librarian.net

The American Library Association has launched an email newsletter and they have sent it to every ALA member with an email address on file. The AL Direct FAQ states “AL Direct (American Libraries Direct) is an electronic newsletter sent to ALA personal members by e-mail as a perquisite of membership.” Here is what I noticed in the first 15 minutes of getting my first newsletter.

• The links in the newsletter go to a combination of online content (already available) and giant PDFs that seems to come directly from the pages of American Libraries. I’m not sure I see the value-add.
• I wish I could tell which links went to giant PDFs before I clicked them, but each hyperlink is an affiliate link through an outfit called ixs1.net (helpful error message here) which means no mousing-over the text to figure out which is which.
• The site uses web bugs as near as I can tell, while this is not surprising, neither is it cool
• There is an unsubscribe link, but I had to use my email’s find feature to locate it.
• They don’t post old issues on the web site. This makes a certain amount of sense, since there is already an AL Online news digest as well as a weekly roundup of stories coming to interested members in their inboxes, but then there’s the question: why do this at all?
• I specifically set my communications preferences with ALA — once there was a way to do so — to receive “official communications only” which is described as “ballot, renewal and membership card, American Libraries and division journals and newsletters specified in the ALA Handbook of Organization” on the Communications Preferences page. This may be nitpicky of me, but I don’t see why a heavily-advertiser supported newsletter — Sirsi is the sponsor for issue 1 — which is mostly rehashing news I already have access to elsewhere in ALA is seen as official communications. Put another way, why is me saying it’s okay for them to mail me a magazine seen as the same as saying it’s okay to put me on an email list for a newsletter?

For those of you who are already not fans of ALA, this will come as no surprise, ALA continues not to understand how to communicate in the digital world. For those of us who keep saying “No no, I think there’s still hope” each fumbling foray like this makes us wince and wish we belonged to a savvy organization that excited and interested us with their new ideas and options for intteraction.

There has been a lot of talk about Library 2.0 lately, and I’m with Steve that I’m more interested in doing cool stuff with my libraries than writing about libraries, or debating semantics, but I can say one thing for sure, I know it when I see it. In this case, I know I’m looking and not seeing it

From the Daily Kos, my comments, and I’m sure many other places. Federal agents’ visit was a hoax Student admits he lied about Mao book

My favorite thing about blogs beyond the personal interactions that they afford is reading what people think about more products than I can usefully evaluate on my own. Two reviews that came through my reader lately have been true gems:

1. Mary “LibraryLaw” Minow discusses LibraryElf: My library elf - the joy and the horror
2. Sarah “Librarian in Black” Houghton tries a beta of QuestionPoint’s Flash interface: New QuestionPoint Flash Interface: LiB’s Review

Meredith “Information Wants to be Free” Farkas also does a lot of good no-nonsense reviews.

This may be one of those things that everyone knows but me, but it looks like EBSCO has made their Library/Information Science & Technology Abstracts available now for free. The sexy URL redirects automatically to the longer internal URL. The press release with the announcement is here. [update: fixed link, thanks everyone]

Get your Reference is Cool button from Salem Press. If you’d like, send them some visual verification.

Salem Press is inviting you to submit evidence that reference books, the people who use them, reference librarians and teachers are “cool.” We are using the expression ‘cool’ to mean ‘excellent’ or ‘first-class’ not the sense of the word that implies merely ‘acceptable’ or ’satisfactory.’ It is permissible, but not required, that the person, action, thing or event be relaxed - cool. But not chilly, please.

I don’t care if Tommy Thompson is going to chip himself, I’m still not sold on RFID technology for libraries as it’s being marketed and implemented currently. Let’s get real here. There’s a difference between voluntarily tagging yourself and having tagging being a prerequisite for your school or library. Would TT’s tag have his social security number on it? What about his library reading record? This article looks to be nothing more than a cheap stunt hyping VeriChip’s system of linking information on your chip to a database that could contain your health information. Like many nifty technology tools, this one only becomes useful when it becomes ubiquitous which seems to me to be a long ways off. Getting this sort of coverage would [or should] mean open standards to lower prices, encourage innovation, reduce vendor lock-in and encourage growth generally.

And, speaking of RFID, Laura Smart’s URL to her excellent Library RFID site has changed. You can find all her content here: http://libraryrfid.net/wordpress

Until a few days ago, this was the web page for the Sirsi online newsletter. Now it redirects you here. I sure hope this merger makes librarians happy. I sure worry that it won’t.

I have read variants of this on four blogs so far today:

“ebrary is offering one year of free access to 55 library science titles to ALA members.  The collection will be integrated with the American Libraries digital archive. More info is available at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ala“

I’m an ALA member, and I may be thick as a brick, but nowhere on that page do I see anything looking like more information. Can anyone give me more actual information on this? Do I have to wait for National Library Week to start? If anyone has more information on finding these 55 periodicals I have free access to, I’d be very grateful.

update: apparently there are contextual menus available via right-click or control-click [see my picture here], as PLABlog alludes to. So you go to American Libraries online, highlight a word in the text of the magazine, from there you can search ebrary’s other content but, searching a word like librarian will get you to books with the word “librarian” in it, someplace. Alternately, you can search Yahoo maps, Biography.com, Excite.com [remember them?] and others. Clicking “explain” takes you to Britannica.com, “define” takes you to m-w.com, “locate” gives you a choice of Mapquest, Yahoo Maps or National Geographic.

It’s all very bizarre, sort of like what I imagine a postmodern search engine would be like. There is no way to just do a keyword search of ebrary content, the box that looks like a keyword search is only for American Libraries. All searches open new browser windows. All content is shown to you in a window that is maximum 3/4 the width of your browser, and if you don’t close the table of contents window, it’s roughly 1/2 the window width. You cannot bookmark content in your browser, only through their in-house “bookshelf” feature. I’m just shutting it down now. The toolbar software that ebrary requires you to download before you can even use this interface has left white stripes across my screen even once it’s closed. I hope there’s something a little more welcoming there when National Library Week actively kicks off, but for now, that’s about as much “more information” as I can share with you.

Strange little bit of news that came to me via the “copy and paste a press release into my mailto form” Allibris will be offering books for sale via OCLC’s WorldCat so librarians can buy a book instead of ILLing it. OCLC will bill you, making it even stupidly simpler. No postage, no mailing & return envelopes, no messy labelling. Is this the future of interlibrary loan? Is it really cheaper to buy the book than ILL it?

Speaking of library art, check out this description of a new art show by the guy who owns the LAPL’s old catalog cards. [thanks chris]