Category: Technology

Categories
Books Media Technology

Ebooks explode this week

This week, ebooks were all over the tech news, and there were at least two huge announcements. Well, one announcement, and one not-so-secret launch coming Monday.

The announcement was the Google Book mobile service, which gives users access to 1.5 million books from the Google Book scanning project OCR’d and formatted for mobile screens, like those of the G1 and the iPhone. In one fell swoop, Google has made these platforms the home of the largest electronic book library in the world…the Amazon Kindle store currently has 230,000 books, while Project Gutenberg has just over 100,000.

The upcoming announcement is that almost certainly on Monday, Amazon will announce the Kindle version 2. Leaked photos make the v2 look sleeker, more updated, and with much better physical form-factor. What I’m most excited about is the possibility of v.2 of the software, which better UI and possibly more features. As long, of course, as the software is ported back to the original hardware.

Are these the things that will finally push ebooks firmly into the public consciousness? Time will tell, but I can hope.

Categories
Library Issues Technology

December Techsource post

In my December Techsource post, I decided to do my Year End Top 5 Technologies list. Head on over and take a look, and tell me if you agree. đŸ™‚ Here’s the teaser:

In the spirit of the bazillion other  year-end lists you will see over the coming weeks, I decided to list my Top 5 Most Influential Technologies of the year. These are the technologies that I think librarians need to be aware of, examine, and find uses for in their library. Not all of these started this year, but 2008 was  the year they broke out and became necessities in many people’s lives.

Categories
Personal Technology

Obama’s Acceptance Speech as cloud

Been awhile since I did one of these, and this definitely captures something special. I love the way that the cloud came together to say “new america yes”.

Categories
Library Issues Technology

The Open Library Environment

Sat through a webcast today updating people on the Open Library Environment project, a joint effort between a ton of amazing libraries to build a modern, open source library system. While I wish them the best of luck, I have to say that I have my concerns about the project.

My largest concern is that too many cooks really do spoil the soup. I’ve never seen anything truly great come from committee, and I worry that there are far too many hands in this to really push it where it needs to go. Really amazing breakthroughs and products are almost always the design of one or a very few people, pushing to make the thing inside their heads real.

With that said, I hope this project produces something amazing and proves me wrong. What would I want out of a ground-up library system? A modular design, with logical connectors that allow for data sharing…and that data sharing uses open, web standards (not another “library” standard). Support for a centralized cloud database, with local records being limited to unique, archival items in the library’s special collections. Support for open sharing between catalogs, as well as sharing data between other websites and services, built in. A standards-based OPAC. Built in support for mobile use, including the backend systems. A repository system built in, to hold digital objects of any sort…if I want to catalog a video, let me embed the digital copy right into the system.

There’s lots and lots more. I’m hoping they get it right…I’ll be watching, and hopefully helping where I can.

Categories
Personal Technology

A new, new homepage…and Sweetcron

Sweetcron homepage

So not that long ago, I decided that I wanted a homepage that more accurately tracked me online, and so I posted about hacking together a FriendFeed widget that fed my homepage.

Then, earlier this week, I discovered Sweetcron. A self-hosted php/mysql lifestreaming solution, that supports themes and all sorts of customizations. I had to give it a try, so here it is: my new, new homepage.

There are still a TON of things to figure out. I’ve not wrapped my head all the way around how Sweetcron is handling the feeds, so I’m not happy with the way it’s dealing with things like delicious. But I did more-or-less get the skinning, and was able to create custom feeds for my blog, claimid, and a few others. I’ve not added all my feeds yet, because adding a feed requires futzing with the code to make it display properly, and to make it look nice you have to write some custom css for each feed as well.

So why do it? Well, the big deal for me is that now I have the data…my lifestream is ending up on my server, in my mysql database, that I can backup. Maybe after messing with this for awhile I’ll head back to a simple solution like friendfeed. But I’m hoping with the plugin architecture and such that this garners a little development community and they starting building really cool things for it.

Take a look, and see if this solves any problems for you or your library.

Categories
Personal Technology

Which Timbuk2 bag for me?

I’m seriously considering getting a Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger bag for my forthcoming travels. I love my current laptop bag (a Waterfield sleeve with strap) but I’m needing something with a bit more room. The only thing I’m undecided on, really, is the color/pattern. So, blogosphere: which of the below do you like best? It’s clear that I like the dark orange, and earth tones…but I just can’t make up my mind. So: which do you like best? Vote in the comments!

timbuk2timbuk2timbuk2timbuk2timbuk2timbuk2

Categories
Library Issues Media Technology

Marketing in the 2.0 on Slideshare

Finally got my slides up on Slideshare…got to say, I love Slideshare a lot, but the fact that it won’t take Apple Keynote files is just wrong. If you use Keynote, you have to export as a PDF, and upload it.

In any case, here’s the Slideshare. You can download the PDF from them as well.

Marketing in the 2.0 :: Libraries and the Cluetrain

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing library)
Categories
Books Library Issues Media Technology

Reflecting on the Kindle

I have a new post up on ALA Techsource regarding my take on the Kindle, and what I think of it after living with it for 6 months.

Click on over and take a look, and leave a comment, especially if you have a Kindle as well!

Categories
Library Issues Technology

Marketing in the 2.0

Finally! My presentation from TennShare 2008 on Marketing in the 2.0 is up. Had a hell of a time getting the audio and video synced, and even now it falls a little apart near the end of the presentation, but it works! Hope people find this useful, or at least interesting. Original quicktime can be downloaded from my blip.tv page. I did the presentation in Keynote, and the powerpoint translation of it is pretty bad…the fancy effects go away, and it’s not nearly as elegant as Keynote. So for now, you all get the video version. If you really, really want the PPT, let me know in the comments.

Categories
Library Issues MPOW Technology

Guest computer access

Thanks to my coworker Andrea for the wording below…we have a quandary at MPOW, and we’re trying to work out the best answer. We need your help in seeing other ways of handling the situation. So: to the question!

The context:
Here at UTC, we require our patrons to login with a username and password to use our library’s public computers. Current UTC students, faculty, and staff have these logins, but other library guests (alumni, patrons who have purchased courtesy cards, people who walk-in off the street) do not.

At present, our Reference Librarians use a guest account to login courtesy card patrons (alumni, retired faculty/staff, those who purchase a courtesy card etc.) and faculty/staff/students of other universities. Courtesy Card patrons can also check out a laptop computer for 3-hour in house use at our Circulation Desk. For everyone else, we have set up three “research stations” — computers without logins that have no productivity software and can only access the library databases and .edu/.gov websites. No general Internet access is available on these.

Unfortunately, we consistently find all of our computers in use during the fall and spring semesters. And, we find that some of our guest users monopolize our equipment to the exclusion of our primary patrons: UTC students, faculty, and staff. We are also getting some pressure from our campus IT people to not allow “anonymous” logins to the campus network – which is essentially what our use of a generic guest login provides.

The Questions:
We’d like to know what others out there in a similar situation have done (other than buy more computers). Have you cut off access to guest users completely? Have you implemented time or access limits through some technological or manual method? What has been the reaction from your guest users to the policy change? How about from others on campus?

Thoughts?