The world of Webinars and WebJunction

Posted on by jessamyn

Now that I’m somewhat affiliated with the MaintainIT project I am trying to put my crabbiness aside and interact more with WebJunction. I’m thinking about even trying to attend a webinar about Practical Techniques for Supporting Public Computing. I stepped through the instructions for getting their helper applications set up and it went pretty smoothly albeit very slowly. I’m going to see if any of the librarians I work with here are interested in trying this process out, including the set-up which involves disabling pop-up blockers, sending and receiving audio via their application, as well as running a bunch of java applications. I’m interested to see if it was as simple for them as it was for me.

The only part I was dissatisfied with, from a personal perspective, was the overly-cute “door hanger for E-learners“. First of all, learning is learning and calling something E-anything really sounds like you discovered the Internet yesterday. Second, for a two page PDF that basically just says “I’m busy” with the WJ logo [actually it says “I am participating in an online course that is critical to my job performance” among other things, but I am overly sensitive to hyperbole so maybe this sounds normal to other people] why is it a 2.3 MB file? Just because most public libraries now have broadband doesn’t really mean we should be using it up with overly-large files. For the libraries that don’t have broadband, this is a forty minute download.

So, my constructive feedback, up to this point.

– the webinar software works well, I’m pleased it works on my Mac
– I’m glad WebJunction is functional, I’d like to see it look decent on Firefox on my Mac. I sent in a help request about this little problem
– I wish WebJunction had URLs and filenames that gave me some idea what was behind them. Why isn’t the door hanger called webinar_door_hanger.pdf or something so when I dump it on my hard drive I know what is is? Why aren’t we optimizing our web pages for Google?
– If you’re in advocacy work, it’s sometime tough to draw the line between what level of branding is appropriate to keep you able to do your work and get grants and what amount is actively getting in the way of delivering services. I’m really happy that WJ is using more platform independent means of content delivery despite the fact that they’re at least partially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (as is MaintainIT). I hope they continue to support libraries in whatever technology choices they decide to make. A search for Ubuntu on WebJunction only gets no hits in the site itself and nets a few discussion topics, though this one should be required reading for any library thinking about making the big expensive step to Vista.
– No more 2 MB PDFs please. Since we’re working with people who, in many cases, are not that tech savvy, I feel that every choice we make should specifically send the message that technology is manageable, understandable and hopefully fun. There are best practices for usability just like there are best practices for accessibility and we should be working hard to move from “hey it works!” to “wow, this works WELL.”

update: I take back what I said about cross-platform support. What I emailed WebJunction asking why one of their pages didn’t look right on my browser (see photo above) the email I got back said, embarassingly:

Hello!

At this time, WebJunction does not support Macintosh browsers. However, I will make note of the display anomaly you reported for future implementations.

Thanks!
M____ B______
WebJunction Training & Support Specialist
support@webjunction.org
800-848-5878 x0000

If it’s 2007 and you can’t design your web pages to be at least readable on a Mac browser, you should rethink your commitment to enabling “relevant, vibrant, sustainable libraries for every community” (emphasis mine) in my opinion. I appreciated the speedy response, though. update: and someone else explained to me how my browser was probably caching an old stylesheet from that page and if I just did a shift-reload it might clear up the problem. Guess what? It totally did. No love for the no-mac-supporting tech support, but at least the website isn’t broken. Cautiously optimistic I am….

A few things that didn’t make it to the carnival…

Posted on by jessamyn

There was so much good stuff in the Carnival yesterday, that I didn’t append some of my favorite links from the week, but here they are.

– Two links about Google Books. One is Scott Boren’s long piece on LISNews about full txt serching in books. What you can search and how you can search it. Great well-researched piece. The second is Julia Tryon’s contribution to FreeGovInfo concerning the amount of government information available via Google Books. Google provides no statistics. This will be part of an ongoing project she’ll be working on there, stay tuned.

When looking at the search results in Google for publisher field has GPO, I found 141,600 items, only 82,487 of which were available in the full view. And although it is nice to think that we have the full text for 82,487 documents, not all of them can be used. I randomly picked a title to see how it looked and chose the Statistical Abstract for 1954. The pages were clear enough to read easily but on every even numbered page part of the right hand column was chopped off.

