amazon has delayed the release of the Kindle 2 until 1Q of 2009. If the leaked images of the next-gen version that made the rounds in October are real, it looks much more polished that its predecessor. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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Comments (0)November 21, 2008
| If You Build It, They Will Come |
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And then you’ll have to build it again. The architects of the new Europeana digital cultural library designed the site to handle 5 million hits (to oversimplify, think “visits”) per hour. They got 10 million instead, so the site’s now down a day after it launched. They hope to have Europeana back up by mid-December. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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November 6, 2008
| Libraries … They’re Just Financial Black Holes |
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Why is it every time there’s a budget crisis, the first step they take to cut costs is nuke the library system? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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October 28, 2008
| Google Books Library Project Settlement: $125 Million [UPDATED] |
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Two weeks ago I blogged about how Google’s lawyers are such busy bees. Well, one case down and a zillion to go: the NY Times reports that Google has settled the class-action suit filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the Google Books Library Project for $125 million. (Wall Street Journal has some info, too, if you have a subscription.) I case you’re interested, that’s less than 1% of Google’s cash on hand. That’s like a rounding error, right? Update, 2:30 pm - Google’s response, from the Official Google Blog. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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August 22, 2008
| Why is This Woman Smiling? |
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Maybe it’s because she’s Internet Famous. I bet most of us at Jenkins are a bit conflicted about this. It seems like overkill to arrest a 20 year old over 2 books that would cost less than $35.00 to replace. You revoke her library card, order replacement copies of the books, and be done with it. It’s the cost of doing business as a library. Maybe you moan about the tragedy of the commons for a few minutes, but that’s about it. On the other hand, if you’ve worked in a library for any length of time, then you know how hard it is to get people to take the whole returning-the-book thing seriously. It’s like people don’t believe that it’s stealing. Librarians have horror stories about lost and stolen library books. Ten years ago when I was a contractor-librarian at the EPA office here in Philly, someone gave me a book he purchased at a yard sale for fifty cents. It had “Property of EPA Region 3″ stamps all over it. It was still in circulation. The person running the yard sale was a federal employee of the EPA. Did I even contemplate talking to EPA officials about theft of federal property? Nah … I was just glad to get the volume back. It was old and out-of-print. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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April 14, 2008
| CIL 2008 - Web 2.0 Services for Smaller Libraries |
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Overall, the conference was full of great speakers and interesting topics. As Lee Rainie had stated in his Keynote speech, this is the “era of user-generated content” - aka Web 2.0. People are beginning to take on this mindset that the internet is the computer and are storing things online such as documents (Google Docs), playlists, pictures (Flickr), etc. Keeping all the technology changes in mind, we ask ourselves where should a Library’s funds go? It should go to both Librarians and technology because people who go to libraries expect both to be top-notch. Web 2.0 for Services for Smaller, Underfunded Libraries - presented by Sarah Houghton-Jan
I’ll be posting more notes from the sessions I attended, so keep an eye out for those! Technorati Tags: cil2008 |
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Submitted by: RayAna Park, Former Web Developer
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I had the privilege to attend January 17, 2008
| Never thought you’d be teaching? |
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Everyone plays multiple “roles” in everyday life. What did Carla mean by this? Well as soon as you get up in the morning, you may “play the part” of a wife or husband, then a commuter or driver; even at work, you are a supervisor or colleague, a meeting attendee… It doesn’t mean you’re “pretending” to be someone you’re not. Certainly your demeanor as a raging driver doesn’t carry over into your attitude at work or I’m sure your gait and gesture commuting through the city is different from taking a stroll through Fairmount Park. Well, teaching is also a “role” that you take on and have the audience believe you are the teacher even though they may see you in other roles. As Carla continued her presentation, she didn’t miss a beat, and demonstrated how to handle bratty students. All of this was both funny, fun, and effective, not only in showing us what to do but also in keeping us awake. She also told us about the 3 different types of learners which helped us, as Jenkins’ staff, understand why our CLE classes are so well received. We appeal to all 3 learning types by: demonstrating each exercise on the projector screen, talking the students through the steps of the exercise, all while the students are actually going through the exercise on their own. Good to know and good to keep in mind when we are teaching! Some quick tips for public speaking:
Carla List-Handley, SUNY Distinguished Librarian Emerita and creator of “Performance Workshops“, was the guest speaker for TCLC’s workshop: Teaching as Performance at Rosemont College on January 9, 2008. Carla List-Handley received her B.A. in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin and her Master of Arts in Library of Science from the University of Iowa. |
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Submitted by: RayAna Park, Former Web Developer
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How many people, including myself as a Web Developer, predicted that they would ever have to stand in front of a classroom to teach? I never thought I would, and to most of the Librarians at the Tri-State College Library Cooperative’s (TCLC’s) “Teaching as Performance” workshop, the responsibility of teaching also came unexpectedly but with the territory. Not only did the workshop give good insight on how to speak effectively to an audience but through a live demonstration, we experienced how a good and bad public speaker can effect our learning. Without giving too much away, these are some of the highlights of Carla’s presentation that my colleagues and I have put together. If you would like to know more, I’d encourage you to September 25, 2007
| Banned Books Week - it’s not what you think! |
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Why is it called “Banned Books Week”?? Well since 1982, this annual event is supposed to remind us not to take the simple pleasure of reading for granted.
