Jim Rettig’s Travel Schedule for 2008/2009
My director, Jim Rettig, is currently the President-elect of the American Library Association. I had the idea of creating a mashup of his travel itinerary for the year to help the library community visualize where he’ll be appearing over the course of the next year. The result is below.
Here’s a link to the full version on Google Maps: http://snurl.com/29z6i
To accomplish this, I created a dedicated calendar in Google Calendar, fed the xml data from the calendar into a custom Yahoo! Pipe, and then exported the KML data back to Google Maps.
Props to the team at Lifehacker for picking up on a post of how to do this!
Need Online Storage for Library Users? Try drop.io!
A new online storage service, http://drop.io, launched recently and allows users to store up to 100mb of files. Yeah, it’s stingy storage, but great for office docs, a few images, an occasional audio file, etc. The benefits: no registration so you’re privacy is intact (as much as you want to believe that), multiple users can share the space, you can set a deletion date, users can add notes and make changes, etc.
I can really see this being beneficial to library users visit the library, create a project/document, but need a quick way to save it or send it to themselves. Yeah, there’s always Gmail, but I like the ease of use of this site and like the ability to collaborate.
Powered by ScribeFire.
FaceBook Launches “Pages”
A few days ago Facebook launched Facebook Pages, officially allowing groups, businesses, organizations, etc. to host official sites. This is a great addition in a number of ways. Previously users had to form groups if they wanted to support an organization, now there can be an official page and supporters will be displayed as “fans.” The page administrators can also find and add relevant FaceBook applications, further enhancing the page’s usefulness. At our library, we created a group a little over a year ago to help students become more familiar with the library, and it’s always been a little awkward. Now, users can come to our official pages, check the events calendar, follow suggested links, and IM with a librarian directly from the page.
Check us out at: http://richmond.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6009397930 or just search for “boatwright library” (login required). Feedback is always welcome!
Powered by ScribeFire.
New Position/Role!
As of today I am the new Emerging Web Technologies Librarian for Boatwright Memorial Library at the University of Richmond! This is the type of work I’ve been eager to focus on for a longtime now. I’m entering this job after being in the access services world for 11 years, beginning with serving as the Stacks Supervisor at Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University as well as Head of Access Services at Virginia Commonwealth University and here at the University of Richmond. My new priorities focus on serving as the library webmaster as well as exploring service delivery through web 2.0 tools, mobile devices, etc. This means I get to play with and test all of the cool stuff that’s constantly being released on the web! The more beta/open source, the better!
My initial priorities will be preparing to move the library website to the university’s new CMS - Cascade Server from Hannon Hill. I’m also finalizing a wiki that our customer services group will use to organize all of the procedures and policies that desk staff need access to. We’re also going to re-examine our IM service over winter break and see if Meebo might be more suited to our needs.
Anyway, I’m really excited about the new possibilities that exist in this position and I’ve got a long list of people out there to talk with about their experiences with various technologies and platforms, so don’t run if I come calling!
Library 100 Book Finding Tutorial
Our library recently produced this video to show during our Library 100 freshmen orientation sessions. It’s pretty funny and shows the talents of two previous Access and Delivery student employees! Nick Vogel in our Media Resource Center filmed and edited the video.
New Levels of Spam
At work we have recently been discussing the problem of spam sent through our web forms (formmail.pl). Apparently somewhere people are paid to sit and fill out web forms in order to submit unwanted advertisements. Now let’s take it a step further. Below is something that was submitted as a question via the internal eBay messaging system regarding an item I’m auctioning:
dear friend:
We are www.superll.com. we are distributer,we have many wellknown
products such as dell,ibm,sony,panasonic,philip,samsung,nokia,nikon,olympus,canon,
fujifilm and so on.
there are many sorts of digital products in stock for sale.
they are original and in good condition,also one year international warranty with
the manufacters.
We do business such as drop ship and wholesale.
if you are interested in our product please have a look on our website
and contact us by following means.thanks.
Web address : www.superll.com
Email : superll8@hotmail.com
Msn : superll8@hotmail.com
thanks.
After a quick Google search, it appears that others have received this as well. What’s funnier is that the spammer’s eBay account purchased two (very cheap) items in June in order to gain a small amount of legitimacy. Oh well, they probably wouldn’t be doing it unless the occasional person fell for the scam.
Unfortunately spam appears to account for 80 - 90 percent of all email traffic, depending on the source. Due to this, many are predicting an eventual transfer of messaging to a combination of IM and social networks. However, I’m sure spammers will only come up with a more sophisticated solution. It’s the web’s version of the Cold War.
