In library studies we spend a lot of time thinking about how we will be expected to deliver information in the future. This means that we have to start thinking NOW about how best to structure our digital info for delivery via, say, contact lenses. Heh.
Showing posts with label Library technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Library technology. Show all posts
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Walkie Talkie over the Internet w/YackPack Widget!
Today's post was going to be all about these fun things called ning's...
["Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds."]
....but, like a little baby distracted by shiny things, I got SO excited about this new widget that I encountered while perusing library ning's that ning's will just have to wait!......
YackPack is a new widget that allows you to walkie talkie over the internet! I discovered it when I stumbled upon Library 2.0's ning. There is no software required, no installation of anything, no registration. All a person has to do is click on the button and depending on how it's set up you can either record and send a message OR talk live with the LiveVoice feature.
This is a nice little video that'll tell you ALL about it. Love it.
["Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds."]
....but, like a little baby distracted by shiny things, I got SO excited about this new widget that I encountered while perusing library ning's that ning's will just have to wait!......
YackPack is a new widget that allows you to walkie talkie over the internet! I discovered it when I stumbled upon Library 2.0's ning. There is no software required, no installation of anything, no registration. All a person has to do is click on the button and depending on how it's set up you can either record and send a message OR talk live with the LiveVoice feature.
This is a nice little video that'll tell you ALL about it. Love it.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
An Information Commons for the Public
The Information Commons (IC) concept has been implemented mainly in the academic area for some years now. In general, an IC is a space that brings people together for informal collaborative social learning with access to technology aides.
In its physical manifestation it takes the shape of a shared space with modular furniture, high-speed computers, wireless access, group study areas, workstations and various new technology toys to play with. In its virtual manifestation it may be a library wiki where people can exchange ideas online as well as access electronic documents, etc. North Carolina State University's Learning Commons is a good example of both.
This concept isn't exactly new but surprisingly though, the literature on the subject has been devoted entirely to the university setting. I am hard-pressed to find any literature on how the public library might create an IC.
If the public library is to evolve it will need to give serious thought to implementing this concept. I understand funding restraints for new technologies, but the concept goes well beyond simply purchasing high-speed internet access, some technology gadgets and a few tables and chairs. The IC is a mind-set. And this mind-set is free but in many cases, directly opposing traditional public library rules.
The IC is intended to be a comfortable open place for people to gather, perhaps have lunch, enjoy their coffee, while exchanging information and relating to each other in a regular in-door voice. It is a place to have fun and learn while trying out new technology such as the wii. (Right now the ALA and Syracuse University are researching "the public good" served by libraries that offer gaming programs (more on that in another posting!). I suspect as gaming in the library starts to take hold, IC in the public library will too... )
To illustrate, while interviewing a local library manager recently, I was horrified as she stalked over to a group of teens reading quietly at a table and barked for one student to "sit right" in his chair! This....is not the Information Commons way. All people, including young people, should have a fun open place to gather and share in information indulgence and exchange without intimidation. This is not to say there shouldn't be guidelines (as opposed to rules) but even I was terrified of this librarian and I certainly didn't want to go back. This is also not to say that many public libraries haven't sough to implement the IC concept, it is only to say that many still have a long way to go.
In its physical manifestation it takes the shape of a shared space with modular furniture, high-speed computers, wireless access, group study areas, workstations and various new technology toys to play with. In its virtual manifestation it may be a library wiki where people can exchange ideas online as well as access electronic documents, etc. North Carolina State University's Learning Commons is a good example of both.
This concept isn't exactly new but surprisingly though, the literature on the subject has been devoted entirely to the university setting. I am hard-pressed to find any literature on how the public library might create an IC.
If the public library is to evolve it will need to give serious thought to implementing this concept. I understand funding restraints for new technologies, but the concept goes well beyond simply purchasing high-speed internet access, some technology gadgets and a few tables and chairs. The IC is a mind-set. And this mind-set is free but in many cases, directly opposing traditional public library rules.
The IC is intended to be a comfortable open place for people to gather, perhaps have lunch, enjoy their coffee, while exchanging information and relating to each other in a regular in-door voice. It is a place to have fun and learn while trying out new technology such as the wii. (Right now the ALA and Syracuse University are researching "the public good" served by libraries that offer gaming programs (more on that in another posting!). I suspect as gaming in the library starts to take hold, IC in the public library will too... )
To illustrate, while interviewing a local library manager recently, I was horrified as she stalked over to a group of teens reading quietly at a table and barked for one student to "sit right" in his chair! This....is not the Information Commons way. All people, including young people, should have a fun open place to gather and share in information indulgence and exchange without intimidation. This is not to say there shouldn't be guidelines (as opposed to rules) but even I was terrified of this librarian and I certainly didn't want to go back. This is also not to say that many public libraries haven't sough to implement the IC concept, it is only to say that many still have a long way to go.
