Author: jessamyn

Not going to ALA

Posted on by jessamyn

I forgot to mention here, I won’t be at ALA. I was planning to go. In fact I may still be on the schedule but my dear friends decided to get married in Brooklyn that same exact weekend and the choice between paying my own way to DC to be on a panel and paying my own way to NY to be at a wedding was pretty clear-cut. Close readers will note that this is the second time that I’ve passed up Annual to go to a wedding. It must be a popular weekend.

There are a few neat things going on that people should go to. The Hollywood Librarian premiere Friday night (trailer, behind the scenes video). I’d link you to the ALA press release about this but their search form is broken, as is their contact form. My friend Pete, a librarian who works at MediaMatters, is DJing a dance night with some other folks on Saturday night. No cover, no dress code, lots of librarians. More details here. I look forward to reading about the conference on the bazllion blogs covering it.

quickie Ubuntu update

Posted on by jessamyn

printer + internet success!

So it’s been a while since I checked in from the Ubuntu installs at the library. Life intervened in a ton of ways. I went back over to the library today. I spent most of my time helping a Ukranian artist woman wade through the 250 emails in her inbox spanning almost two years. Every time she’d see a lost job opportunity or a note from a friend from eight months ago she’d say "see, this is why I have to know this, I lose work not knowing this…" I had to agree to a point but also mentioned that checking her email — however that needed to happen — more than once every 18 months was probably part of it.

So, I was in prime form when I went downstairs to check on the Ubuntu machines. The handyman had installed the ethernet drop from upstairs and I had limited time. This is what I did in about 20 minutes.

– made basic user accounts on each machine and changed the password on the admin accounts from the one I put on the YouTube video
– Set up the desktop for that account to have Firefox and OpenOffice on it (for now, we’ll move to games and IM once this is established as working)
– Plugged both computers into the switch I got. Hey check that out, they’re on the Internet. That was simple.
– Plugged the printer into one of them (HP 6100 series all on one blah) and went through the install printer routine. Hey look IT JUST WORKS, and prints.

Now one of the machines prints, both of them are on the internet, they’ve got a non-admin account on both of them and a locked down admin account with a new password. Next time I’ll do software updates and get the other printer working via the network, flesh out the desktops some and write some documentation. Woo! (crossposted from Flickr)

Michael Gorman, blogging on Britannica

Posted on by jessamyn

A few people have pointed out Michael Gorman’s blog posts, appropriately enough appearing on the Britannica blog. For reasons that evade me he has one general post split into two parts. Web 2.0 The Sleep of Reason Part I and Web 2.0 The Sleep of Reason Part II. Let me just say that Michael Gorman is a smart guy and I just wish the things he said didn’t sound so… snooty. Statements like these “The task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print, virtues often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print.” are things I can totally get behind but then he follow-up in his later post with “Google cofounder Sergey Brin has said that ‘the perfect search engine would be like the mind of God,’ but most of us took that to be billionaire hyperventilating not blasphemy.” and I don’t understand why he has to be that way.

My take on what is happening has less to do with the nature of scholarship and more to do with the blurring of the idea of “research” as something we do for entertainment as well as scholarship. This may be something I think because I’m not really affiliated with an academic community and perhaps things have changed more than I am aware of, but I don’t think the idea of the expert is going away, only that it’s shifting in many of our interactions. So instead of us asking our expert mechanic for his or her opinion, we’ll check not only Consumer Reports but also epinions and maybe Edmunds.com when we’re buying a new car. We have more data because of the Internet and the network generally, and in many cases there’s no reason plain old humans can’t do something with that data. Gorman glibly refers to the idea his relief that there is “no discernable ‘citizen surgeon’ movement” but why is there a problem with citizen journalism? Especially if, like tagging and folksonomies, these trends are offered as supplments to the existing canon of options, not as supplanters of them?

update: aaaaand Clay Shirky’s reponse to Michael Gorman made boingboing

be social – explaining social networks to librarians and parents

Posted on by jessamyn

I did a short tour of some New Hampshire libraries over the past few days. I did a little talk called MyWhat? Decoding social technologies.. It’s only about five slides but most of it was doing a tour of some of the more popular social networks [Facebook, MySpace, Flickr] and showing how they worked, how kids were using them and what parents and librarians should know.

Remember that a lot of the digital divide that we deal with now isn’t that people don’t have computers per se, it’s that they’re not in networks and groups of people that understand them and can answer complex questions about them. The library is often an integral link in this equation. A lot of my time at these talks is spent answering questions about how these social tools work, how I use them, how librarians might use them, and how kids and teens can use them safely and effectively. A lot of the print materials I’ve come across err on the side of caution which is not a bad idea but often there’s no “Hey you really SHOULD try this” couterpoint. I hope I was able to offer that somewhat.

but once libraries get to facebook, what do they do there?

Posted on by jessamyn

Jenny points out the UIUC library search which is a widget that can be put on any user’s facebook page so they can search the library catalog right from Facebook.

Facebook recently opened up their site to other applications and there has been a huge explosion in what people are sharing on their profile pages. From my own subjective perspective, it seems like these applications are getting more people to Facebook and keeping them there, doing stuff. In my 2.0 talks I have often talked about how libraries could create “presence” using social tools and I’ve pointed to Facebook groups like Awesome Resources which is a group of 30+ librarians doing what librarians do best: sharing resources and helping each other find things.

When I went to Ann Arbor this week, I connected with Ed “Superpatron” Vielmetti on Facebook and it’s one of the fastest and best ways to get ahold of a small subset of my friends. When I was at the Berkman Center event last week listening to them talk about Digital Natives (versus tired old “digital immigrants” like myself) a professor mentioned that they did a show of hands survey of their incoming class to Harvard this year and asked who had a Facebook page. The answer wasn’t “most of them” but every single one of them. Granted Harvard skews in some ways towards the clueful and plugged in, but what an opportunity, knowing the one place that all of your students go online. I’m not totally sure if we know what to there once we get there, and I share the same privacy concerns as others about how much information we’re aggregating and personally identifying there, but I also feel that the UIUC search box is a little breakthrough application, sort of the way LibX was for Firefox. Exciting times, no?