Flickr user American Graffiti (Shannon LaBelle) FlickrMailed me to ask permission to use a picture of some talking books I took. Little did I know it would end up in such a nice looking presentation.

I love seeing flickr listed in her references

Rogers, C.R. (Dr.) (2006, June 22). Record Player [1952 model]. Flickr. Retrieved March 13, 2007, from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/curtisrogers/sets/72157594173424379/
Image used with permission. Dr. Curtis R. Rogers works at South Carolina State Library.

Rogers, C.R. (Dr.) (2006, June 22). Talking Book Cassette Player. Flickr. Retrieved March 13, 2007, from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/curtisrogers/sets/72157594173424379/
Image used with permission.

Schmidt, A. (2006, December 5). Talking Books! [Oregon State Library]. Flickr. Retrieved March 12, 2007, from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronschmidt/sets/72157594407498348/
Image used with permission. To visit Aaron Schmidt’s personal web site, go to: http://www.walkingpaper.org

Wouldn’t this look great in a YA or YS department? 350€ from Italy.

[via]

No, not your hair on a Monday morning. Natural disasters! If you have some time to spare, check out Stop Disasters which is a joint project of the UN and International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

Each scenario is a different location with a specific natural hazard against which you must protect a village or town. The game does a great job of educating the player about making good decisions regarding fortifying the environment without being boring or dry. Another solid explicitly educational game to add to the list I put together at my post “quick educational gaming links.” No, maybe not as addictive as line rider, but still fun.

…make them like this. Clever, humorous, and polite. Signs like this are the best because there’s added value. The reader takes something else away from the sign other than the primary message.

Kudos to Rochelle for the inspired sign. See her post “Library Flyer: It goes to 11″ for her take, and a link to a Word document that you can download to have your very own template to alter! And importantly, are there really enough Bears fans in Wisconsin to argue loudly with Packers fans?

Here’s a goofy German car advert that takes place in a library, posted partially because it is slightly funny and partially because the librarian is so damn mean. How’d we get that reputation?

Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I went to the Multnomah County Library Catalog and found a big, bright orange RSS icon.

They’ve rolled out III’s RSS product, and have 15 feeds coming out of the catalog:

• Audiobooks,
• Children’s fiction
• Cookbooks
• DVDs
• Fiction
• Gardening books
• Graphic novels
• Music
• Mysteries
• Non fiction
• Science fiction
• Teen fiction
• Teen graphic novels
• Travel books
• Picture books/ easy readers

I subscribed to a half-dozen feeds in Bloglines to see how many subscribers are listed (not that this figure is the be all, end all) and found that DVDs is the most popular feed with 34 subscribers. Other feeds have 4-10 subscribers.

I like that they are promoting their RSS feeds in a prominent place. I also like the nice What is RSS? page they’ve put together.

Gripes? Ideally patrons would be able to create their own feeds for specific searches (like aadl.org) but, to my knowledge, this isn’t a feature available from III. I’m guessing that most “2.0″ solutions coming from vendors will be watered down like this. I’d be more than willing to eat my words though!

Having the feeds available is a great first step, and I hope to see MCL take further action integrating the library into the community by helping other organizations get feeds displayed on their websites.

The ever resourceful Librarian in Black breaks a huge story about hennepin county library’s bookspace which is an online community based around books. I’m going to copy her list of things readers can do at bookspace:

* create their own account for Book Space
* sign up for e-mail alerts on new books
* get daily book excerpts via e-mail
* listen to audio eBooks
* create book lists
* browse subjects and genres to find good books
* get e-mail and RSS feed updates on new books
* post comments about what they’re reading
* find book events and book clubs
* sign up for Book Space eNews

This site approaches a hypothetical/magical/mystical/unrealized library website I often describe in my presentations about social software in libraries. I don’t want to detract from just how neat the site is, but I see one glaring missing feature: user profiles. It is a bit difficult to have a community without meaningful interaction, and it is difficult to have meaningful interaction without people. Here’s a screenshot of what happens when you click through someone’s username:

It is great to see all of the booklists the user has created, but I was hoping to see a user’s “homepage” in the community. You know, a space for a picture, a place for conversations, all of that stuff.

One other thing I noticed is that the site isn’t limited to HCPL patrons. I’m sure this was a deliberate choice, and it was the right one. It isn’t my site, but I’m still going to encourage you to get an account and see how more of our sites should be featured.

Embedding songs:

Guess they released this functionality last month. Some songs are full length, some are a 30 second clip.

Also, will anyone tell me if they see posts from this site in bloglines? I sure don’t!

An AskMetafilter question about finding free wifi access in South Florida.

People’s recommendations? Airports and hospitals.

Also it is perhaps interesting to note the asker’s question is about “Favorite libraries or public study spaces…” but states that he’s looking for a place to run his business.

Things at the North Plains Public Library have been busy and interesting. Besides daily troubleshooting tasks, budget planning (finally done, yay!) and making some small changes around the building, I’ve been working on ensuring the library meets the requirements for full membership into the Washington County Cooperative Library Services (WCCLS). I’ve considered all of this stuff essential foundation building activities and haven’t made time for non-100% essential tasks. There just hasn’t been the time.

This time crunch highlights the value of using a weblog as a Content Management System for a small library website. The North Plains Public Library Website is a (not extremely customized) WordPress install and it does just what it needs to do. There are a few other tricksy things going on in the site too. The library tour is powered by PictoBrowser and Flickr. The Best Sellers page is the NYT Books feed rendered as HTML.

More than the time saving web gizmos that make the site, I really enjoy the NPPL Staff page and am hoping to get some photos up there at some point. Staff were not reluctant in the least to share a bit about themselves and it makes for a richer website.

One thing that was great about the process of developing this small website is that it was not a case of thinking of a neat new way to make a library website. WordPress was just the tool that made the most sense (though of course it isn’t ideal). Another web technology found its way into the library’s work flow for the same reason. Using a Google Spreadsheet to organize the collaboration of multiple employees that are infrequently in the same room works so well. No longer do multiple staff members need to keep track of multiple documents that get revised monthly. It is all centralized for us to access at will. Ideally everyone would have their own google account, but for now staff are sharing the library’s main login. Simple.

I hope this mini case study of a time strapped library helps expose the “I don’t have time for social software” excuse to be just that: an excuse for not wanting to expand and learn.