If you’re interested in the idea of using web 2.0 types of features in a library catalog but don’t want those features sold to you in clunky forms by your existing ILS vendors, The Social OPAC may be for you, and now has its own website and developer community. Go look! Here’s a little bit of backstory explaining what the tool is and how they’re using it at the Darien Library.
I just got back from my first talk/workshop of the “school year” at NNYLN’s headquarters in Potsdam, New York. I did an expanded version of my VLA web trends talk and got to also plug Firefox and WordPress as decent open source tools. I also got to meet a lot of interesting librarians and take a beautiful drive through northern New York and Vermont. The notes for my talk are here: Web Trends & Whatnot. Getting the word trend in the title means that I get to talk about Rickrolling which is one of the tiredest memes in the Internet universe and yet 1) people there hadn’t heard of it 2) I still think it’s funny because I am (not so) secretly eleven years old.
A good article to add to any bibliography about Web 2.0 [and by extention, Library 2.0]. Key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 on Frist Monday.
Web 2.0 is a buzzword introduced in 2003–04 which is commonly used to encompass various novel phenomena on the World Wide Web. Although largely a marketing term, some of the key attributes associated with Web 2.0 include the growth of social networks, bi–directional communication, various ‘glue’ technologies, and significant diversity in content types. We are not aware of a technical comparison between Web 1.0 and 2.0. While most of Web 2.0 runs on the same substrate as 1.0, there are some key differences. We capture those differences and their implications for technical work in this paper. Our goal is to identify the primary differences leading to the properties of interest in 2.0 to be characterized. We identify novel challenges due to the different structures of Web 2.0 sites, richer methods of user interaction, new technologies, and fundamentally different philosophy. Although a significant amount of past work can be reapplied, some critical thinking is needed for the networking community to analyze the challenges of this new and rapidly evolving environment.
I managed to do two talks in two days from the same set of slides that were, in many ways, totally different.
I talked about Library 2.0 stuff to McGill SLIS students on Thursday and then to professional librarians (mostly) today. Good talks, interesting people, all followed up with some delicious food and grand socializing in Montreal, one of my favorite places. If anyone would like to see my list of links and handout, you can see them on this page: Library 2.0 - links & resources. The pdf is sort of large, but the list of links goes to almost all the websites I talked about, and the handout is the standard “places to find me online” if you want to explore a little but don’t know many people using the tools yet.
Thanks to everyone who came out and listened and responded and limboed and chatted with me.
I’ve been getting pretty bad at doing advance notice for some of the public speaking that I’ve been doing and have a resolution of sorts to get better about it. So, this is a few days advance notice that I’ll be in Montreal at the end of the week — have I mentioned lately how much I LOVE Canada lately? I am so lucky it’s close by — to do two things.
The Library of Congress is on Flickr! I am charmed by their profile. “Yes. We really are THE Library of Congress.” Update: please read this longer very well thought out essay about the project that does a lot more than just my “woo!” announcement.
One of the things I tell people in my 2.0 talks is that the digital divide is becoming about much more than people who have computers/email/web sites and people who don’t. The difference, to me, is people who have folded the web into their day to day lives and those who haven’t. This matters for a few reasons. As I have said before, I think it’s anyone’s personal choice whether they want to use a computer recreationally or not. However as more and more of our government’s services are available either primarily or most easily online, being able to at least navigate the online world becomes important, if not mission critical.
I’ve often thought that I should do a program on “The life of a 2.0-pian” (pretty sure I’ve seen that before) where I outline the many ways in which being able to use the web as another resource makes my life simpler, easier and saves me money. Here is the example that came to mind this week. As some background, when I worked at a public library of medium size, when we needed supplies we had two main choices, possibly three. 1) buy the supply from the Big Catalog 2) send the systems librarian out to Staples to buy the item 3) get the supply ourselves on the way to work (on our own time) and get reimbursed. While I am not one of those “My tax dollars at work!” people, I have to note that this process was rarely cost- or time-efficient for anyone involved except, sometimes, the accountant.
In any case, I was printing out holiday cards this week — I have a group of online friends who swap cards every year, I do not normally do a holiday card thing — and ran out of printer ink. As you know, printer ink is one of those notoriously overpriced items and if it’s something you buy often it’s best to have an angle. The ink I need at Staples is $20. At my local office supply store it is $27. My angle is a price comparison site called dealink.com which lets me search competing ink prices. They told me I could get it for $18.50 shipped, HP brand ink, no knock-offs. That was pretty good. Then I headed over to my favorite coupon site, RetailMeNot to see if they had any online coupons for DataBazaar which had the lowest ink prices. They did. I hope you are noticing that I can link to all these things. I can’t link to the ink page at Staples.com. So, I got an extra $5 off if I bought three (I needed a few anyhow) making my total $48.85, delivered to my door, for three ink cartridges for my photo printer.
So, the reason this matters and why I’m putting this on a libraran-oriented blog is that first, we tend to not buy things this way where I am, in libraries or elsewhere. Getting to Staples from my house takes at least 90 minutes round trip and $5 worth of gasoline and yet we still sometimes act like buying things online is somehow risky or uncharted territory. What’s risky for me is getting on the highway this time of year, to say nothing about the time I’d have to take off from work when there’s work do be done. Second, this is the type of efficency that 2.0 stuff gets us. A computer can compare prices. A computer can stockpile and share coupons. A computer can show me a photo of an item so I can see if it’s the one I want. Letting the computer do these parts of the shopping-for-supplies experience that is one of the less fun parts of librarianship leaves our bodies and big old brains free for doing what a computer can’t do like helping someone navigate their first email account, or doing a storytime puppet show, or having a book group discussion or forgiving someone’s library fines because it’s the holidays or making a book display about the Solstice.
Working on the web isn’t just about collecting real and/or imaginary friends and new interactive ways of sharing photos of your cat, it’s also about saving real time and real money so that you can do real things in your offline world. That’s my twopointopia report, over and out.
Not super fleshed out, but how cool is it that one of our venerable library institutions has a blog outlining some of the new things they’re trying and evaluating what they’ve already been doing? Please subscribe, right now please, to labs.nypl.org. [thanks pk!]
If the title sounds familiar, it’s because it is. I’ve been trying to combine more of my public speaking trips which means more weird weeks like this one and that one, but it works out a lot better on my end. After I got back to Massachusetts from Access, I drove over to NELA and gave three talks there. I really enjoy NELA but there were some complications this time around mostly involving iffy wireless (and hotel staff who were just repeating what their outsourced IT told them which the IT-librarians knew was a little fishy-sounding, but I digress) which means I wasn’t doing much blogging and had a period of radio silence here and on Flickr and on Scrabulous, etc.
I got home today and I’ve uploaded the latest talks. One was all new, one was a modified version of an earlier talk and one was a talk I gave earlier, but with twice as much time. All of them went really well but I have a sore throat and will be heading to bed as soon as they’re linked here so that I can be bright and bushytailed for work which starts tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who made my trip easier, more pleasant, and fun.
My talk went well. It was scary (keynote!), early (8:30!), and multimedia (slides, video, me doing the blah blah part). I have this problem basically not being able to remember a thing I said after I get off the microphone BUT this time I wrote the talk out first, and this time I think it was even recorded. I’ll keep you posted on that. Here are my slides, notes and some more links. Thanks to everyone who paid close attention, blogged about it, and/or laughed at my jokes, and thanks to the conference planners for inviting me and encouraging me to make the trip.
Hi. My name is Jessamyn West and I'll be your librarian today. I work in rural Vermont as a library consultant and also am a moderator at MetaFilter.com. My personal blog is at jessamyn.com. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments.
