November 2007
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Month November 2007

Entries 10 Total

i <3 making webpages

Nov 29, ’07 7:59 PM

Sometimes I get infatuated with certain webpages I’ve thrown together so I’m going to post about this one. I knew when I saw the WordPress theme Fluid Blue on The Liminal Librarian that I absolutely had to use it for the NPPL site. It is widget friendly and I like the way it looks.

With a bit more time to concentrate on the digitalness of the library I changed our main Books & Movies page to what you see below. Here you see RSS feeds coming from our catalog displayed through Feed2JS. I still think Feed2JS action is really cool even though it doesn’t feel particularly cutting edge to me any more.

Unfortunately, there’s no RSS feed available for just new items from the NPPL. The list is for the entire cooperative. Boo. Ideally I’d like a list just for our items and the ability to make some customizations of that too. If I could have a feed of just our YS items, I bet I could get the local elementary school to display it somewhere on their site.

In a gChat the other day Michael K. Pate mentioned to me that this feature doesn’t exist because, in part, Polaris hasn’t heard a demand for it from the Polaris Users Group. I guess I can’t doubt that. Maybe in the next release, as we say.

Even though the list isn’t ideal, I still like the page. Why? Because it is saves us time. You know what I got to do tonight instead of trying to stay on top on manually listing new materials on the library website? Meet new library users, chat with them, and shake some hands.

Comments (5)

i

Nov 29, ’07 7:59 PM

Sometimes I get infatuated with certain webpages I’ve thrown together so I’m going to post about this one. I knew when I saw the WordPress theme Fluid Blue on The Liminal Librarian that I absolutely had to use it for the NPPL site. It is widget friendly and I like the way it looks.

With a bit more time to concentrate on the digitalness of the library I changed our main Books & Movies page to what you see below. Here you see RSS feeds coming from our catalog displayed through Feed2JS. I still think Feed2JS action is really cool even though it doesn’t feel particularly cutting edge to me any more.

Unfortunately, there’s no RSS feed available for just new items from the NPPL. The list is for the entire cooperative. Boo. Ideally I’d like a list just for our items and the ability to make some customizations of that too. If I could have a feed of just our YS items, I bet I could get the local elementary school to display it somewhere on their site.

In a gChat the other day Michael K. Pate mentioned to me that this feature doesn’t exist because, in part, Polaris hasn’t heard a demand for it from the Polaris Users Group. I guess I can’t doubt that. Maybe in the next release, as we say.

Even though the list isn’t ideal, I still like the page. Why? Because it is saves us time. You know what I got to do tonight instead of trying to stay on top on manually listing new materials on the library website? Meet new library users, chat with them, and shake some hands.

Comments (5)

library gameshow!

Nov 29, ’07 3:41 PM

Scott Jeffries, Reference Librarian at Dallas Baptist University writes,

For four afternoons in November, the Dallas Baptist University Vance Memorial Library hosted their Are You As Smart As A Freshman? event. Patterned after the popular game show Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?, this event had 2nd-4th year students competing for prizes by answering questions that university freshman should be familiar with. They were able to use a panel of Freshmen as part of their “lifelines” as well as one of the library’s reference librarians …The intent of the event was to raise awareness of the library and its resources and to offer a fun outlet for students within the library’s facilities.

Gaming in libraries does not just mean video/computer games! Nice work!

Comments (0)

report spam?

Nov 28, ’07 2:23 PM

Also, who dates emails like that? Out of touch library vendors?

Comments (7)

testing QuickTimePostWPP

Nov 28, ’07 12:01 PM

After learning that my QuickTime embed wasn’t playing nicely with Firefox I tried to write some better code for it. It turns out that WordPress dosn’t play nicely with well formed QT code if under Options -> Writing, the “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” box is checked.

In lieu of deselecting that I went in search of a plugin for putting QT into WordPress posts and found QuickTime Embedding Plugin which I installed. Since I never could get my browser to crash in the first place I’m going to have to use you all as beta testers again. So let me know if this plugin still makes Firefox cry.

[QUICKTIME http://www.walkingpaper.org/mao2.mov 230 240 false true]

Comments (4)

click-a-story two

Nov 27, ’07 6:14 PM

##
UPDATE: A few people said that the video crashed their browsers. I’ve taken it out of this post and put it on a separate page. I’ll have to sort it out. Any reports would be appreciated!
##

Way back in the day at the TFML some YS librarians recorded stories, I put them online and since the site is (soon to be was, I understand), blog based, the stories were being podcast. Yay. As neat as it was to have a podcast, the interface for listening to stories online was not ideal. As you’ve likely experienced before, clicking on an mp3 takes you to a grey page with a simple controller. Not very pretty, and not good for usability.

