You know that it’s bad when Eliza isn’t even here yet, and I’m in Denver, and I miss her.
*sigh*
Miss Bets as well. 🙁
Categories
Categories
First big baby gift
Our first big gift came the other day, from my friend Jen and her family, a swing!
It reminded us that we’re going to have to put together A LOT of stuff. Babies have sooo much stuff! Three showers in the near future, the first one next weekend.
Categories
Heading out to LITA Forum
Tomorrow I’ll be hitting the road, heading off to LITA Forum in Denver, CO. I’ll be heading up the LITABlog blogging effforts, pushing posts through, editing like mad, and capturing audio for the ever-popular LITABlog Podcast series.
If you’re in Denver for the Forum, say “hey”. Myself, Michelle, Karen, and Jonathan of BIGWIG will be in attendance…if you’re interested in throwing your lot in with us in hopes of changing ALA and LITA for the better, definitely stop one of us. Our plans have slowed, but not stopped. We’ve still got some rebellion in us…and we never run out of good ideas.
This is the period during the year at MPOW that we are reviewing our goals, and really looking at what the next 6 months will bring. As a portion of that, it’s up to me to try and figure out how our IT department fits in with this, given that we are mentioned in no less than 99.999999943% of the Library Wide goals. Pretty much every overarching goal for the library as a whole has some part of it that IT is going to support, or design, or maintain, or drive.
This makes for job security. It also makes for many hats.
After looking at where we are headed (new building, re-thinking the library, focusing on the students) we decided that the area that could most impact the way that we do things is metasearch. No one is happy with their ILS, and patrons just aren’t using our catalog at all…circulation statistics for books is through the floor. But foot traffic, website visits, database use, reference questions…all are up from previous years. So we’re definitely being used, just not for books. Given that the library “brand” is books, that’s worrying.
As an attempt to bridge this gap to the books, the library IT council decided unanimously to pursue Metasearch over the course of this year. The idea is, of course, to have books presented to patrons side-by-side with all of our other resources.
The gap between theory and practice in this case seems like the Grand Canyon.
Is anyone happy with a metasearch product? I know that most of us agree that the technology isn’t mature yet, but at this point implementation of a metasearch solution seems less daunting than trying to roll to another ILS. Especially since I can give LibraryFind a try without signing away my soul to the Library Corporate Masters.
Categories
Feelin’ good
So far, so good on the pregnancy. I’m in the third trimester now, getting bigger by the minute, but still have a decent amount of energy. I’m a mixture of excited and nervous in anticipation of Eliza’s arrival. I can’t wait to meet her, to see her, to know her. But of course, going into labor and being in the hospital scare me to death! I feel her kicking constantly now…she’s quite the active one. The doctor says she is a bit advanced in that respect, since she’s still quite little to be such a kicker. That’s our girl!
Categories
Welcome!
Welcome to Brand New World, the blog wherein Betsy and Jason explore what it’s like to plan for, have, raise, and generally interact with their new baby girl, Eliza. No guarantees regarding either quality or quantity of writing is expressed or implied, but we thought it might be handy to have a place for us to express ourselves.
Betsy is currently 28 weeks along, due on Dec 19, 2007.
And so here we are.
Categories
Help me build a new library
Ok, library gang: I need some help.
As I’ve mentioned before, we’re building a new library here at UTC. We are in the planning stages now, and are in the process of putting together a program plan.
Here’s the rub: the program plan that we’re coming up with is based on, of course, current processes.
My challenge to you, library bloggers (and feel free to answer on your own blogs, just linkback so I can follow): if you had a new building, 16-18 full time librarians, and roughly 20 staff members, how would you put together the best academic library possible? How many people doing what? How do we deconstruct “Systems” into something useful? Same for “Reference”? We’re not tied to existing paradigms, and are looking for radically out of the box thinking…give me your best shot at a library for the 21st century.
The point is to ignore existing skillsets of the people here, and instead build the ideal set of positions…we can fill them afterwards. But that’s hard to do from the inside. Give us your best shot!
Welcome to the gang from Digg! I think the site is finally stable now (thanks Blake). Thanks for stopping by…
In an article today on CNet, the Register of Copyright of the US, Marybeth Peters (who, let me remind you, is an Associate Librarian for Copyright Services for the Library of Congress) admitted that she was a:
…self-proclaimed “Luddite,” who confessed she doesn’t even have a computer at home. “In hindsight, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
boggle
I’m sorry, but I thought that just said that the person responsible for administering Copyright law in the US doesn’t own a computer.
Oh wait, IT DOES SAY THAT THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR COPYRIGHT IN THE US DOESN’T OWN A COMPUTER.
She goes on to say things like:
Peters indicated she was less thrilled, however, about a portion of the DMCA that generally lets hosting companies off the hook for legal liability, as long as they don’t turn a blind eye to copyright infringement and remove infringing material when notified. That’s one of the major arguments Google is attempting to wield in fighting high-profile copyright lawsuits, including one brought by Viacom, against its YouTube subsidiary.
“Shouldn’t you have to filter? Shouldn’t you have to take reasonable steps to make sure illegal stuff that went up comes down?” she said. She added, without elaborating further, “I think there are some issues.”
No, you shouldn’t, Marybeth. Filtering means that we are placing the responsibility of policing onto the providers of the service, and not on the people ultimately responsible for the infringement. It also means that we move farther from Net Neutrality, because there is a slippery slope from “monitor everything” to “oh, since you CAN monitor everything, prioritize something”.
Is there anyone at all in the actual copyright process that understand that the law is broken beyond repair right now, and that the digital world really does change the rules? Or is it just that all of our media laws are now being written and propped up by corporate interests instead of being written for the good of the people?
Categories
Yahoo Mash
Yahoo recently launched a new beta service, mash.yahoo.com, which seems to be their attempt to enter the social networking fray.
Similar in style to iGoogle, you have blocks of content (modules) that are available to add to your page. These act as you expect AJAX sorts of pages to work: you can drag and drop them around your two-column layout. To customize your page you can also add a background image (similar to Twitter) and manage the colors of your modules (background, border, text). All the expected modules are around: Flickr, Twitter, a generic RSS module.
Here’s where it gets weird. Your friends, by default, can edit your page…move modules around, etc. They can also affect it in other ways…one of the default modules is a “pet” (represented by a line drawing) that you can interact with…feed, pet, etc. You can also lick, smack, kill, and snorgle it. And you can do so to other people’s as well.
In the end, this ends up being a sort of aggregator for your virtual life, but others have tried that (correlate.us) and failed to gather speed online. The addition of a social networking component to that is interesting, but I’m not sure whats gained other than the potential strength of viral growth from spread from friend-to-friend.
It’s interesting to see what Yahoo is doing here, trying to leverage their way into the social networking world. They own two of the most popular (and most original) social sites on the ‘net…del.icio.us and flickr. I would expect them to do more cross-pollination, but at the same time I hope they don’t. Del.icio.us and flickr are two of my favorite things online, and I don’t want to see them change too much. I’m already frightened by the upcoming delicious 2.0.
If anyone wants an invite, leave your email in the comments.