Categories
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.

Categories
Library Issues

And yet more on the website redesign…

So, a bit of an update.

CMS? Check.
Install? Check.
Template? Check.

Got the rough template design done earlier this week, and while there will be lots of updates to it, the very rough structure is in place. Now it’s all about verifying the migration plan. We’ve got a test server that I’ve been doing all the experimenting on, and the question is now do we do content addition on the test server, or go ahead and move on the production server, with the risk that entails?

In the spirit of answering the question, I’m going to attempt to move my current Joomla installation to another spot on the server…fresh install, and then move the database over. We’ll see if that works, and that will answer the above question, I hope.

Next week? Actual, honest-to-god content migration begins! (I desperately hope…)

Categories
Library Issues

Next Step Blogging, take two

A very nice writeup of my ALA presentation from Karen Schneider via LITABlog…it was just a ton of fun to do, and Karen is entirely too mum about her involvement in the process. She was the instigator that got Steven, Karen C., and myself together to do the thing in the first place. Thanks, Karen! I hope to get the chance for a repeat performance next year.

Go take a look!

Categories
Books Library Issues Media

Turn it up!

I’ve got a ton of leftover stuff I still want to talk about from ALA Annual. Here’s my favorite vendor sign from the exhibit hall at ALA in New Orleans…

Large Print Audiobooks

Large Print Audiobooks? Do they just talk louder?

Categories
Library Issues

Website update #X

Well, we’ve decided to use Joomla in the library website redesign, and I’m in the process of messing with a raw template and pushing it into the direction we want to go. Found a really excellent template that is pure CSS…too many of the ones we looked at used Tables for structure. But I’ve got a pure CSS one that seems to render well in IE, and if I can just move it over to variable width rather than fixed, I’ll be set.

But the next week or two will be me = coding hell. Send cookies.

Categories
Library Issues Personal

So much stuff

I’ve just returned after a complete whirlwind of a week. I spent 5 days in New Orleans at ALA, then drove to Columbus, OH for the Origins game fair, the second largest gaming convention in the country. So much stuff to talk about, but I’m completely exhausted. So instead of writing, you all get: My Week In Pictures!

kgs taking a photocafe du monde aftermath

Michelle Boule and Paul StarkeSuchi and Jean at the swank Google Party

Neil Gaiman @ ALAapproaching cincy

NINFireworks!

Categories
Library Issues

Why Would Anyone Listen to These Three?

Next Step Blogging

Why Would Anyone Listen to These Three?

Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.

Great pic by Michelle Boule, just prior to the LITA presentation that she chaired and I, Karen Coombs (to stage left in the photo), and Steven Bell took part in. The presentation was titled “Next Step Blogging” and will be revealed in its entirety on LITABlog (as soon as Karen Schneider finishes it up…). My slides can be found here. It went remarkably well, with an absolute standing-room-only audience. Next time we need a bigger boat.

Categories
Digital Culture

Headin’ down to New Orleans…

ALA

As of tomorrow morning, I’ll be on my way to the Big Easy for the American Library Association conference. For those attending, if you see me, say “hi!” and make sure and attend the Monday 10:30 LITA Session “Next Step Blogging: Building a professional blog for your library” so that you may heckle me. It’s in the Convention Center Room 342. I’m also going to be out and attending a lot of the blogger shindigs, so I’m sure I’ll run into bunches of you.

I’m planning on blogging as much of the conference as I can, both here and over at LITABLog. There will be text, pictures, and other goodies…Stay tuned!

Categories
Digital Culture

He of Books

Betsy just sent me the coolest thing…a translation of mayan glyphs that include the symbol for librarian!

he of books

It also translates as “one who keeps, guards, or venerates.” How cool is that? I think I’ve found my next tattoo….there’s also a female version:

lady of books

These are from FAMSI, a great site dealing with the history and cultures of mesoamerica.

Any librarians heading to New Orleans for ALA this weekend that want to track down a tattoo shop and get inked?

Categories
Digital Culture

Chronicle bias?

I’m curious about the spin that The Chronicle of Higher Education puts on this particular interview with Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia. Here’s a quote from from the article:

Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, ‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

Sounds reasonable. Now here’s the headline for the article this is part of:

Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation

Ummm…yeah. He also is discouraging college-level researchers from using Britannica, and World Book, and Americana. I’m very disappointed in the Chronicle for this bit of wiki-bashing…it’s not wikipedia he’s saying doesn’t work/isn’t authoritative/is non-academic. It’s the encyclopedic format that he’s saying is not a source of university appropriate research.