Monday, July 9, 2007
"Hipper Crowd of Shushers"
The New York Times Sunday Edition had a nice little article about the new emerging library crowd in the Fashion & Styles section. "Today's librarians?", it asks, "Think high-tech party people".
Yes...yes that sounds about right...
I found the part about trying to guess the names of cocktails (based on book titles) by their dewey decimal no. TOTALLY geeky but shamelessly amusing and probably a good study technique I should try....
Yes...yes that sounds about right...
I found the part about trying to guess the names of cocktails (based on book titles) by their dewey decimal no. TOTALLY geeky but shamelessly amusing and probably a good study technique I should try....
Friday, July 6, 2007
Adventures in Podcasting
Who knew it was so easy?! The other day I decided to make myself an official member of the podcasting culture. It's all the rage you know and libraries across the country are offering up all sorts of podcasts like the Denver Public Library and well, the New York Public Library has an impressive array as you can imagine.
I figured I would start by adding an extra little element to a faux website on storytelling that I'm working on for class. (Incidentally I make a lot of faux website's for school...) Anyway, the aim was to create a few podcasts of my witty and engaging stories and post them to the faux website.
In the end I encountered two problems: 1) LISTENING to myself. I'm tempted to add a disclaimer to all recordings: 'Warning, midwestern accent may be harmful to your ears' 2) Getting over the stage fright of speaking into a microphone. It's not exactly the same as sharing stories in the bar with friends...and beers.
This means though that the technical part of all this was EASY! So here were the steps I took after a bit of internet research:
1) Went to Best Buy and bought the cheapest PC desktop microphone in stock ($12).
2) Plugged the microphone into my computer.
3) Downloaded Audacity, the free audio editor, yet another free open source software.
4) Downloaded the Lame Mp3 Encoder.
5) Found something to say. (I was going to share a quick story about my adventures in Miniaturk but didn't have enough time to get over the microphone intimidation. Instead, I read a cheeky poem by Ann Bradstreet, The Author to her Book.)
6) Opened up Audacity, pressed record and read into the microphone.
7) Pressed stop.
8) Clicked File/Save Project As...
9) Clicked File/Export to Mp3
10) Posted the audio link to my webpage
Now, you can just post the link as a regular old hyperlink to your webpage, but I highly recommend adding a nice little player instead so that users don't have to download the files, they can play them automatically. For this, much thanks to Ms. McAdams is due for providing the cut & paste code and really easy tutorial for the Mp3 audio player on the site.
The next step, I figure, is to play around with adding music to the background of the vocals. This may be slightly trickier but I found this great site that has fun free background music (that is, free for non-commercial use).
Stay tuned...
I figured I would start by adding an extra little element to a faux website on storytelling that I'm working on for class. (Incidentally I make a lot of faux website's for school...) Anyway, the aim was to create a few podcasts of my witty and engaging stories and post them to the faux website.
In the end I encountered two problems: 1) LISTENING to myself. I'm tempted to add a disclaimer to all recordings: 'Warning, midwestern accent may be harmful to your ears' 2) Getting over the stage fright of speaking into a microphone. It's not exactly the same as sharing stories in the bar with friends...and beers.
This means though that the technical part of all this was EASY! So here were the steps I took after a bit of internet research:
1) Went to Best Buy and bought the cheapest PC desktop microphone in stock ($12).
2) Plugged the microphone into my computer.
3) Downloaded Audacity, the free audio editor, yet another free open source software.
4) Downloaded the Lame Mp3 Encoder.
5) Found something to say. (I was going to share a quick story about my adventures in Miniaturk but didn't have enough time to get over the microphone intimidation. Instead, I read a cheeky poem by Ann Bradstreet, The Author to her Book.)
6) Opened up Audacity, pressed record and read into the microphone.
7) Pressed stop.
8) Clicked File/Save Project As...
9) Clicked File/Export to Mp3
10) Posted the audio link to my webpage
Now, you can just post the link as a regular old hyperlink to your webpage, but I highly recommend adding a nice little player instead so that users don't have to download the files, they can play them automatically. For this, much thanks to Ms. McAdams is due for providing the cut & paste code and really easy tutorial for the Mp3 audio player on the site.
The next step, I figure, is to play around with adding music to the background of the vocals. This may be slightly trickier but I found this great site that has fun free background music (that is, free for non-commercial use).
Stay tuned...
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Amazon.com and the Library Catalog....so happy together
This is great. I first discovered that universities in the UK are using a script so that anyone on the university system, searching Amazon.com on their Firefox browser, will see a link indicating the status of the book they are searching for at the university library. They will be told whether or not its available, if it's available in electronic format, on loan, etc., and users can link right into the catalog from Amazon to reserve it.