I remember The Catcher in the Rye was almost banned from being read in my classroom. It’s the second one in the list of Banned and/or Challenged Books… Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century and it’s my favorite to this day. So maybe I’ll re-read that one :) What are you gonna read? |
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Submitted by: RayAna Park, Former Web Developer
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The week of September 29 through October 6, 2007, marks the 26th anniversary of Banned Books Week, ALA’s annual celebration of the freedom to read.April 19, 2007
| The Future of the Catalog |
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Tim Spalding of LibraryThing started out with his talk entitled “The Fun OPAC”. Tim quotes Casey Bisson who said that the OPAC was broken in three ways: usability, findability and remixability. Tim argues that that is not enough - he also thinks it’s missing funability. He gave us an example from Big (the movie) where Tom Hanks says that one of the toy ideas isn’t fun. Tim says that everyone is a toy company now. Users expect the web to fun and easy. If a site doesn’t change from visit to visit it’s boring - and our OPACs never change!! Unlike other speakers on this topic, Tim thinks we need to bring the catalog out front and center. He says so used to hiding it behind our websites because we’re ashamed of it - and we can’t change it (which is very true). So, how do we make it fun?
Next up - Roy Tennant!!! Roy was worried that we were all there to see Tim, but everyone stayed to hear what he had to say (well, I left a tiny bit early to make a lunch meeting - but I really really really wanted to stay). Roy started by telling us that he refused to use the “O” word. And then told us that catalogs have no future - you’ve gotta love him! Roy does clarify that when he says catalog he is not referring to the ILS (which libraries still need for internal operations). He is no suggesting the death of the ILS just that we rework the finding tool which is the catalog. He sees a future where there is no local catalog and in his future, all discovery will take place on the network level. If however it stays on the local level, few people will want to limit their search to just books - they’re going to want something that can pull together all of the info on a topic no matter what format it’s in. This means that we need to look at new models of finding information. In the new world order, discovery will be disaggregated from the ILS (Google, Open WorldCat, meta search, others). This makess sense because users typically want to find anything they can on a topic. Now we have to explain that you have to look in different places for articles. People don’t like pain so they want to search in one spot and if they can’t then they won’t use your tool. Most ILS lack cool new features and fall behind our expectations and the market doesn’t look great that we’re going to see these things anytime soon. Open WorldCat is offering some of the cool tools we want (facets, integrated article index, clean easy to read display) all for free. They also have WorldCat Identities tool which allows for every author to have a page. Maybe the answer is that WorldCat replaces our union catalogs. OCLC already has all of our data (I don’t quite follow this - not being a cataloger - but it sounds good to me). Another tool that they have is Fiction Finder (both this and Identities like the things Tim was talking about with LibraryThing). These tools are great at exposing the richness of the records we’ve been painfully creating over the years (and this is true - i had a horrible time creating MARC records for one of my assignments). At this point I had to leave for lunch - but it all makes sense to me and I’ll keep an eye out to see if Roy’s predictions come true! |
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Submitted by: Nicole Engard, Former Web Manager
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| PennTags Demo at CIL |
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Rob Cagna from University of Pennsylvania came to talk to us about PennTags. The last time I saw this it was a bit rough - it has grown up a lot since it’s birth!! PennTags is like del.icio.us for members of the Penn community. They can save pages from anywhere on the web, from the catalog and from campus resources to PennTags and share it with the world. They can also keep their bookmarks private if they’d like. Penn has also released bookmarklets to allow people to tag things from their browser without logging into PennTags first (like with del.icio.us extension for firefox). One neat feature of PennTags is that the users can make projects - which are files of different documents in a particular subject area. This way you can see just a new books list (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/project/14404). Projects can also be made private if the user prefers - Rob doesn’t think that many people have done this. If you look at this record in the UPenn catalog, you see an Add to PennTags link at the bottom and below that you’ll see the tags and annotations from PennTags - very very very cool!! This is done with Oracle and Perl - you can email Rob if you want the more techie details. One way this has been used is as an on-demand subject guide. Reference librarians create a project and add links. They then send the project URL to the patron! Students can use these projects as bibliographies - or working bibliographies as they write their papers. And because every page has an RSS feed the patrons or students can subscribe and see new additions as they’re added!! I am very impressed - and a bit jealous!! If you like what you see, Rob is looking for partners to help work with the code and make it open source! Email them at: penntags@pobox.upenn.edu. |
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Submitted by: Nicole Engard, Former Web Manager
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