Library Stuff

Have I mentioned how much I love the keyword based full-text press release delivery from PubSub? I get about 15 releases per day that pertain to exactly what I want. It’s a beautiful thing. Have you tried it out yet?

For examples, this morning I was notified that Wells Fargo now has a blog. It’s called Guided By History and is very unique:

“Our team will be covering local commemorative events, including the 1906 Great Earthquake and Fire Expo, a preparedness exposition organized by the San Francisco Fire Department Historical Society. We’ll help you find the resources you need to prepare, including links to checklists and plans from experts, such as the American Red Cross.”

“We will offer you a glimpse of our historical archives, which boast a rich assortment of exclusive documents, artifacts and photography. We will bring you to the Wells Fargo Museum to experience an earthquake exhibit that features a virtual walk through the city, an earthquake simulator, and items from the archives’ collections. Historic figures of the time will come alive through their compelling first-hand accounts.”

I love that companies are getting creating with blogs and not just “What’s new at [enter company name here]“. Blogging for Wells Fargo is about reaching out to their customers and educating them. Beautiful.

Did you also know that WF provides an RSS Feed for “This Date in Wells Fargo History”?

In a comment on my UPenn tags in the catalog post, Michael Winkler, the guy behind the tags, writes:

“Now all of this is very very very early in development. The technology is solid. But what I’m interested in is what folks could imagine doing with the ability to embed contextual content into the catalog? Folksonomy, sure…book reviews, maybe…research guides, hmmm… Come on, folks…feed me.”

My comment to Michael would be to take a look at Library Thing and do what Tim has done for books and emulate it in the catalog. Any other thoughts?

John Tropea has been an OPML freak for a long time. I’ve been an avid fan for a while now and felt the need to show him more link love this evening. If you are at all interested in OPML and other work centered around RSS technology, Library Clips is a must read. Before you stop by his site, subscribe to his feed. Don’t pass go. Don’t collect $200 dollars. Subscribe now.

Done? OK.

Check out this amazing post from today:

OPML for OPAC – “I can see some catalogues having an RSS feed for each subject term…whenever there is a new book in the library and it’s assigned that subject term you can be notified. So why not take a bunch of feeds of subjects you like and add these feeds as items in an OPML outline, you have now created a Reading List…people can browse it in an OPML Browser/Reader or subscribe to the OPML URL in their RSS Reader. Whenever you add more subject feeds to the list it will be reflected in whoever subscribes to your OPML URL…add that to your sidebar and browse it Read/Write, social, re-mix, mashup…the web is becoming interconnected.”

See? I told you.

I don’t like many material things. In fact, I can name just three: American Idol, BMWs, and celebrity gossip.

So, in honor of my birthday, Gabe Riviera launched We Smirch, the memeorandum for celebrity gossip. I’ve subscribed and am now more up to date than many gossip columnists. Also, I’ve subscribed to two People magazine feeds. The first result I got was a link to a survey about Hilary Duff’s new look. What do you think? Blonde or brunette.

Blonde. No contest. My wife agrees.

Ready?

32 – Today is/was my birthday. I turn(ed) 32. It’s also Pi day!

16 – Barbie reminded me that we’ve known each other for half our lives. We wmet when we were 16. Wow!

9,309- the number of “sessions” counted for Library Stuff on March 1st. I’ve been hovering around the 9,000 mark for a few months and I now have more days over than under. So, thank you for your continued readership. For those who are curious, here is how Urchin defines a “session”:

“A ‘Session’ is defined as a series of clicks on your site by an individual visitor during a specific period of time. A Session is initiated when the visitor arrives at your site, and it ends when the browser is closed or there is a period of inactivity. Sessions quantities will vary to some degree based on what type of visitor tracking method is employed.”

Whatever it means, as long as that number continues to increase, I’m a happy guy.

8 – The number of days that I’ll be away from home starting on Sunday. I’ll be traveling to Washington D.C. to present to a bunch of government librarians for Lexis Nexis on Monday morning. The next day is my preconference at Computers in Libraries. Then on Tuesday afternoon, I hop on a plane to Boston for the big PLA show where Andrea and I will be leading a team of over 15 bloggers to report on the event for the PLA Blog.

Millions – The number of splogs that I have deleted over the past 3 weeks at work. Part of my job at PubSub is to make sure that the content we send to end users is clean, based on discussions, and free of splogs. I’ve spoken to a few people who have been thrilled with the clean results since we started this initiative.

730 – (two years) – The number of days since my life-changing panic attacks. I continue to live with panic disorder, although the past year has been pretty much panic free. But, if I forget about it for one moment, I’ll probably feel it. The medication is working well and I’m feeling great.

Onward…

The talk about Library 2.0 and it’s magical powers of bringing the library profession back to life (Were we dead?) has finally flatulated itself into, well, nothingness (typical Library 2.0 stuff I’m afraid). Thank goodness.

Last week, the DIY Librarian had an interesting post about using Powerpoint even though she hates it. Why?

“I think that PowerPoint does a good job of allowing people to quickly and easily create and display electronic “slides”. It is surely not the only method of creating digital slides, but it’s familiar to users of Word and it’s widely available. I think it does a lousy job of helping people organize and write presentations.”