– Also from FreeGovInfo comes this analysis of Google Video’s closing and what happened to all those DRMed video files that people supposedly “purchased” Please read Part I: DRM Killed the Files and also Part II: Why the Google Video story should scare you.

– Karen Schneider has been writing some great stuff lately. It’s been fun to see her getting into what I see as the more technical side of librarianing because her explanations of techie stuff are clear and free of nonsense while still being readable and engaging. Her article in Library Journal Lots of Librarians Can Keep Stuff Safe about LOCKSS and Portico really helped me understand the fairly complicated world of e-journal archiving.

– Bryan Herzog’s always-excellent blog has pulled some Reader’s Advisory suggestions off of ME-LIBS the Maine Librarie dicussion list and added his own commentary. Brian also made a custom book review search using Google’s custom search function. Very very nice. I’d love to see someone toss together a page of Google Custom Searches that were useful to librarians. Has anyone done this? I’ve already made a Custom Ego Search but that’s not the same thing.

Despite my Very Large Skepticism of Google in general, the tool itself is very easy to set up and is potentially extremely useful (especially for librarians). Basically, it lets you limit searching to a select group of websites – in this case, book review websites

off-topic: see me be revolting at SXSW

Posted on by jessamyn

South by Southwest is a big conference thing in Austin Texas in March. It’s made of music, movies and something they call “interactive” which is basically Internet. It’s an interesting conference that I went to once in 2000 and it changed my life pretty much forever. I met a bunch of early bloggers in the flesh and we became friends and the rest is pretty well trod-upon history. During SXSW since then I was often petsitting for my blogger friends while they went to Texas. This year I may be going. There is a panel called Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! put together by Annalee Newitz who is all sorts of excellent. There is a good chance I will be speaking on that panel in my role as moderator of MetaFilter. IF… if the panel gets chosen. Fortunately, SXSW is a pseudo-democracy so you can vote for panels you’d like to see. And I say pseudo because you can also implore your friends to vote for you and/or your panel and it’s all kosher. So, if you’re picking up what I’m laying down here, please consider voting for my panel, or any number of interesting panels you’d like to see, whether you’re going or not. And the title of the panel? Pure coincidence.

Carnival of the Infosciences #77

Posted on by jessamyn

Welcome to the August 20, 2007 edition of Carnival of the Infosciences. Thanks to everyone who submitted stuff and all the others who asked me what the heck I was talking about. We got a huge response regarding this guide and I think allowing submissions via del.icio.us has helped participation somewhat (thought I think of carninfo being for information about meat!) go social software! Speacial thanks to Chad who really did most of the heavy lifting this time around as I tried to figure out how it all worked.

WoodyE presents Tragedy of the Library posted at What You Already Know, saying, “Public libraries lining up for a ‘tragedy of commons’?”

Katie Dunneback sent us Open letter to incoming LIS students posted at Young Librarian.

Chris Zammarelli, a long time friend and supporter of the Carnival, presents Good blogs, bad blogs posted at Walt at Random, saying, “While writing about research he’s performing for his next book, Walt outlines what makes for good and bad library blogs.”

Chris submits Keeping up posted at Blisspix.net, saying, “Some advice from Fiona Bradley about keeping up with the library literature.”

Chris also shares This Just In: ILL is Important! posted at Circ and Serve, saying, “Mary Carmen Chimato reviews an Association of Research Libraries about ILL.”

Holly directs Carnival readers to And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? We call it riding the gravy train posted at The Gap, saying, “A neat story about a patron who did a display of his videogames and consoles at the Joplin (MO) Public Library. Blurb from the library’s website”

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth shares Preserving Virtual Worlds – TinyMUD to SecondLife posted at SpellboundBlog.com, saying, “Thanks for taking a look and considering this for the Carnival of InfoSciences!”

Ellyssa Kroski invites us to peruse A Guide to Twitter in Libraries posted at iLibrarian, saying, “I recently started blogging over at iLibrarian and I thought you and your readers might find this post useful.”

