I was asked by the LITA Top Tech Trends committee to help them test out a new idea for TTT…having a Trendster talk about a single tech trend on video, and throwing it up on YouTube. I agreed, and the result (after a little editing on my part) came out really well. Take a look:
If this is the sort of thing you’d like to see more of from LITA, please…leave a comment! Let us know what you think.
We have two tenure-track librarian positions now open at the UTC Library, and YOU (yes, you!) should apply. We’ve taken a new direction with our Serials and Electronic Resources positions, and are looking for two excited, knowledgeable, and dynamic librarians to help move us into the digital future.
UTC Library is a phenomenal place to work, but it’s not for the meek. We move fast, change fast, and get stuff done. We’ve got crazy smart and active people like Colleen Harris, Virginia Cairns, Caitlin Shanley, Lane Wilkinson, Bo Baker, our awesome Dean Theresa Liedtka, and more. I’ve never been in a library so many incredibly smart and energetic people. Do you want to join us? Apply!
Electronic Resources and Serials Librarian
The Electronic Resources and Serials Librarian ensures optimal and accurate access to subscription resources in all formats, including databases, electronic journals and books, print journals and other continuations.Digital Integration Librarian
The Digital Integration Librarian implements public facing digital tools and services, such as link resolvers, that connect electronic and other library resources for patrons.View a chart comparing requirements and qualifications for each position
View the library’s organization chartA review of applications will begin on July 5, 2011 and will continue until the positions are filled. Interested applicants should submit 1) a letter of interest, 2) a current CV, and 3) the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses of three references including the professional relationship of each reference to facultyvitae@utc.edu.
This coming Monday, June 6th, Apple will give their annual keynote at the World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) 2011. This is traditionally the stage for announcements about software and operating systems…things that developers for the Apple platforms (iOS and OSX) are centrally concerned with.
This year, in an unprecedented move, Apple’s press release for the WWDC keynote includes details about what they will present, and it centers around three things: the next version of OSX (code-named Lion), iOS 5, and a brand new offering called iCloud. From the press release:
At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.
Practically nothing is known at this point about iCloud. There has been speculation that it could be everything from an enhanced media locker in the vein of Amazon Cloudplayer or Google Music Beta to something like enhanced syncing API’s for developers. Apple has been making deals of some type with the major record labels, which means that some form of music sync/streaming is likely, but details will make all the difference about whether it’s more compelling than the above services.
It’s no secret that Apple’s success with web-based services is almost the exact inverse of its success with hardware…nearly every web-based service that Apple has launched has sucked. From iTools, to .mac, to MobileMe, in every case the promise has been much more impressive than the delivery. For each of the pieces that make up MobileMe, other online services provide the service better. Calendar syncing and eMail are both done better by Google, online storage and public web access is done better by Dropbox, and MobileMe gallery is outdone by YouTube and Flickr. Services that are uniquely Apple’s, like Find my iPhone, are well done, but even in this case it’s not universally good…for instance, Back to My Mac is only great when it works. Which is almost never.
I love nothing more than putting on my “make shit up” hat, so I thought I’d give prognostication a shot for what Apple is doing with iCloud. How can Apple move in the right direction with its online services? Here’s what I hope to see from iCloud:
First off, I expect that iCloud will be a suite of services in the same way that they have chosen to brand their iWork and iLife suites. iCloud will be analogous to these local services…the branding for all of Apple’s online offerings. I’m hoping that the reason that Apple is choosing to announce iCloud at the same time as Lion and iOS 5 is that they are all tied together. Or, rather, that iCloud becomes the glue that ties iOS and Lion together, merging a number of local services from iOS and OSX and allowing for seamless data transmission and interaction. Think Dropbox, but deeply integrated into the filesystem, allowing for documents to be edited on any platform, music to be played anywhere, whether mobile or desktop.
