Quick Accessibility tips for Windows and Mac

A large part of dealing with the public in the library setting is being prepared to make information accessible to everyone at any time....

A tall order indeed!

But have no fear, here are a few quick tips that I just picked up from my Information Literacy course:

Windows XP has three little accessibility features right there under their accessories that can help out in a pinch. Go to Start/All Programs/Accessories/Accessibility and you'll find a:

• Magnifier (enhances hard to read fonts simply by mouse-over)
• Narrator (reads onscreen text, not exactly THAT good but an option for a patron in need)
• On-screen keyboard (very neat, test this out! it allows you to use your mouse to click on the letters of a virtual keyboard. helps when a patron may have limited mobility)
  

Apple also has some pretty extensive accessibility features available under /Applications/System Preferences/Universal Access.

Among the cooler features available through Apple:

• Speech Recognition
• Text to Speech Synthesis
• VoiceOver
• Zoom

There is certainly far better (and more expensive) technology out there that makes information more easily accessible to all users in this digital age, but knowing these little tricks can be useful on the fly (and the cheap)!

Plastic Electronics....

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.

Gadgets and other new fandangled technology

I attended the SLA Conference in Denver over the weekend...that is, I went through the website and tracked down all the sessions that were posted online and read them! Through the beauty of time-shifting I was able to compile this list of some of the new gadgets and technology mentioned at the conference. Some of these things have absolutely nothing to do with Library and Information Technology (see George Foreman USB i-Grill) but they're just too fun not to share....

• Microsoft Surface: Basically a 30-inch digital table top surface with a screen that responds to touch and gestures and allows for “surface computing”. It used to exist only in 80's sci-fi movies. Now it's REAL.
• Golan i.Tech Virtual Keyboard: Uses laser & wireless technology to project a full-size virtual keyboard onto any flat surface which then feeds into your PDA.
  
• Clocky the alarm clock that runs away: It's an alarm clock that is built to “run away and hide” when you press snooze, which triggers it to start moving and eventually fall off the nightstand and keep going.
• Cellular Book: An Italian company has developed this portable device, smaller than a cell phone, which has a thin flexible polymer display that can be unscrolled up to 5 inches. It holds ebooks, email, podcasts, music, rss feeds, etc. Will be released in Italy first and then to rest of the world.
  
• George Foreman USB i-Grill: Grill meat in your office! Just plug it into the USB port of your computer, the USB port is its only power source, and through a web-based interface enter in your food item and it will be automatically grilled to perfection.
  
• Eye-Fi: This is a device being tested that lets you wirelessly download your pictures from a digital camera directly to your PC. It has 1GB of memory! No more hassling with plugs and cards and lots of directions and the like. My mom in particular will appreciate this one...
• Panasonic 103-inch Plasma TV: This is just a ginormous tv that costs $63K.
• USB Missile Launcher: They call this "the latest weapon in office warfare technology". I like.
• Hitachi Walkman-style Brain Scanner: Sign me up.
  
  

For more, check out Barbara Fullerton, Brian Neale and Holly Pinto's June 25th presentation 60 Gadgets in 60 Minutes.

"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....

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...

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.

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.

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.

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!