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→ Portland Ciy Council Hopeful Amanda Fritz is meeting citizens in coffee shops around the city. Portland <3s coffee. Nice idea of going where the users are.
→ Push Button Coffee Shop.
It’s like a delicious, delicious Transformer. How about a push button library branch? A next generation bookmobile?
I’m really honored to have given a talk at the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies meeting today.
To save COSLA the trouble, I’ve uploaded my presentation here:
The Read/Write Web Opportunity [silly large PDF].
It mainly is a bunch of pictures, so if you have any questions about, say, why there’s a picture of a small Italian alley, email me.
Thanks to COSLA for having me and being a great audience!
I’m really honored to have given a talk at the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies meeting today.
To save COSLA the trouble, I’ve uploaded my presentation here:
The Read/Write Web Opportunity [silly large PDF].
It mainly is a bunch of pictures, so if you have any questions about, say, why there’s a picture of a small Italian alley, email me.
Thanks to COSLA for having me and being a great audience!
The Arizona Memory Project is using Flickr to solicit pictures from the public. Nice!
The Arizona Memory Project is using Flickr to solicit pictures from the public. Nice!
Here’s another conversation about libraries I didn’t mean to get myself in. This time it was with a woman that was an avid library user growing up. While growing up, she confessed, going to the library with her mom was the highlight of her weekend. She’d get books and movies and loved the librarians. This habit continued into adulthood where she developed friendly relationships with librarians at a Boston Public Library branch. “They’d even drop off items my stoop on their way home,” she said. Nice.
Flash forward a few years. She asks about what kind of stuff I do as a librarian. I mention reference work and she gets a puzzled look on her face. “Wait a minute. People can ask random questions at the library?” “Yeah, anything, really,” I replied. Her jaw dropped and she asked, “Don’t you feel used?”.
Keeping OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries and Information Sources report in mind, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that even this active library user had no concept of the library as a place for information. There’s a disconnect between how most libraries see themselves and how others see libraries. Clearly this is only one anecdote but if we extrapolate a bit it is another indication that we have serious public relations and image issues.
With no cajoling from me, at the end of the conversation she was excited to visit her local Multnomah County Library branch to use her “own private search engine.”
Here’s another conversation about libraries I didn’t mean to get myself in. This time it was with a woman that was an avid library user growing up. While growing up, she confessed, going to the library with her mom was the highlight of her weekend. She’d get books and movies and loved the librarians. This habit continued into adulthood where she developed friendly relationships with librarians at a Boston Public Library branch. “They’d even drop off items my stoop on their way home,” she said. Nice.
Flash forward a few years. She asks about what kind of stuff I do as a librarian. I mention reference work and she gets a puzzled look on her face. “Wait a minute. People can ask random questions at the library?” “Yeah, anything, really,” I replied. Her jaw dropped and she asked, “Don’t you feel used?”.
Keeping OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries and Information Sources report in mind, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that even this active library user had no concept of the library as a place for information. There’s a disconnect between how most libraries see themselves and how others see libraries. Clearly this is only one anecdote but if we extrapolate a bit it is another indication that we have serious public relations and image issues.
With no cajoling from me, at the end of the conversation she was excited to visit her local Multnomah County Library branch to use her “own private search engine.“
My friend Sarah Houghton-Jan, the Librarian in Black, just scored a new job with an amazing job title: Senior Librarian for Digital Futures. I look forward to seeing how she shapes San José Public Library’s digital future.
SJPL, you’re lucky to have her! Congrats, Sarah!
→ Brain-computer interface for Second Life.
A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines moving his/her right and left arms.
I want my JETPACK!!
→ MySpace and Skype to partner
Both Skype and MySpace say they will deeply integrate the other into their services. On every MySpace page, members will have a chance to click on a link and make a Skype call to another member
Wow. Just wow.
In my presentations I like to say that people using social software sites like to do library type work for fun. LibraryThing might be the most glaring example of this, but there’s also AskMe. And there’s organizing and adding metadata on del.icio.ius and flickr.
Speaking of flickr, I’ve now another example. There’s a group called ID Please in which members post all sorts of insects, plants and animals for others to identify. Birders I know might like it.
I’d love to see a report on the accuracy and speed of things identified by the ID Please group and Reference Librarians. Fair comparison? Who would you bet on?
