tek – Page 4 – librarian.net

while I was away at ALA, reblogged links not to miss

I’ve got one more privacy related post, but this is just a few things I’ve seen, noticed and liked. My goal for the summer was to catch up and stay caught up on RSS feeds, either through thinning my list, developing better habits or deciding to only follow friends and family, or only work people. I did a little of all of those and have been caught up for weeks now, even through ALA.

Quick privacy-related link: why is was it so hard to find Google’s privacy policy? Also, if you’re not familiar with the Google/Viacom lawsuit, now is a good time to get familiar.
Speaking of Google, does anyone feel, like Sarah does, that they punk’d us?
Ryan Dechamps tries out an EEE PC thinking about its potential use in a public library setting.
Laura does some thinking out loud about the 2.0 aesthetic and what matters to us versus what matters to our patrons.
David Lee King talks about Twitter best practices. Some very sensible suggestions for people who are newly starting out with Twitter, the how and the why.
An older but good post from Lichen about a session she went to at NELA about library-wise IT proficiencies. That is, what proficiencies should we expect all library staff to have?

a few quick talks from this weekend

Posted on 08Apr0808Apr08 by jessamyn

I went down to Massachusetts to do a few short talks. They were all very different and most were somewhat reworked versions of talks I’ve done before. I also went to a MetaFilter meetup and had BLTs with Casey. Thanks to everyone who hosted me while I was down in MA. Here are links to the presentations I did.

Teaching Tech in Libraries for an in-service day at Cambridge Public Library
OPACs – The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good
for an information technology class at Simmons West that I was a guest at
Small Libraries and the Digital Divide & why it matters, a lot my contribution to an excellent panel about the Digital Divide that featured me, Pay Oyler a Simmons prof who went to train librarians in Vietnam, and Susan O’Connor who runs the Timothy Smith Network in Roxbury MA which I will post more about in another separate post.

Now I’m back to a week of teaching adult education classes and ripping plastic off the windows which I am sure will bring about a new ice age.

Teaching Tech – a talk for the Michigan Library Consortium

Posted on 17Mar0817Mar08 by jessamyn

I gave a talk this afternoon for a one day workshop given by the Michigan Library Consortium about teaching technology in libraries. It was a keynote-ish talk so more “big picture” talking and less “this is how we do it.”

To that end, I did a new-from-the-ground-up talk about technology instruction and even wrote out notes for all of my slides so people who weren’t there could maybe follow along later. As anyone who has seen me speak knows, I tend to extemporanize (sp?) quite a bit so while the bones of the talk are in the notes, I also told a lot of stories about the libraries I work in and waved my hands around a lot. You can see the notes and a mov or pdf of the slides here: Teaching Tech in Libraries: what are we doing?

I’m still trying to find a good way to put slideware talks online without having to re-give the talk and toss it into Slideshare. Big thanks to all the folks from Michigan for being such a great audience and Twitterfolks for giving me some good advice. (go be Flickr friends with Kevin to see more (admittedly, not that fascinating) photos of this event)

“web services” doesn’t mean just getting a better website

Posted on 17Sep0717Sep07 by jessamyn

Karen Coombs explains why web services isn’t just about a better website and also explains what some of the sacred cows are that keep library websites from being better.

[M]eeting your users where they are isnâ€™t about making them come to the library website. In considering our long term virtual presence plans, the library website is a given. People who come to the site know we exist and want to use our services. To truly be successful we have to get our content into the path of the people who wouldnâ€™t walk through our door (physical or virtual).

I like Karen’s talks about her work website specifically because she’s part of a larger team that all needs to work together to roll out new services to their faculty, student and staff population. I feel lucky because I often have carte blanche in the tiny sites for tiny libraries that I design. I also have very little reach with those sites. That’s okay for what I’m trying to do, but if I had to bring together multiple different stakeholders and make them happy with a website — including those designing, for example, for 800 x 600 resolution screens — I’m sure I’d find it very challenging indeed.

I’m en route to Nova Scotia today, speaking at NSLA and at a Learning 2.0 program with Ryan Deschamps, but when I get back I hope to show off my own collaborative project, turning the Vermont Library Association site into a bloggish group-maintained site from a static single-admin site. It’s gotten so that I have enough WordPress admin login pages to keep track of that I’ve shunted them into their own folder on my bookmarks toolbar. Exciting times!

ALA study: public library funding & technology access

Posted on 12Sep0705Oct07 by jessamyn

Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2006-2007 Report is out today. I haven’t looked at it yet and was waiting for it to hit the website. The URL for the actual 6MB file is here

http://www.ala.org/ala/ors/publiclibraryfundingtechnologyaccessstudy/finalreport.pdf

If you bookmark the page the document is linked to it will appear as “ALA | 2006-2007 Report” on your bookmark list. While I continue to make the point that tech/web savviness is going to be an important part of being useful relevant libraries in the 21st century, we still put out documents intended to be widely disseminated in PDF format, not HTML This assures that it will be shallowly linked and quoted, if at all, and those links will be hard to track and learn from.

The one news article that I’ve read referring to this report — an AP wire article that I read in the Las Vegas Sun — “Despite Demand, Libraries Won’t Add PCs” is a weird mess of statistics and odd conclusions (won’t add PCs? how about can’t add PCs. Who did this study again? Oh right The Gates Foundation… gee I wonder what their solution to this involves, it better not be Vista. update: the geeky artist librarian agrees). It discusses how popular technology in libraries has become, but also what the limitations are that libraries are facing. The whole article is tailor-made to support a roll-out of the Gates Foundation’s next round of funding which I’m sure will nicely sew up all the loose ends that this article pinpoints.

Except for the fact that more computers means, or should mean, more staff and more space, neither of which get a lot of lip service from technology grantors who would rather give away last year’s software for a hefty tax writeoff. You’ll note that this article says that libraries are cutting staffing so they can afford more computers. I assume then that this is supposed to imply that getting more computers means more freed up money to hire staff. However, we all know, at least out here in rural noplace, that funding remains fixed as does space and what we could really use is an operating system that doesn’t need a 20MB security update every few weeks and a browser that isn’t out-of-the-box vulnerable to a huge range of exploits that leave our computers barely working. The good news is that we can get both of those things and we don’t have to wait for someone to loan us money to do it. Sorry for the slightly bitter tone, I’ll chime in with some more facts from this study once I’ve gotten a chance to read it.