Interlibrary Loan, Visualized…
A few months ago a subscriber to ILL-L posted a message about using a paper map in his office to help both library colleagues and customers better understand ILL service by marking the institutions where they borrow from and loan to. I thought this was a great idea and asked the staff in the UR ILL office if they could try something similar, which they did. However, when Google rolled out the new My Maps service as part of Google Maps, I instantly thought about transitioning our paper map to an online version, something we could easily share with the entire UR community to help interlibrary loan service to be better understood, both from a borrowing point of view as well as lending, since both are ILL’s core mission.
Yesterday I met with our ILL staff and showed them the initial map I created. We then reviewed what content to include and how to add it. We decided to include all borrowed and loaned items since January of 2007. Most of the data is now entered, but there’s some that’s still outstanding, but I’m very impressed with the results. Here’s a link to the map (we’re also working on an embedded version that we’ll host locally):
UR Interlibrary Loan - Borrowing and Lending
Let us know what you think!
You got SpiderCard in my Printing Credits…
Yes, just as popular as those delicious peanut butter cups, printing credits are heavily consumed by most UR students! Thanks to staff in UR’s networking group, they will soon be able to purchase printing credits online using funds from their SpiderCard, which has been a long requested feature. It will be a very easy process as a student will only need to login to their account on BannerWeb, where they will see the option to add printing credits. In case their SpiderCard balance is too low, they have the option to add funds to their Spidercard account from a credit/debit card, or electronic check before making the purchase.
Up until now students have only been able to purchase printing credits at Boatwright Library’s Main Service Desk, which over the past few years has grown to be one of the busiest services (in conjunction with laptop circulation) the library offers. Last fall semester alone, we collected over $13,000, just from printing! For the foreseeable future we’ll continue to allow students to make cash purchases, but will probably cap it at a low amount for those emergency printing situations. This is an exciting new service, both for library staff and our students!
BibMe.com!
Surprise, another web 2.0 tool for students! Seriously, this actually looks very useful and handy. BibMe.com allows users to create bibliographies by searching internal databases of books, magazines, journals, websites, newspapers, etc. Initially I find the search feature to be limited and they are pulling their articles from FindArticles.com, which is certainly not going to meet the information needs of today’s college students and other researchers. However, I fully appreciate that it’s free and that it offers manual entry of bibliographic data allowing you to complete a bibliography. It’s also very simple to use and straitforward.
In comparison, NoodleBib is another tool geared toward students and offers much more in-depth tools and features and uses a wizard to help build each citation. Unfortunately I can see a student who’s expecting something fast and easy to get easily bogged down and frustrated. At my university, NoobleBib has been well received by our students which is a great thing and is hopefully improving their ability to identify sound resources for their work, but I can see the simplicity of BibMe and other freely available competitors to be an enticement for switching.
Essay from ACRL - Changing Roles of Academic and Research Libraries
ACRL has released a report highlighting the changes academic libraries in particular are experiencing due to the changes in the information marketplace and is the result from a meeting held late last year.
“This essay derives from a Roundtable on Technology and Change in Academic Libraries, convened by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) on November 2-3, 2006 in Chicago.”
This essay offers a lot of practical insight into the changes that are happening all around us due to the exponential growth starting with the development of the web, just a little over fifteen, short years ago. It has come to the point that it is no longer feasible for libraries to continue their traditional role as gatekeeper.
“At the same time, however, traditional structures of authority and qualitative certification, which the library embedded both in its own collection and in the scholarly apparatus it supported, have been engulfed in a flood of information from multiple sources, disseminated primarily in digital form, and retrievable by means that the library, and hence the academy, no longer control.”
Have libraries been supplanted by the web? Many of the younger librarians I know regularly visit Wikipedia and are addicted to Google when it comes to locating and consuming content. I think the following paragraph needs to be thoughtfully considered throughout the academic library community as many users are considering their libraries irrelevant to their work.
“Among young people in particular, however, there is a tendency to consider the library as primarily the domain of the book; fewer now regard the library as either a primary source of information or as a means to discover and access knowledge that exists beyond its own physical collection. The recent OCLC report, College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, indicates that most undergraduates either do not visit their campus library or do so only one or two times per year. Librarians and faculty members alike complain that young people too often conceive the research process as beginning and ending with an Internet search. Several have observed that it takes only one dissatisfying experience with a library to solidify a student’s conviction that the Internet provides more efficient, productive, and enjoyable paths to information.”
These are just my initial thoughts and I’ll post more as I am continuing to digest the essay. What are your thoughts?
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/future/changingroles.htm
-
-
About
Professional and personal ideas, thoughts, and comments from your favorite tech-brarian. Actually, that's probably not a valid term, but hey, I'm not sweating the small stuff!
TechTips - My Other Blog -
My Twitter Feed
-
Blogroll
-
Photos
-
Recent Music
-
Other Places