Turns out its on this side of the pond too and a number of public libraries have put this into action. In fact our very own Loudon County Public Library System offers this download for its patrons, as well as the DC Public Library and the Mongtomery County System. (my own university library however hasn't done this...sigh)
How does it work? Well, luckily I have a super genius brother and he puts it this way:
"Greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox that lets you overlay additional content over an existing web page, usually using JavaScript. It's like scribbling on a page of newspaper."
This article with screen shots elaborates further on it: "A simple Talis script detects ISBNs on a page at Amazon and uses this to query a shared database of library holdings. Greasemonkey is then used to write information on libraries holding the book back onto the Amazon page (note the '@libraries' box, not normally evident in Amazon results)".
userscripts.org has a large collection of these library lookup scripts and in theory, creating a customized script for your own library can be as easy as modifying one such as Carrick Mundell's for the Seattle Public Library to reflect your own catalog details.
Turns out its on this side of the pond too and a number of public libraries have put this into action. In fact our very own Loudon County Public Library System offers this download for its patrons, as well as the DC Public Library and the Mongtomery County System. (my own university library however hasn't done this...sigh)
How does it work? Well, luckily I have a super genius brother and he puts it this way:
"Greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox that lets you overlay additional content over an existing web page, usually using JavaScript. It's like scribbling on a page of newspaper."
This article with screen shots elaborates further on it: "A simple Talis script detects ISBNs on a page at Amazon and uses this to query a shared database of library holdings. Greasemonkey is then used to write information on libraries holding the book back onto the Amazon page (note the '@libraries' box, not normally evident in Amazon results)".
userscripts.org has a large collection of these library lookup scripts and in theory, creating a customized script for your own library can be as easy as modifying one such as Carrick Mundell's for the Seattle Public Library to reflect your own catalog details.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Image Classification Fun!
Recently the Wall Street Journal (my new favorite paper) featured an article Computer Scientists Pull a Tom SawyerTo Finish Grunt Work (June 27, 2007; Page B1). The gist was that computer scientists have come up with a new way to tackle the massive task of classifying images in large databases by making a game of it. Anyone who has tried to find an image using yahoo image search or google image search or any other large database of images, will have an idea of just how important this classification work is!
In this game, two random users will be shown one image and are asked to type in words to describe it. When their words match they "win" and the word is chosen as a descriptor on the assumption that there is at least a level of congruency. Of course this leads to a lowest common denominator situation and the classification will tend to remain relatively basic.
Labeling images is not a process so easily resolved by games but the idea is extremely interesting. Dr. Choi, a professor of mine, illustrates the complexity of the matter by referencing the classic 'is it an old lady or a young woman' picture.
Complicating matters further is cultural context. A study was done* whereby a three panel cartoon drawing was shown to young British and South African children. The first panel shows a young child wearing a ball cap, standing under a sun, holding a watering can over a flower. The second panel shows the child, under the sun, with his hat off and liquid droplets coming off his head. The final panel shows the child sitting down, under the sun, shirt off, pouring the watering can over his own head.
The British children understood the panels to be related and to be telling a story depicting a child watering a plant, the sun making him hot, and by pouring the water over his head, cooling himself off. The young South African children on the other hand were not inclined to view the pictures as related and took each one as a separate entity. They also did not understand the liquids to be water or sweat and thought it was perhaps blood and overall the entire scene made little sense to them. Interestingly, even in my own class there was debate over the last panel, some thought he was pouring the water over his head to cool off, others thought he got the idea that he wanted to grow like the flower.
So you see....classifying images...not so easy.
*Levie, W. Howard. Research on Pictures: A guide to the literature. In The Psychology of Illustration, edited by Dale M. Willows and Harvey A. Houghton, 1987, p.
In this game, two random users will be shown one image and are asked to type in words to describe it. When their words match they "win" and the word is chosen as a descriptor on the assumption that there is at least a level of congruency. Of course this leads to a lowest common denominator situation and the classification will tend to remain relatively basic.
Labeling images is not a process so easily resolved by games but the idea is extremely interesting. Dr. Choi, a professor of mine, illustrates the complexity of the matter by referencing the classic 'is it an old lady or a young woman' picture.
Complicating matters further is cultural context. A study was done* whereby a three panel cartoon drawing was shown to young British and South African children. The first panel shows a young child wearing a ball cap, standing under a sun, holding a watering can over a flower. The second panel shows the child, under the sun, with his hat off and liquid droplets coming off his head. The final panel shows the child sitting down, under the sun, shirt off, pouring the watering can over his own head.
The British children understood the panels to be related and to be telling a story depicting a child watering a plant, the sun making him hot, and by pouring the water over his head, cooling himself off. The young South African children on the other hand were not inclined to view the pictures as related and took each one as a separate entity. They also did not understand the liquids to be water or sweat and thought it was perhaps blood and overall the entire scene made little sense to them. Interestingly, even in my own class there was debate over the last panel, some thought he was pouring the water over his head to cool off, others thought he got the idea that he wanted to grow like the flower.
