Check out my quick-n-dirty review of the new Barnes & Noble Nook eReader over at the TechSource blog.
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Just wanted to post Eliza’s first ever school picture, taken at 21 months old. I have NO idea how they got her to pose like that (or sit still for so long). The giant smile is no surprise…that’s honestly how she looks the majority of the time. The cow lick is just an added bonus! And, by the way, this is an outfit she picked out. She absolutely insisted on wearing her “chick shirt” for picture day.
We love everything about fall, and I think it’s rubbing off on Eliza. Could it be the Little People toys we’ve gotten her (trick-or-treat house and hayride set)? Could it be the awesome trip to Bear Wallow Farm in Nancy, KY where she picked out her own pumpkin, petted animals, and led all her cousins through a corn maze? Could it be the beautiful fall leaves, which she now picks up to take home, along with rocks, pinecones, and other treasures? Could it be all the books about Halloween and her impending excitement about trick-or-treating?
Who knows, but these past few weeks have been Eliza (and mommy and daddy) heaven.
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Why I love new librarians
So here at UTC we’ve hired a few new faculty and staff, and this week I’ve been blown away by one of my new colleagues. She attacked a problem that we were having, and found a solution that was elegant and awesome, all at once.
Here’s the setup: one of my reference librarians is maintaining a file that describes, for each of our databases, how you use Endnote Web…which filters, how to make it happy, etc. With dozens of interfaces, this is a non-trivial amount of info, and finding a balance of how to display it to users and keep it easy to update for the librarian became an issue.
Enter: Caitlin and Exhibit! Somehow, I had never seen or heard of this marvelous little tool! Exhibit will take data, and build you a webpage that can be manipulated and sorted in a myriad of ways. Best thing? You can use a Google Docs Spreadsheet as your data source.
So Caitlin worked to get the data file up as a Google doc in the appropriate format, got Exhibit working with it, skinned the results to fit our look & feel, tweaked the CSS, and generally went web-fu on the whole problem.
The final result is a page that’s easy for our patrons to use, and easy for the librarians to manage. Take a look at the result: here’s the Google Spreadsheet with the data, and here’s the final webpage using Exhibit.
I was really impressed with the way she handled this problem, and I can’t wait to continue to be surprised with the solutions she comes up with.
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SANDALL – Libraries and Mobile Tech
And here’s a second snippet of the two presentations I did in San Diego, this one about Mobile Technology and Libraries.
Here’s a 5 minute or so snippet from my recent presentation to the San Diego Law Library Association on Realtime web. They chose a really interesting few minutes to post…
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BiblioMashups – Reading Radar
There’s a ton of good work being done in libraryland with mashups and bibliographic data (I’m looking at you, LibraryWebChic!). But for user experience and overall awesome, I love this mashup by John Herren of just the New York Times bestseller list and Amazon APIs:
He detailed how he did it in this great blog post, and it set my mind to racing with possibilities for libraries. For one, I didn’t know that the NYT bestseller list had an API! Public libraries all over should be leveraging this on their websites, with links to their holdings.
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David Weinberger @ LITAForum 2009
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Wha’s dat?
Eliza has learned to say “What’s that?” and now we’re doomed. It’s not the dreaded “why,” but it’s pretty close. Because she asks all the time, about everything, even when she knows the answer perfectly well. “Eliza, it’s a spoon. You know what a spoon is. You’ve said it since you were 13 months old.”
She’s not saying “Who’s that?” yet, but instead points to strangers and asks “This one?” as in, what’s this one’s name? She doesn’t yet realize that mom and dad don’t know everything.
