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friday night short link list

Here in the frozen north Friday nights can often be a time to cook a big meal and curl up with a book and/or laptop while people in more populated areas do whatever people in more populated areas do. Here are a few of the things I have been reading this evening.

Testing the THOMAS Beta by Peggy Garvin – no RSS feeds, but the beta does seem to have some new useful features and an improved search.
Help for Librarians Receiving Law Enforcement Requests Revisited by Don Wood, ALAOIF whose blog is really worth reading
Surveying non-users, Sarah Houghton-Jan points to a library who is trying to figure out who is NOT using their library. I did a little bit of this during National Library week. I set up a library card sign-up table outside of Wal-Mart and met a LOT of non-library users. The main reason people didn’t go back to the library? Fines, especially for younger patrons.
ALA Read Write Connect. Not sure why this is a wiki, exactly, but it’s a great starting point for all of ALA’s newish bloggish and social content. There is a lot more than you would think!
Library Director Quits – Cites WiFi Dangers – I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not sure how you accept a job if you are extremely sensitive to electromagnetic radiation and don’t think to inquire whether there is an active WiFi network. I’m also not convinced by the downloadable Word documents that are provided on the Council on Wireless Technology Impacts’ science page

ALA invites member participation, sort of

Posted on 25Nov0625Nov06 by jessamyn

Dear ALA’s Member Participation task force,

I am happy you have a blog. I am happy that its URL is fairly short. It’s very attractive. However I think one way that you could help members participate would be to make the links in some way distinct from the text that surrounds it. They are, on my monitor, the exact same color and boldness as the text around them. The underline only shows up when you hover over the link making using your blog an experiment in hide and seek. Usually links are indicated by a distinct color, an underline (not just a hover underline) or by being in bold when the surrounding text is plain. Using two out of three of these increases usability dramatically.

Two other smaller points which are more a matter of personal preference.

Usually titles of blog posts link to the post on a page by itself with the comments underneath, a permalink. The blogging software you use does not do this. This is not necessarily a problem, but it is non-standard and might confuse people. One of the great benefits of blogging is that it allows people to use a user interface that does not change much from blog to blog. You might want to consider configuring your blog to work the way most blogs work.
Linking to Word documents is a less than optimal way to get your message across. While I think allowing people to look at a Word document with “track changes” turned on is a neat way to show the evolution of a document, it relies on a proprietary piece of software that people may not have (or Open Office if they are savvy enough to use it) and makes the information contained in the linked document unavailable to search engines and posterity except for the pull-quote you provide. It also increases download times for people on dial-up which is a non-inconsiderate amount of ALA members. Consider making the text of documents you describe available in some way that is more findable and usable to the widest range of people. While I wish it were not the case, ALA member are not always the most tech savvy people around and anything we can do to encourage their participation is a good thing.

Sincerely,

Your friend
Jessamyn

Wikipedia is wise to your antics

Posted on 24Oct06 by jessamyn

In the most recent Dispatches from a Public Librarian, Scott Douglas asks readers to “invent my life” on Wikipedia. By the time I checked out the Wikipedia article, which was not even linked from his essay, it had already been protected which is Wikilanguage for “we’re stopping you from editing this page until you monkeys quit messing with it.” A quick inspection of the page’s history, ah transparency, shows that the page was created by someone named Roboscott (which matches his email address) about two weeks ago and had a flurry of editing yesterday, the day the essay was published, culminating in it being protected about 24 hours ago.

blog: typo of the day

Posted on 18Oct06 by jessamyn

Typo of the Day, highlighting one word each day from the list of thousands found by the members of the forum LIBTYPOS-L. More information about Terry Ballard’s typographical errors in library databases project can be found on his website.

how it should work: book donations @ your library

Posted on 13Sep06 by jessamyn

From Daniel Cornwall, via LISNews comes a good example of how a public library can be friendly and firm about accepting book donations. Here’s the example from the blog of the Seldovia Public Library.

Recently, a very large donation was left outside the library, without notice, for days in boxes too large for our volunteers to lift once they did discover them. In that time, the books became weather-damaged as well as suffering from the territorial marking practices of local dogs. Would you want to read these books or have your children read them? What a sad waste, and one that could have been prevented with a phone call.