Hi. One of the things I don’t like about aggregated news is its tendency to sort of swim rootless in space and time. I’m adding a date in the title field of my first post of the day. This weekend I will wrestle with getting MT categories to be a way to browse posts on my site. Also, Greg and I went out to a nice dinner at AJ’s steakhouse in White River Junction last night. AJ’s is a cool 35 minute drive from our house and as such it is the closest steakhouse to where we live. I got a NY strip sirloin and Greg got a tuna steak. We both had dessert which is, of course, crazily profligate in our law-student and half-time librarian lives. Thanks to any and all who clicked through the Powell’s link and bought stuff from that nice independent union shop in Portland.
Month: January 2004
wifi vs CIPA
What are the CIPA implications for a library that provides WiFi access? TechnoBiblio’s Aaron discusses the problem they are having grappling with this at his library.
PC vs Mac
Gates Foundation grants have done a huge amount towards getting libraries online. That said, they have regrettably opened libraries up to a lot of the crappy virii and browser hijacking problems that abound which are almost exclusively the result of insecure software, or software that has the potential to be secure but is configured insecurely out of the box. Microsoft makes, and sets default configurations on, most of this software. Librarian Way has a good short bit about the PC vs Mac dichotomy in the library world. I have been agitating just to get Netscape loaded on our Gates Foundations machines at my library, just so we can give our patrons a bit of a choice.
a few more blogs I’ll be watching, and a note or two about RSS
The Curmudgeony Librarian and the Kept-Up Academic Librarian are being added to my more-frequently-read list. One thing I haven’t seen people mention lately about the benefit of reading content via RSS+aggregators is that it lets you skim. Now maybe this sounds crass, but I can access more content more quickly and filter out what interests me in order to give it a closer look, if I’m not doing the point-click-wait tango of getting 20 different web pages to load and render.
del.icio.us/jessamyn
Another tool that alll those chatty blogging librarians seem to be checking out lately is del.icio.us, a bookmarking tool that is striking for its simplicity, ability to share lists and [best of all] an ability to create your own authority control structures via a keywording system that becomes a set of hotlinked categories. I’m mostly using it presently for my “to add” list of links for librarian.net, and because I enjoy the URL del.icio.us/jessamyn.