She’s, of course, right. We like the familiar, we embrace it; it’s the warm fuzzy blanket that we put over our shoulder while we suck our thumb, hoping that we will never outgrow it and…change!

But, that’s the problem. Because something is familiar, easy, and widely available means that we have to use it? Remember Netscape? It was the only thing to use before IE came out. Now, more and more people are using Firefox. We changed. We moved on from IE. The numbers are showing that FF users continue to rise. Why can’t we just ditch Powerpoint?

I’ll tell you why. Have you ever seen the faces on attendees at presentations where Powerpoint is used? It’s like they have had their brain matter sucked out by a virtual vacuum, leaving nothing but empty space to be filled by bullet points and flying words (incoming!) from the top left hand corner of the screen. Powerpoint still rules because it is conference crack…

…and many presenters like it that way. They are the pushers, and the audience, the addicts.

Those who don’t deal with the world outside fo librarianship on a professional level usually don’t hear comments like this often. For those of us that blog about and work beyond the four walls (virtual or otherwise), we are constantly ridiculed. Most of it is comical, but sometimes it can be brutal. I find myself defending librarianship many times during the course of a week. And don’t get me started when I go to non-librarian events. Do you know how many times I’ve head, “A librarian? At a start-up?”

Adam Green, who I will meet at OPML Camp next month (a get-together that I am really excited about), has a few words about librarians. Surely, it was in jest, but at the root of all jokes lies some form of the truth, a suffocating scab waiting to be picked at until the wound breaths. If you didn’t click on the link above yet, here are a few quotes for your reading pleasure:

“Another unexpected source of Web innovation is librarians. Don’t get me wrong, I like librarians. I worked in libraries from Junior High School straight through college. It is just that next to accountants, librarians are the last group of people I would expect to jump into new technologies.”

…

“[T]ags are the opposite of a hierarchy. They are a user generated form of anarchy. Every user may have a different tag for the same idea, and may even spell or pluralize it differently. It’s the virtual equivalent of letting users pull the books off the shelves and throw them in big piles. After all those years reshelving books, just thinking about it gives me stomach cramps. Librarians adopting tagging is like capitalists adopting Open Source.”

I love that last line. Don’t bother commenting on his blog because he hasn’t enabled comments. For shame…

Adam also thinks that librarians throw fun parties at conferences. They aren’t bad. Most of the good parties at library conferences that I’ve been to have happened when a bunch of us just get together on a whim, let our hair down (heh!) and, well, drink like the rest of humanity. Well, there was that one in Chicago.

Adam, the PLA Conference is in Boston next week. Stop by and I’ll try to show you a good time…

While we’re not sure how they are doing it, the UPenn library is now allowing users to create their own personalized classification systems by enabling item tagging in the catalog.

I learned about this from the ever resourceful ACRL Blog, which is blogging year round (like we do at the PLA Blog) and not just active at conferences (great work guys!).

But back to the tagging. The UPenn library has always been one to watch with new social tools. They created their tagging system a while back and, if you look at the dates under the tags, it is heavily used. With the addition of this new feature

+ Students can rely on their trust networks to locate materials that they wouldn’t otherwise see.

+ Professors can assign books and tag each one with the course number.

+ Librarians can easily create online subject oriented reading lists.

How exciting that a library is helping to make the catalog a two way street. Here’s an idea:

Match up the tags to those in Library Thing (the biggest book tagging tool online today). In this example, the book is tagged with the keyword HIV. Here’s the tag for HIV in Library Thing. Mesh these together with links to the catalog entry for each book and you have a pretty interesting collaborative service…

News from Jotspot this past week that they have released two application features to their fabulous wiki software. Basically, they realized that some of their users want “skeleton” tools already in place for specific wiki uses. The two that they released are Bug Reporter and Class Reunion Planner.

Bug Reporter allows companies to easy deal with bugs in their services. What’s more important than finding issues is that they get resolved and users notified of the fixes. Wikis are perfect for new technology companies as they help to foster internal communication and product development. Tracking bugs in wikis is a natural progression of communication as more than one person may be involved in the bug fix. Now, instead of having to create the bug tracking wiki from scratch, Jotspot has already done the hard work.

Class reunion gatherings are made easier to organize with any social networking tool. With wikis, anyone with information about classmates can enter in information about locating others. More people are connecting with classmates.com and other tools, but with this application from Jotspot, the tools necessary are already in place and the environment is perfectly suitable for getting classmates to get back to the joys of reunions.

We use a Jotspot wiki for the PLA Blog. We store documents necessary for the bloggers to download and send in to PLA, recommendations for bloggind at the conferences (we’re probably more lenient in our rules than other associations), and for internal communications for the bloggers, managers, and PLA staff. The wiki has been used at 2 ALA events so far and it set up for use at the PLA conference next week. We have bulletin boards for bloggers to discuss issues, pose and answer questions, and network amongst themselves. It’s been fabulous. Maybe Jotspot can create a skeleton wiki for event blogging. Andrea Mercado (my co-manager for the PLA Blog) is the brains behind the wiki that we run and I’m sure she could provide pointers.

Here’s an interesting tool. BibSonomy is a bookmarking tool for sites and lists of literature based on BibTeX. Slick! What a great way to share lists. Hmmm. How can we incorporate Reading Lists into bookmark/tag sharing? Would that be useful?