Tag: web2.0

Categories
Digital Culture

Valleyschwag 4

IMG_7689

More Valleyschwag! This month wasn’t as good as last month, but the shirt is nice. I’m not sure wtf the mini beach chair is good for…holding my cell phone? The stickers are interesting, as always, and I got a bottle opener. But it does seem a bit small, comparatively…of course, Valleyschwag is undergoing some serious growing pains. I’m willing to give them a few months to work it out.

I’m also not sold on Perplexcity…I’m a gamer, and love games of all sorts, but I’m just not sure how to take such a massively distributed puzzle. Seems like more work than fun to me.

Categories
Digital Culture

WPOpac

Wow…I’m a little late to the party, but this has such potential I thought I needed to blog it. Casey Bisson has done some amazing integration work to combine his OPAC with a WordPress blog. I’m still playing with features, but it seems like an amazing tool for refining search. Plus, it’s just a mind-freakingly difficult thing to pull off…most OPAC’s don’t play well with others. I’m completely impressed that it even works…this is like convincing Microsoft Word to integrate with iTunes. Huge props to Corey for making this work.

Categories
Books Library Issues Media

New Worldcat search

Check out the new search from OCLC…Worldcat gets Googlized, and the results are pretty good. I absolutely adore the “refine your search” options that it gives you on the left bar…Now can we finally get rid of our local catalogs? Pretty Please?

Categories
Digital Culture

Head, Library Information Technology Services

If anyone reading this blog would do me a huge favor and throw a linkback or comment or mention on your blog my way…we’re trying desperately to find a great candidate for our recently vacated Head of Systems position here at UTC. The entire job ad is here, and here’s a brief description. If anyone has specific questions, I’ll try and answer them within the best of my legal ability (the state of TN has some wacky rules about job ads)….

Reporting to the Dean of the Lupton Library, this position provides leadership and know-how to advance the Library through the development and expansion of library collections, tools and services that facilitate learning, teaching, and scholarship within a digital environment, as well as creating an infrastructure that facilitates the adoption of next generation library services.

Specific information technology related responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Provides library leadership and strategic planning for the design, integration, and maintenance of the library-computing environment and for the specification, acquisition, development, and support of digital library collections, tools, services, and support applications that facilitate teaching, learning, and research.
  • Manages a staff of 2 professionals who develop, deliver, and maintain information technology services for the Lupton Library and works collaboratively with other librarians and colleagues throughout the Library and the University.
  • Administers the Library’s VTLS Virtua integrated library system.
  • Provides consultation, support and problem resolution to ensure Library software and hardware is functional, interoperable, and serves the ongoing goal of supporting research and teaching.
  • Gathers, monitors, and evaluates usage statistics.
  • Serves as backup to other members of the Library’s Information Technology Services Department.
  • Ensures the Library’s Information Technology Services Department is positioned to take advantage of new developments that improve the patron experience and staff productivity.
  • Serves as primary Library liaison to University’s Information Technology Division.

This is a great environment to work in…the team that is in the library now is remarkable. We’re moving towards a very robust systems/IT infrastructure, and have some really great ideas where we’d like to go. Plus, you’d get to work with me! 🙂

So if anyone knows someone looking, please make sure they apply! As well, throw a link to this entry up anywhere you can, or link directly to the job ad above.

Categories
Digital Culture

Library 2.0 Generator

Really funny stuff from Dave Pattern: the Library 2.0 Idea Generator!

Categories
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.

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
Digital Culture

Work work work

All work and no blog makes Jason a cranky boy.

I’ve been spending nearly all my available neurons on the website redesign and my upcoming ALA presentation. Doesn’t help that I have a trip right after ALA as well, so time is getting shorter on the website.

As an update for anyone interested: we’ve formally decided to go with Joomla as our CMS. The support seems good, the tool seems to do everything we need, and the final decision-maker was that it seems much more intuitive than Drupal. Also, the actual text-editing for adding content is far easier, richer, and more Word-like than Drupal, which is a big deal in a library where we are going to attempt to decentralize some of the content creation. Now we’re on to info-architecture and template design….wish me luck.

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.

Categories
Digital Culture

Allow me to reiterate…

…how exactly fucked the media conglomerates are. To be more specific, the RIAA and the MPAA’s of the world who are still desperately attempting to control content in an age where it is beyond anyones control.

The latest brilliant idea? LaLa, a CD trading site that lets you post your wants and haves, matches you up appropriately with other LaLa subscribers, provides postage paid mailers, and lets the USPS do the swapping. It’s like P2P without the digital. The cost? $1.49 per disc that you swap, giving you the ability to trade old music for new at prices that almost rival AllofMP3. For less than $20 a month, you could have more new music than you could comfortably listen to, all DRM free and with the ability to control it as you see fit.

Just another thing that the RIAA can’t stop. Just wait until some rolls this up with some open source social software that allows small groups to do this without the need for postage. How could they respond if Facebook provided this functionality?