It’s Boston Public Library! Photos and metadata! Red sox in swimsuits! Neato. Meanwhile NYPL “soft launches” a redesign for their Digital Gallery. Go peek. Give feedback. [via spinstah]
Category: blogz
Cool job: answer questions for The Explainer on Slate
Slate is looking for someone to work two days a week writing the Explainer column, answering questions about issues in the news. The application seems simple enough. You have to send your sample answers to a yahoo.com address which seems a little weird. All you people looking at how to become a freelance librarian, start here.
My tech-NOs
After Rochelle and Jenna and Laura. Some of these are by choice and some are just… weird broken parts of my brain but it hardly matters which now, does it?
- I can’t set the time on the clock in my car and it’s set to some crazy time [i.e. not like an hour or two off]. I’d like to, but this time of year if I’m not driving the car it’s too cold to be in it. Erica?
- My bank is in Washington state. While I do a lot of e-banking with them, I generally mail my paychecks to my bank to deposit them. This isn’t strictly technological in nature, but it’s definitely an old-fashionedness that looks like a tech-not.
- I can barely use my cell phone. I can take a picture. I can make and receive phone calls. I can text, but I still try to answer it when someone is text messaging me. I like to think I’d be a better study if the thing worked in my house.
- I have very little e-book curiosity. My interest in e-books is purely professional.
- I have an iPod I rarely listen to. I have an iPhone I don’t use much (both were gifts). I like to have them, but I usually just listen to the radio in my car and iTunes on my laptop at home.
- I have created more podcasts than I have listened to.
- I don’t play online games much. I play Scrabulous (come find me on facebook!) and that’s pretty much it. When you have a job that’s online, spending more time there just doesn’t seem as appealing.
- I use my TV to watch movies only, and even then pretty rarely. I was a Nielsen family earlier in the month and I sent the whole book back blank.
- I don’t have voice mail, just an answering machine. No caller ID, so please tell me who you are when you call.
- When I have to set the alarm to wake up, which happens rarely, I’m as likely to set it for PM as for AM. This is more of an absentminded professor thing than a tech-NO, but I’ve sortof never gotten the hang of setting an alarm on something without hands
- And lastly, because I grew up in the country, I pretty much don’t understand locks. I have a heck of a time with any door that locks, remembering which direction to turn the key, or rememebring my keys period.
I can do pretty much anything with any sort of computer, but that doesn’t mean I know everything or do everything with technology. How about you?
nyplblog
The New York Public Library is blogging. A little more backstory from Jay and Josh at the labs. It’s really neat to see the blog being used to surface content from the collection, not just fancy images, but all sorts of stuff: NY history, ephemera and even a little conversation.
what are you for?
My pal Hugh McGuire — you probably know him from Librivox, he swears on his blog too — wrote a post with some words to the wise: Defining What You Are For (just like porn). He explains how one of the reasons porn is so darned profitable is “[b]ecause the porn biz understands exactly what it is for” and then wonders if other institutions like newspapers and libraries really understand what they are for. It’s not primarily a post about libraries, but since Hugh is the president of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library (a library with a drupal website and an apartment inside it, those who know me know that I hyperventilate as I type this) this is a topic near and dear to him.
But the real value a newspaper performs is not giving me good articles, it’s putting it all together. The mere provision of information is worthless now, because anyone can do it (even me).
This is why blogs – at least in the techno-intelligencia – win. Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it – because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant. So a site like BoingBoing becomes one of the most popular on the net: their craft is not providing information, it’s selecting it. And they’re good at it.