If they do this, and then further allow access to the service via API so that app developers can tap directly into your iCloud for file storage, Apple will seriously have changed the game. Not only would it solve syncing issues, but it could also theoretically be a solution for backup…all of your documents and settings for your desktop and mobile devices could be backed up as they are synced. Even better for things like games, iCloud could enable syncing of game states, so that you could play Angry Birds on your iPod Touch, then pick it up on an iPad and have the game pick up just where you left off.
One last prediction…if this is the route that Apple goes (and I hope that it is), one thing that I would love to see in iOS 5 is the addition of account management/multiple accounts on iOS devices. Syncing only works if it’s tied to an identity, and it’s very hard to manage identities on shared mobile devices without some form of account management. There’s no technical reason that iOS can’t support multiple accounts on a single device, and it would actually simplify some parts of the syncing issues for Apple.
We’ll find out everything on Monday…I’m looking forward to seeing if I’m right about any of it.
I could do these dishes I could try
To do these dishes
I could decide to do these dishes
Time to decideor i could go to Australia
And carry a bowie knife
and wear my hair like Hepburn parted on the side
and learn card tricks and physics and buy
everyone drinks and take boxing and try
eating things only with chopsticks and finally
be like a person I think you might likeI could do these dishes
I could try to do these dishes.
I could decide to do these dishes
I should decide to do these dishes
Time to DECIDE….Fuck it
I’m gonna go to Australia— Australia, by Amanda Fucking Palmer
I am completely thrilled to be able to announce that in February of 2012, I’ll be doing one of the keynotes for the Victorian Association for Library Automation (now more formally called VALA – Libraries, Technology and the Future Inc.) 2012 Conference. While “Victorian Association for Library Automation” sounds a bit like a group of steampunk library cosplayers, it is actually an incredibly forward-thinking organization that helps foster and understand the use of technology in libraries and other information professions.
So come February 6-9, 2012, I’ll be in Melbourne, Australia for the VALA 2012 conference. It will be my first time visiting that particular continent, and I can’t wait to meet with all the great Australian, New Zealand, and other librarians that will be attending.
I decided that the only thing worse than a writing project is a writing project without a deadline…so here’s me self-imposing a deadline via public announcement. For the last month, I’ve been working on revising my Library Technology Report from April of 2010, Gadgets & Gizmos: Personal Electronics and the Library.
In April of this year, publication rights for the text reverted to me. Rather than just re-releasing it as is, I wanted to update it with more information about each of the Gizmos discussed in the original text. In addition, I’m adding a chapter related to to the iPad and tablet computing…believe it or not, when I delivered the text to TechSource for publication, the iPad hadn’t been released. So it’s pretty clear that any text about personal electronics has to take the new tablet space into account.
Here’s the interesting bit…whatever this becomes, it’s not going to be published by a “traditional” publisher. I’m still working on the specific details, but you can bet that it will be available as widely as I can possibly make it. As long as I can get the look/feel right for every eBook store, I will be making sure that it’s on the Amazon eBook store, the Apple iBook store, the B&N store, etc. I’m also going to be searching for a print on demand option for libraries that wish to have a print copy. I will also be making it available for free, under a Creative Commons license, through my website…although I’m also going to try to find an interesting way to make that happen.
To be fair to TechSource, I’m already under contract for a Gadgets & Gizmos 2.0, to be delivered and printed in 2012…so this is going to be Gadgets & Gizmos 1.5, in a sense. So in 2012, there will be an updated version from ALA, but in Summer 2011, there will be an update from me, directly. I get to test the waters of electronic self-publishing and hopefully learn a lot along the way. Stay tuned for more information, coming soon.
Head over to Library Renewal to see what I think about the recent news that Amazon may be turning on ePub support on the Kindle. It should tell you something that the original title of the post was “ePub don’t mean shit”.
