‘puters

wiki from the inside, the first 30 days of LISWiki

LISWiki, the first 30 days, an essay on Ex Libris written by John Hubbard.

o here’s my sales pitch that I’d like to close with: if you’ve ever had a thought about libraries and librarianship that you wish to share, don’t keep it a secret! I don’t care if it’s some incredibly insightful revelation, making mundane clarifications about library terms, adding in-depth analysis on a library issue, or just copy editing my sloppy prose.

It’s understandably alarming to surrender your work to public editing, but Wikipedia demonstrates that such sharing can be highly effective; a community-built knowledge base has the capacity for far greater scholarly achievement than the sum of its individual contributions. Since our profession is built around facilitating access to information, we owe it to ourselves and to our successors to freely contribute to an open community encyclopedia of library-related knowledge.

del.icio.us pasta

Posted on 04Aug05 by jessamyn

I know you know about del.icio.us. However, you may not know about Pasta. Every now and again I have something I would like to link to here but it lacks a web component. Sometimes it’s an email, sometimes it’s an IM, sometimes it’s a press release. Pasta allows you to post up to 100k worth of text and auto-bookmark it on del.icio.us for you. As an example, here’s an IM I had with a random web stranger asking about library schools.

RFID not being used for new federal ID cards

Posted on 02Aug05 by jessamyn

Hey if RFID isn’t good enough for Homeland Security and their privacy concerns, maybe it’s not good enough for libraries? Read the article for more information on what RFID is, and what it is not.

one more privacy concern: printers?

Posted on 25Jul05 by jessamyn

EFF’s blog has a post about a new way libraries could accidentally infringe on patron privacy. Some common color laser printers have the ability to encode uniquiely identifying and traceable information into pages they print. If you care enough about patron privacy to not reveal if a patron has a library card, would you care enough to not reveal that they have used your computers/printers?

According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company’s laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the “serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots” in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

advice on library school and learning technologies

Posted on 22Jul05 by jessamyn

Meredith and Jenny have both posted very astute summaries of technology competencies that either are or should be required for incoming professionals to the librarianship field. Meredith focuses on what you should think about learning while you’re at school and Jenny adapts a list of skills for educators into her 20 Technology Skills Every Librarian Should Have list. Not a surprise that there is more than a little overlap between these lists. If you’re already out of school and in the field, think of this as a laundry list of opportunities for professional development, or catalysts for librarian skillshares.