Category: Digital Culture

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Digital Culture Library Issues

Google @ ALA

Here’s Google’s video relating their experience at ALA 2006. Included are shots of the booth in the exhibit hall, a little video of the party they held at Muriel’s, and snippets of interviews they did with librarians at the party. You can see the swanky glowing drinks that I talked about earlier.

I was interviewed, but evidently didn’t make it into the video…but they did put up a picture of myself and Charles at the booth:

me @ ala

The most amusing thing to me about the picture? Google put these up as a Picasa Web Album, but I’m linking to it from my flickr account. Why? Picasa doesn’t give you easy linkability…I could copy image location and paste in the URL, but that’s not a friendly user experience. Flickr EXPECTS you’re going to hotlink their images, and gives you the URL to do so.

Picasa also doesn’t give you an easy way to browse to a specific picture…this was pic 166 of over 200, and when I went back to find it, I couldn’t be bothered to click next picture 165 times. There must be a jump to picture option for usability, guys. What else…oh yeah…no multiple sizes to pick from, so the resolution you get is just what’s there. I love Picasa as a local picture manipulation solution, but Google is a long way from flickr for online experience.

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Digital Culture

Valleyschwag #3

Valleyschwag posterMy Valleyschwag showed up late last week, and it was a great one:

Stickers Plaxo shirt

But the best schwag was this:

messenger bag

One of the rockin’ messenger bags! The poster was also a neat surprise, and very well done. Very happy with this month’s schwag…here’s hoping that it keeps up! For anyone who loves the Web 2.0 explosion and is a tech-head, this is a fun once-a-month surprise.

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Digital Culture

Google Cubes

Google Cubes

Another pic I’ve been meaning to get to…these are little promo items from the Google Bash at this year’s American Library Association Annual meeting in New Orleans. They were at the bar, and when you ordered a drink the bartender would pop one in along with the booze and ice. When you do that, they light up:

Google Cubes all lit up

They have a couple of electrodes on the back that need to be bridged with some conductive item before they light up. Clever, and they gave the party a decidedly sci-fi aura, with everyone walking around with different colored glowing drinks.

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Digital Culture

Blue in Kentucky

Most people have heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, but few have probably heard of the blue people from Kentucky. Seriously. Blue. People.

They’re known simply as the “blue people” in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.

There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one old-timer that “their blood is just a little closer to their skin.” But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the “blue Fugates ” lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate’s descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.

I grew up just north from Hazard and Perry County, and heard about these genetically interesting folks growing up. I never met anyone with this genetic quirk, but there are still some in the area. Here’s a really well-written story about them, how they came to be so blue, and how they’ve dealt with it. Story is old, but fascinating.

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Digital Culture

ClaimID

If you are interested in Identity online (and I believe that this is the next big area of the net is identity management across platforms), ClaimID is now off beta, and available for signup. Check out Fred’s announcement for info on the launch.

I’ve been using ClaimID for some time now while it was in beta, and the development team has done an amazing job integrating information issues/needs into the tool. Take a look, play with it, and see if it does what you need.

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Digital Culture

Blogger Bash 2006

President-Elect of the ALA, Leslie Burger, had a wonderful gathering last night for Library Bloggers and librarians from the Katrina effected gulf coast. Hearing their stories, seeing their faces, and hearing the statistics (millions of books lost, hundreds of people without jobs, dozens of libraries destroyed)…truly sobering. The recurring message:

Do. Not. Send. Books.

They have more books than they can process…if your library is doing a book drive, stop it. Instead, send money…for repairs, for staff, for new buildings. That’s the need, and after having driven through the affected area, the need is more than I can say.

IF, and only if, you have to buy books, you should use the Amazon wishlists they’ve set up:

Dewey Donation System

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Digital Culture

Gaiman!

Neil Gaiman @ ALA

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Digital Culture

ALA Day One – Google!

Tales, Tips and Tools: Book Search, Scholar and the Library Team
Ben Burnell, Google Library Partnerships

Once more: notes in the form of a bulleted list!

  • Larry and Sergey’s idea started as a library concept…digitize the library, make it rankable.
  • Google Print Book Search divides books into three main IP categories: Public Domain (hey, I won a hat for knowing who Emily Dickinson was!), In Print, and “other”.
  • Here’s a sobering thought: over the Google 5 (the five libraries in the Book Print project), 60% of the books in the libraries are held in only one of the participating libraries.
  • Another sobering statistic: of the Google 5, only 20% of the books in the library are in the public domain.
  • Example from Google Book Search: Earl Robichau, in a picture in a book, is discovered when his great nephew find his name in Google Book Search.
  • 5% of books are currently in print.
  • The “snippet” view is designed to legally display and make findable the other books…those not in print and those not in the public domain.
  • So there are three ways to look at a book in Book Search: Full Book View (Public Domain), Snippet view (Unknown copyright status), Sample Pages view (In Print, agreement with publishers).

    • Google Scholar

  • Will provide article results, book results, and citation results.
  • Great quote: It’s better to be frustrated than ignorant.
  • At AASL, Google handed out 200 invitations to the Google Librarian Newsletter…and got 3000 signups in a week.
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Digital Culture

More ALA love…

…over at LITABlog! We’ve got a veritable army of bloggers covering the convention, and we’ll have tons of info flowing in over the next 3 days.

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Digital Culture

ALA Day One – Website as a Branch

First program/panel: Website as a Branch. The room is standing room only, so I’m forced to sit way back on the floor, which limits my view of the slides. The notes below are largely from the verbal portion due to that.

Presentation by Broward County Library in Florida. Short bullet point summary:

  • Put yourself in the user’s place when you start the redesign.
  • Then ask your users what they want.
  • Identify user sets that you want to focus the website towards.
  • Struggle with IT on campus wide issues.
  • Identify technology and how to best use it to present information to users.
  • All users agreed that navigation is a key issue.
  • Staff needs more efficient way to update site.
  • Cross-referenced navigation…users don’t want to have to backtrack in order to go to another portion of the site (in web speak: multiple entry points for each piece of content).
  • How do you usability test distance users?
  • Update/discard content…not something that librarians are NOT very good at.
  • Keep in mind that users only tell you when something is wrong. If no one complains about the website, it’s doing ok.
  • Empower librarians AND make them responsible for the content…where they should be.
  • Give users warning of change, and allow them options for some time.