I want to provide a better interface for listening to stories the second time I implement a “listen to stories online” program. Considering how easy it is to add artwork to audio by exporting AAC files from Garageband, I thought I’d start there.

This is fine and dandy but makes iTunes the only way to see the artwork while listening to the audio. Why? I can’t find any online tools that will let me embed .m4a files in a website. Do you know of one?

Compressor is one of the most versatile file encoding tools and I guessed that if anything could convert an .m4a file into something useful (like a QuickTime file to embed!) that would be it. It did, but with only slightly satisfactory results. Something like this will appear on the NPPL’s Click-A-Story page (yes, that’s the same name, but give me a break, the libraries are across the country). If this embedded video doesn’t appear in your RSS aggregator, you’ll have to click through:

##
The offending video was here. To see it, though for some reason it might crash your browser, here it is on a seperate page.
##

iTunes artwork is 300×300 pixels, but Compressor keeps turning the files into 160×160 pixels for some reason. I’ve not yet been able to find the right setting that spits out proper images. Scrolling is unsatisfactory too. I thought I’d put this out regardless as a quick proof of concept, and to see if anyone has suggestions.

Recently, Joshua M. Neff posted about his library’s Johnson County Library Online Storytime. You know, the title of their project is pretty straightforward and I like it. Another part of the project that I like and that I’m planning on replicating is having CDs of the stories for distribution. That’s a good way to get content to do more work.

I’ll be sure to let you know when the project is live and what the response is like!

Comments (5)

a casual conversation with me (this friday)

Nov 26, ’07 5:01 PM

UPDATE 11/30 – Here’s the URL for accessing the talk which start in an hour!
OPAL Auditorium

I’m excited to be the first in a great series of informal talks held by OPAL. It’ll be like an afternoon in Portland drinking coffee and talking. But we’ll be dry! Lifted from their site:

Friday, November 30, 2007 beginning at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 1:00 Central, noon Mountain, 11:00 a.m. Pacific, and 7:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:

A Casual Conversation with Aaron Schmidt

Aaron Schmidt is the Director of the North Plains Public Library in Oregon and a blogger at Walking Paper. The Casual Conversations series is designed to be up-close and personal from a respectable online distance. While there are many conferences (in-person, online, and in-world) where librarians can hear leaders in the field make formal presentations about interesting projects, there are few opportunities to hear these same leaders discuss informally what they currently are working on, their future plans and goals, the challenges and opportunities facing librarianship, their personal pet peeves, etc.

Watch for more information about these upcoming Casual Conversations:

Thursday, Dec. 6, 2007: Meredith Farkas
Friday, Jan. 18, 2008: Curtis Rogers
Friday, Feb. 8, 2008: Lori Bell
Friday, Feb. 15, 2008: Michelle Boule
Friday, March 28, 2008: Marshall Breeding
Friday, April 11, 2008: Jenny Levine
Friday, May 16, 2008: Stephen Abram
Friday, June 6, 2008: Michael Stephens

Comments (0)

walking paper scraps

Nov 23, ’07 1:31 PM

→ Defining Reading at the YALSA blog does a nice job raising some criticism of the NEA’s recent To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence [pdf]

→ Gummies under Duress a great Flickr set


[pic]

→ Awesome customer experience given by Coffehouse Northwest here in Portland. They gave away everything for free on Thanksgiving and donated the tips to charity. Then they hosted a dinner party for people that had no place to go on Thanksgiving.

Comments (0)

overheard today, inventing the future

Nov 22, ’07 2:43 PM

“I’m like the Kindle but I’m not going to buy it. I’m going to wait until it can hook up with the library system.”

What do you think of that? I was kind of blown away.

At any rate, I like Jaap’s idea of libraries developing our own eInk device. If we *really* want to ready ourselves for the future, why are we going to wait for the market to produce a device that we’ll have to shoehorn into usual way of doing things? It would be fantastic if libraries developed a great, free (as in speech) device. I know that librarians are capable of developing a device that everyone will want. Dewey invented the vertical filing cabinet (according to Gladwell but not wikipedia), right? How would we get publishers to work with us? Dunno. Barcode authentication to databases on an ebook would be neat, but would it add value over using a laptop? Not sure.

Whatever the case may be, we can ensure our viability in the future by creating the future ourselves.

Comments (5)

happy birthday phonograph

Nov 21, ’07 3:04 PM

Happy birthday to the phonograph. In 130 years John Phillips Sousa’s dire predictions haven’t come completely true:

“The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.”

Sounds rather modern, eh? It might be useful to remember that resistance to participatory culture (Keen, Gorman) has a history. Technologies that have changed the way information is made/distributed/consumed have generally made a group of people mad and have changed the world.

“These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country”

Yes, and blogs are making us all less good with the brain thinking.

More good quotes from that hater JP Sousa in Lessig’s Free Culture
[pic]

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