So you see....classifying images...not so easy.
*Levie, W. Howard. Research on Pictures: A guide to the literature. In The Psychology of Illustration, edited by Dale M. Willows and Harvey A. Houghton, 1987, p.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
The Book Trailer
Book trailers, says my fresh new copy of Book Forum, are really taking off this year. Check out Ian McEwan’s sexy/glam little number for his new book On Chesil Beach. SURE i feel a bit skeeved by an old man reading aloud 'nipple' but still it's flashy. and darn it i, and my fellow generation 'whatever's', are suckers for flashy...
Seems to me, as these things proliferate, library websites can easily take advantage of these free and dynamic and, again, free, book marketing tools by, at the very least, linking to the trailers through recommended reading announcements.
Better yet, libraries can create a fun web place for homemade videos. This boy put a charming little trailer together for a school project on his favorite book. While the sound quality isn't very good, it's cute, he used The Cure (Robert Smith is timeless), and he clearly read the book, evaluated its points, and is expressing what he learned to others.
Libraries can reap major benefits by encouraging kids to use their mighty techy skills to advertise their favorite books.
Seems to me, as these things proliferate, library websites can easily take advantage of these free and dynamic and, again, free, book marketing tools by, at the very least, linking to the trailers through recommended reading announcements.
Better yet, libraries can create a fun web place for homemade videos. This boy put a charming little trailer together for a school project on his favorite book. While the sound quality isn't very good, it's cute, he used The Cure (Robert Smith is timeless), and he clearly read the book, evaluated its points, and is expressing what he learned to others.
Libraries can reap major benefits by encouraging kids to use their mighty techy skills to advertise their favorite books.
Where it begins....
Recently the world of librarianship was all a twitter about the ALA premiere of "The Hollywood Librarian", the first feature film dedicated to librarianship. Unfortunately, in the interest of full-disclosure here, I and my other librarian pals ended up missing the premiere. This was due, in large part, to my erroneously thinking that meeting for happy hour would be a good pre-movie event. Turns out that for a group of poor twenty-somethings, the ALA convention simply cannot compete with friday night beer specials. I fully expect my ALA membership to be revoked any minute.
In any case it turns out that we will not be able to see the movie now unless a local library decides to show the film for a fee. This of course defies many rules of logic, the most obvious being that the public library is here to serve those who don't have the pocket change to, say, support propaganda films about librarians. It would seem this marketing plan hasn't matured beyond the sort I devised as a child whereby I charged admission to family members to watch me being cute. My brother, incidentally, never bought it (even though I did a killer rendition of the Bangles' walk like an egyptian) and frankly neither will library patrons.
For a well-rounded commentary please see Norman Oder's review for the Library Journal, The Hollywood Librarian: Nice Idea, Jumbled Execution, Dubious Marketing Plan .
In it he mentions a comment by Karen Schneider who suggested that "a great librarian movie" would include "Jessamyn West installing Ubuntu."
And in that sentence this blog was born. I was delighted, amused, and informed by that video of a librarian who easily overcame the wee problem of having been donated computers (yay!) with no operating systems (BOO!)! It dawned on me that we all have a lot to share on the matter of new technology and its creative implementation in our libraries.
My thirst for exchanging ideas on this topic has no bounds and frankly I'm running out of time in class to raise my hand. SO I will continue to search for signs of clever implementation and uses of new technologies in our libraries and post them here. I also invite, nay urge, anyone who has their own story to share to write me!
In any case it turns out that we will not be able to see the movie now unless a local library decides to show the film for a fee. This of course defies many rules of logic, the most obvious being that the public library is here to serve those who don't have the pocket change to, say, support propaganda films about librarians. It would seem this marketing plan hasn't matured beyond the sort I devised as a child whereby I charged admission to family members to watch me being cute. My brother, incidentally, never bought it (even though I did a killer rendition of the Bangles' walk like an egyptian) and frankly neither will library patrons.
For a well-rounded commentary please see Norman Oder's review for the Library Journal, The Hollywood Librarian: Nice Idea, Jumbled Execution, Dubious Marketing Plan .
In it he mentions a comment by Karen Schneider who suggested that "a great librarian movie" would include "Jessamyn West installing Ubuntu."
And in that sentence this blog was born. I was delighted, amused, and informed by that video of a librarian who easily overcame the wee problem of having been donated computers (yay!) with no operating systems (BOO!)! It dawned on me that we all have a lot to share on the matter of new technology and its creative implementation in our libraries.
My thirst for exchanging ideas on this topic has no bounds and frankly I'm running out of time in class to raise my hand. SO I will continue to search for signs of clever implementation and uses of new technologies in our libraries and post them here. I also invite, nay urge, anyone who has their own story to share to write me!
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