My Friend Flickr is an article from Edutopia about using Flickr in a school setting. The ideas presented relate to school and public library use of as well. What I like most are the good tips about exploiting Flickr’s fairly rich privacy options to customize how walled you might want the garden to be. What’s more, Portland tech-principal Tim Lauer gets a quote.
Trendy is a dirty word in libraries, isn’t it? It conjures up thoughts of sinking resources into flash in the pan ideas, harebrained schemes and jumping off of the bridge just because the cool kids are doing it. Even though many librarians would have us be above all of that, libraries still contain all sorts of fad-driven content: The DaVinci Code, CrazyNew Miracle Diet, Oprah’s Sad Book of the Month and so forth all take up valuable shelf space. The greater world of publishing has an effect on people’s tastes and libraries respond. That’s not so radical, is it? And if not, can’t we be just as trendy in our other services and things we do?
All of that for a simple link and some images. Via del.icio.us somewhere, here’s the Web 2.0 Badge Photoshop Tutorial. In just a few minutes I made these:
If you like any of these, please, use them! To put it at the upper-right of a webpage, use something like this:
<div style="position:absolute;top:0;right:0;float:right">link to image here</div>. Here’s the image as a photoshop document if you want to make it say something else or change the color.
Librarians live in between realizing that libraries are a growing organism and embracing every next new hotness. But a simple image can spruce up your website and is a lot easier to remove than 16 copies of Tuesdays with Morrie.
Happy Friday!
This weekend at the conference I got to spend some quality time with Jessamyn. Not only did we share one of the best wifi experiences I’ve ever had, but she also turned me on to a Firefox extension I’m wild about: CustomizeGoogle. If you haven’t explored the world of extensions for Firefox (you *are* using Firefox, right?), they are little add-ons that can make the browser even more functional. Here’s a list of “The Firefox Hacks You Must Have” from Wired.
Back to CustomizeGoogle. This little guy removes Google ads from search results, gmail, gcal, and other apps in the Google suite. We’ve all become good at ignoring these ads, but the pages are much easier to look at without the extra clutter. One other nifty thing it can do (among a bunch of other stuff) is add links to other search tools to the top of a Google search.
CustomizeGoogle might be useful for school librarians and teachers that want to get students using these tools (because they are free, or to expose them to the latest and greatest) but don’t necessarily care for making those ads part of the curriculum. Then again, is preventing students from seeing real world ads not preparing them for real world web surfing? Is taking the google ads off of a public access computer in a public library censorship?
I don’t have the answers to those questions, but CustomizeGoogle is still a great way to filter your own internet experience!
Kathleen from University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamapaign left a comment about a paper she recently published. I like the UIUC doesn’t see IM and web-based chat as an either/or proposition and look forward to reading the paper.
The UIUC (Univ. Illinois @ Urbana-Chamapaign) Library has been operating IM reference alongside its chat service since Feb 2005. The Undergraduate and Main Reference libraries assisted over 900 IM users in Oct. 2006. It has been phenomenal, in many good ways and one or two stressful ways. (More staff, please?)We’ve recently published a paper which provides details on the “other, larger audience†that Aaron mentions as well as the characterisitics of the other, smaller, population which still prefers chat over IM.
Ward, David and Kern, M. Kathleen. “Combining IM and Vendor-based Chat: A Report from the Frontlines of an Integrated Service.†portal: Libraries and the Academy 6.4 (2006) 417-429. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v006/6.4ward.html (If you have a subscription at your library.)[emphasis mine].
I wonder how many people they helped through web-based chat. With those figures, I’d like to take the cost of implementing IM, and the cost of buying web-based chat software and take a look at the ROI. Maybe I should read the article! Kathleen?
Some days are rather busy.
Here are some notes I put together for my talk with some Canadian librarians this afternoon. The talk was through the Education Institute and titled “Socialize Your Library”.
I just got back from a local library and gave a talk about spyware. No link yet because I just used an old powerpoint for that.
In a few hours (2am for me!! – ha!), Sarah and I get to use Skype and Jybe to communicate with a bunch of folks in the Netherlands. Like some other IM talks I’ve done (including one to an enthusiastic audience last Friday in Edwardsville, IL) this one is called “Having A Phone”. Since we joined forced for this one, there are all sorts of good bits from Sarah in the notes, as well as a distillation of her thoughts on the new Question Point (on which I’m getting trained later this month).
I hope these get some use!
