Teen Tech Week Mini Grants

Some of you might have heard about this - just passing it along: YALSA has some Teen Tech Week mini grants to give out to some lucky libraries! From Yalsa’s website:
“Thanks to our 2008 Corporate Sponsor Dungeons & Dragons, you could win one of twenty mini grants for your celebration! Mini grants of $450 and [...]

Don’t Set Your MySpace Page Profile to Private!

I just saw Plainfield Public Library’s MySpace page (via Michael Stephens). Well, not really - take a look at the screenshot - their MySpace profile is set to private.
So what? Well… it’s a usability and experience thing. There will be MySpacers that want to peruse the page, see what programs the library has to offer, [...]

More Myspace Thinking

I’ve been looking at some library myspace accounts lately, notably Steele Creek Library and Denver Public Library’s eVolver Myspace accounts. Both are way cool. Steele Creek, especially, has a nifty background on the page that I think rocks.
And both sites have great content - they both use the blog part of Myspace, so any of [...]

Law Professor Bans Laptops in Class

From this article… a professor has banned the use of laptops in her class. The article says “Professor June Entman says her main concern is that
students are so busy keyboarding they can’t think and analyze what
she’s telling them.”
Wow. Just wow. I have a question… those students are TAKING NOTES. But using a laptop to do [...]

CIL2006, Day 3: Gary Price - Best of Resource Shelf

Most important - why do we need to know all this stuff Gary talked about? Well - we’re the information go-to… we know our collections. We also need to learn online resources, so when people come asking about the web, we can be ready with a good anser, resources to point them to, etc.
trafficland.com - [...]

CIL2006, Day 3: Lee Rainie

Lee Rainie spoke about younger people… here’s what he had to say:
Younger users: they made a recent TIme Magazine cover - “Are Kids too Wired for their Own Good?”
8 Realities of Millenials:

Distinct age cohort: they are not like gen x or baby boomers. They will be a larger generation than the baby boomer generation, and [...]

E-mail is for older people, teens say in survey (from Yahoo! News)

Here’s an interesting news story: E-mail is for older people, teens say in survey.
According to a recent survey, teens (age 12 - 17) think email is for grown-ups (even though 90% of the kids DO have an email account, too).
Interesting stuff!

Audio Content at Thomas Ford Memorial Library

Update from comments: someone asked what a p-slip was. Here’s a definition (from http://www.library.cornell.edu/tsmanual/jargon.html): “A plain piece of paper the size of a catalog card, sometimes with punched hole for use in a catalog drawer.” It’s the little piece of paper by the library computer that you can write a call number on… often, it [...]

Usability of Websites for Teenagers from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

Update: here’s an article from CNN about the new study…
This is a must read: Usability of Websites for Teenagers (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
From the article: “Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It’s also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, [...]