Connie Crosby, another strong supporter of the Carnival of the Infosciences, presents The King, the Babe and the Books posted at Slaw, saying, “Post by Mark Lewis, Reference/Information Technology Librarian, Sir James Dunn Law Library, Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He marks the anniversary of a fire at the Dunn Law Library with a post including some spectacular (or rather, disturbing) photos from the fire 22 years ago. SLAW is a co-operative blog discussing Canadian law and technology.”

Additionally, Connie suggests Law Firms & Content Strategy posted at Law Firm Web Strategy, saying, “Steve Matthews, recently Information Director at law firm Clark Wilson, has just started his own consulting firm and with it a new blog called Law Firm Web Strategy. His posts to date are quite smart, so it is difficult to choose just one. I have selected this one because he discusses an analysis he did of the websites of the top 100 U.S. law firms, and lessons learned from this analysis. Steve’s blog is one to watch for anyone interested in search engine optimization (SEO), marketing, and law firm management.”

Connie also recommends Thoughts After Library Camp NYC posted at YALSA, saying, “I like Linda Braun’s summary of Library Camp NYC earlier this week.”

Romeo Vitelli presents Burning the Library posted at Providentia, saying, “Book-burning, the Nazi way”. We are very happy to have this submission from someone outside the LIS field, but who cares enough about libraries to write about them. Way to go Doc!

And now for the submissions we received through del.icio.us. We had a good number tagged with “carninfo” this week. Don’t forget to add a note when you tag so we can share why you thought the post was worth including.

Emily Alling (bibliomonstra) tagged “The New Librarians”, an article from T.H.E. Journal on the changing roles of school librarians, and suggested that this piece would be “great to share with administrators, board members, teachers, parents, and anyone who might not be up to speed on the new face of school libraries”.

RoseFireRising suggested that we read “The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds” (abstract), published in Science 27 July 2007: 472-476., saying “”virtual worlds may foster scientific habits of mind better than traditional schools can, because they constantly require inhabitants to experiment with unfamiliar alternatives, rationally calculate probable outcomes, and develop complex theoretical …”. This article requires a subscription.

Also tagged by Rose, we have “Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders”, and she says, “This intriguing report focuses on similarities in the psychology of World of Warcraft and other virtual worlds in building corporate leadership skills. Changes are recommended in corporate management to make it more like successful games.”

Jenna Freedman tagged “Return of the Zine Yearbook” and tells us that this post is a, “Discussion of a zine anthology and amassing of power by Microcosm, a zine distro and publisher and how this affects (should affect?!?) libraries. Recommendations of other zine distros. Includes one snarky comment by a fellow librarian and zine publisher.” Hooray for snarky comments.

Martha Hardy (grasshopperlibr) submitted “We Asked for 2.0 Libraries and We Got 2.0 Librarians” and asks, “Is the collective Library 2.0 venture a raging success, a waste of time, or a successful work in progress? What does it mean to be a Librarian 2.0? Ryan Deschamps aptly sums it up for us on The Other Librarian”.

Martha also tagged “The Book-ish-ness of Books” and says, “What is a book? And how much does the format matter? The Pegasus Librarian says, in part: “The point is that “containers” are not entirely benign. If they were entirely benign, people wouldn’t pour ginger ale from the can to the glass.”

And speaking of the Pegasus Librarian,Iris Jastram submits “A Study of Scanning Habits”, where the future of books, ebooks, and the format in general are discussed.

Thar’s it for this week! Tara E. Murray will be hosting the next edition of the Carnival at DIYLibrarian. Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of the infosciences using our carnival submission form. You can also use the del.icio.us tag carninfo to submit your favorites. Make sure to use the “Notes” field to state why you tagged it and sign your name so we know who shared it with us. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

job opening: data munger needed for Open Library project

Posted on by jessamyn

I rarely post links to job here because it seems to me that most postings for library jobs are more or less the same. This one is different. The Open Library project, which I linked to here before, is looking for some new folks. You’d be working with a fun team of geniuses, most notably Karen Coyle who is the chief librarian of the project. Telecommuting an option. Interested? Read the job description, then email Aaron and tell him you heard about it here.

Tasks include: working with our chief librarian, Karen Coyle, to implement algorithms to do data merging and other processing tasks; writing scrapers and crawlers to grab various data sources; writing importers to parse this data into something that can be imported into our database; and managing all the people who want to help us with these tasks.