Technically Random

The latest in the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About … ” series.

7 Things You Should Know About Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters
of virtual lands, more than 13 million “residents,” and a thriving
economy. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases,
individual departments or faculty—are active in Second Life, not only
for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities
for prospective students, and fundraising. Second Life lets educators
easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different
strategies for a physical space affect learning, and a similar approach
can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.

I have an account in SL and spent way too much time trying to make my avatar look even remotely like me (although for some people, maybe that’s not the goal). I haven’t explored very much but I do know there is a Second Life Library Project. Right now my first life is leaving me barely enough time for sleep and a small guilty dosage of bad television.

This from the Chronicle Wired Campus:

Wired Campus: Twitter Ideas for Libraries - Chronicle.com

The Web site College@Home has put together a nice list of ideas for libraries interested in using the instant-blogging service Twitter.
More…

I’ve resisted Twitter so far because I’m trying to reduce the number of distractions that keep me from… well… work. I can see though how it could make it easier to do some things. Just yesterday I was trying to help diagnose a IP authentication problem with a new database. It seemed to be working from some subnets but not others. I was going through my IM list looking for people to help me test but it would have been much easier to send out something over Twitter so that whoever was available could to respond or not.
Maybe it’s time to jump in.

Yesterday, the University of Washington announced layoffs for 66 positions in UW Technology (the division most responsible for maintaining campuswide online infrastructure here).

Ron Johnson, Vice President for UW Technology had this to say about the cause of the layoffs:

“Things really have changed in fundamental ways. In our world, for a very long time, it was a world of gurus. We were masters of technology, and we would provide it to other people. Now, people are masters of their own technology, and they just need some help. We are much more facilitators of technology now, rather than providers.” - Seattle Times 5/21/08

I was blown away by how this also applies to our academic library world these days. Substitute ‘information’ for technology and the parallels are striking:

‘We are much more facilitators of information now, rather than providers’.

Obviously we still provide plenty of information around here, but maybe the age of the ‘guru’ is drawing to a close for us as well.

More importantly, this fundamental shift has big implications for budgets, staffing, and organization. It’s one thing to discuss and theorize about the future of technology (or libraries) but it really hits home when you see the direct impact.

The DLF ILS and Discovery Systems group is proposing

standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

This set of standards (nicknamed the “Berkeley Accord”) would support:

• Harvesting of data records for library collections, both in full and incrementally;
• Querying for real-time availability of an item;
• Stable linking to any item in an OPAC.

A number of ILS vendors have already signed on.  Our own, beloved, Innovative Interfaces being the exception.  See the full announcement on Peter Brantley’s blog here.

Issue 2 of The Code4Lib Journal is out!  Here is a selected table of contents:

• Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides
• Using Google Calendar to Manage Library Website Hours
• Toward element-level interoperability in bibliographic metadata
• Googlizing a Digital Library
• The ICAP (Interactive Course Assignment Pages) Publishing System

It’s always amazing to see what other people are doing to address many of the same issues we are grappling with.

-Corey

I started playing around with the Google Dynamic Feed Control and Yahoo Pipes to see what it would look like to bring together all the RSS and blog feeds in the Libraries.  I put up a couple of test pages:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss.html
and
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss2.html

The first example is just using the Google Dynamic Feed Control and the second is using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds into a single feed and Google Dynamic Feed Control to display the feed on the page.  I like the simplicity of the second view, but (as was pointed out to me) you lose the context of the feed source that you get in the first view.

I only include the half dozen-ish blogs and feeds that I could find.  If you know of any other UW Libraries feeds, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

And, to give credit where credit is due, Jake was playing with both of these tools long before I was.  He has a test page using the Google Dynamic Feed Control at:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/rss/intlstudies/newspage/newstest.html
and all of the new books lists that he does for International Studies is using Yahoo Pipes.

Corey

Northwestern University Library and Academic Technologies hosted a head-to-head matchup of citation management software and tools in CiteFest 2008.  The tools they looked at were: CiteULike, Connotea, EndNote, NoodleBib, RefWorks,  and Zotero.

The posted the preliminary results earlier this week and Zotero won, narrowly edging out EndNote.  Zotero is a Firefox plugin that lets you collect and manage your citations from within the browser.  They’ve made a lot of improvements in the last year so if you haven’t looked at it for a while, it might be time to give it another shot.  Close to 80 other libraries and universities are recommending or providing instruction on using Zotero.

-Corey

There’s been some talk going around about library applications in Facebook.  At the Web 2.0 Workshop last summer we talked a little about library and research-related tools that have Facebook apps, such as JSTOR and Books-I-Like.  An article appeared in the Chronicle last week on searching the catalog in facebook, discussing the worldcat.org tool. Mostly this article re-iterated the question: will people use Facebook as a tool for research?  Do they want library tools there in the first place?

Over the weekend, Gerry McKiernan posted the results of a survey to his blog, Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services, on Library Outreach and Social Networking sites.  In part of the survey, students are asked whether they would want library tools available in their MySpace or Facebook.  Take a look at the post for the results . . .

The beginning of the new year and ALA Midwinter brings lists of top tech trends for the coming year. Here’s a short wrap-up of some of the trends being predicted for 2008:

Eric Lease Morgan (LITA Blog):

• Linux on the server and desktop will increase
• Open access will grow
• Social networking spaces maturing
• Blogging will continue to effect the way we communicate

Sarah Houghtan-Jan (LibrarianInBlack.net):

• Tough Budget, Tech Stays
• Widening of the Digital Divide and our Inattention to It
• User-Centered Content Production
• Virtual Reference Software a la Rest-O’-The-World?
• We Stop Being So Bossy
• Another Day of Open Source

Karen Schneider (Free Range Librarian):

• Interoperability
• Open systems, open data

Karen Coombs (Library Web Chic):

• Ultra-light and small PCs
• New uses of wireless
• Blogging ceases to exist as blogging
• On the Go Applications and Data

Then this from the publishing world, 15 Trends to Watch in 2008 by Mike Shatzkin at Publishers Weekly.

And, finally 10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life, published by LiveScience during the Consumer Electronics Show last week.

The King County Library System catalog now has tags and book recommendations using the LibraryThing for Libraries catalog widgets.  Take a look at this record for Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking.   On the bottom of the record display you’ll see a list of books that ‘People Also Liked’ and a tag list for the book.  Clicking on one of the tags will bring up a tag browser to see other books that share the same tag.