JD Lasica’s list of Top 10 assaults on digital liberties could just as easily be titled “Top 10 assaults on digital libraries” as diglet rightly points out. Of particular note to libraries is #10. I’ve been hearing more and more about libraries being strongarmed into consortia that requires them to forego IT and filtering decisionmaking, independent collection development and in some cases even in-house cataloging staff. Keep your eyes open to changed in your digital information environment, and the legislation that constantly surrounds it, so that you can be an advocate for access by your patrons.
Author: jessamyn
AL Online news feeds
American Libraries is on the RSS bandwagon and has a feed for their news headlines. It’s excerpts-only at this point, but send them feedback and tell them what else you’d like to see in feeds, Steven has.
My ALA Schedule – ALA Chicago
In the interests of meeting up with people, and my own terrible memory, I’m putting my ALA schedule online. To find me at ALA look in whatever room the Council meetings are at, I’m generally there. I’ve also linked to it on the Unofficial ALA Conference Wiki where others are keeping their schedules.
redefining relevance
Everyone has their own ideas about when the overpopulation of the Internet started resulting in a noticable lack of quality. Generally this point is somewhere along the lines of “A year or two after I got here….” For me it was when I started noticing that FAQs were being used for marketing purposes and no longer had the “just the facts” helpfulness that I had grown to expect from anything called a FAQ. Plus, I had to walk two miles in the snow just to get to the Internet and even then we had to use a hand crank to get it started.
This is all an elaborate lead-up to say that I spent some time in library school learning about the concept of relevance and now do-no-evil Google is trying to tell me their ads are relevant? Feh.
add directions to your library website quickly and easily
Speaking of effective web presence, this nifty trick to allow users of your web sites to get Google Map’s directions right to your [library’s] door is a pretty good tool. [mathowie]