So the twitterverse exploded a bit ago with the report that Amazon had talked to publishers about submitting ePubs instead of the traditional mobi/AZW format to the Amazon eBook store. This quickly became “OMFG AMAZON IS GOING TO ALLOW EPUBS ON THE KINDLE”. Let’s back up here just a second, and take a closer look at what the report actually says:
It seems many publishers have been told by the company that in the near-future, they should be submitting their books to Amazon in EPUB format and not exclusively MOBI. They also went on to let us know that Amazon was indeed planning something BIG and that soon the Kindle ereader will have the full capability to read ePub books.
Is this possible? Sure…all it would take is a quick software patch and every Kindle in the land could read ePub files. The questions we should be asking, though, are: What does it mean for patrons and for libraries? Why would Amazon do this?
The second question is easier to answer: If true, Amazon is almost certainly positioning themselves for the release of their Android Tablet. There may be good reasons to move to ePub as a result of that, including support for much more complicated media types. The article linked above says:
MOBI/AZW is known to have similarities with the ePub data structure and has most of the code embedded into its format
which is not quite true…both are markup languages, but ePub is a much more modern filetype, and is a combination of open standards (XHMTL for content, XML for structured metadata and such). If Amazon does have a tablet up their sleeve, moving to ePub could be necessary for those plans.
The first question is harder, but the answer is, almost certainly that ePub don’t mean shit to libraries or to patrons. Why? Our good friend DRM. It is extraordinarily unlikely that Amazon will replace their own DRM with that used by the library industry (and by others in the eBook world), Adobe Digital Editions. If you aren’t familiar with the various DRM used in the industry, I’ll refer you to my previous post on eBooks, Filetype, and DRM.
So what this means is that while the Kindle might get ePub abilities, it almost certainly won’t get Adobe DRM capabilities. There is no chance that Amazon is going to give people the ability to purchase books from Barnes & Noble and load them onto their Kindle…which is what it would mean if they did turn on Adobe DRM compatibility. So you still won’t be able to load non-Amazon DRM’d ePubs.
Given an ePub-ification update to the Kindle, you should be able to load and read ePubs without DRM. This is almost completely meaningless, because if you had a collection of non-DRM ePubs you wanted on your Kindle, you could just use Calibre to convert and load them.
So for libraries & patrons, the ability for the Kindle to use ePub is a non-issue. It doesn’t give us any ability that we don’t already have. The only advantage here is to Amazon, and only if they are positioning themselves for a new device that needs ePub. Let’s not get too excited about this.
In the next 5 days, I’m speaking for two different state conferences that someone out there in bloglandia might be interested in.
First, I’m heading out to Minneapolis, MN for Academic & Research Library Day. I’ll be presenting a keynote tomorrow morning entitled The Everywhere Patron, where I’ll be talking about the expectations of patrons vis a vis personal electronics and services. I’m really excited about the talk…if you’re going to be at ARLD please say hello!
After that, I head over to Stamford, CT for the Connecticut Library Association conference. There, I’ll be doing a presentation on eBooks, both in terms of content, containers, and the challenges for libraries during the transition to digital texts.
If you are at either presentation, come introduce yourself and say hi!
Eliza and the Sewanee Children’s Center are participating in the St. Jude Trike-a-Thon to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Not only is the Trike-a-thon an opportunity to give to an awesome charity, it’s also part of a campaign that teaches riding safety. You can sponsor her in any amount, no matter how small.
Eliza participated last year, and was determined to take part, even though at the time she could barely reach the pedals of the trikes. She rode 2 laps last year, which was a huge accomplishment…she still talks about it a year later, and is excited to be doing it again.
Below is a Paypal button connected to my Paypal account. After the Trike-a-Thon this Friday (Apr 29, 2011), I will deposit any money in the account directly to the charity, and I will match the first $50 of donations dollar-for-dollar. Your donation is a flat amount, not a per-lap, and any amount, even $1, is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your generosity, and for helping both Eliza and St. Jude.
There’s been a ton of discussion around the web about the Kindle/Overdrive library deal over the last week, but this thread over at Librarything is full of some real gems. If you haven’t read it, go there and take a look.