by David Lee King on January 2, 2008
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 $50 worth of Teen Tech Week products are available to YALSA members who plan to offer unique, engaging programming activites, services or resources to celebrate Teen Tech Week in their community. Download the official rules and submit the application form and your proposal to the YALSA office at yalsa@ala.org by January 7, 2008.”
So if you want to do this, get those application forms in fast!
by David Lee King on December 7, 2006
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, etc – and not want to sign up to be a friend of the library. By setting their profile to private, the library is basically blocking all their great MySpace content from ALL POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS. It’s sort of like saying “yes, you can enter our library building! Of course! But – do you have a library card? ‘Cause you can ONLY enter our fine library if you have a library card.”
The newspaper article about the page (aside – extremely cool they received press about their MySpace page!) quotes a librarian saying they’ve added more than 80 friends to the site since August. My guess? They’d get more friends if the profile WASN’T set to private.
myspace, social networking, User Experience
by David Lee King on July 10, 2006
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 their myspace “friends” will be updated on events and new stuff when the libraries decide to update. And both use the Blurbs section for different things: Denver points to their Ask a Librarian service, their teen website, and includes a catalog search interface right in Myspace!
Steele Creek Library includes Youtube videos of library events – which is an amazingly cool way to use Youtube… and Myspace… simultaneously.
Then there’s the usual comments section where kids say stuff like “We heart you for the freinds addy”…
I think both these libraries are really going for it, and getting a lot of mileage out of their myspace accounts. I also think they could go one or two steps further. Denver’s Myspace account includes popular music – some band called Hot IQs plays when you go to the page. But as far as I can tell, Denver Public Library doesn’t own a copy of the CD (it doesn’t show up in their catalog, anyway). You have the option to pick songs on myspace – so why not pick things that teens can check out, and even link from myspace directly to the catalog record? That’d be one cooler, for sure.
My other idea is this – Myspace has two types of accounts: the normal one, and one for musicians/bands. The added benefit of registering as a band? You can upload your original songs to your myspace site for everyone to listen to download to their iPods, etc. Pretty cool for bands.
But wait! Can’t a library be slightly devious, and register as a band? Heck – right now we’re registering as a teenager (ex – Denver Public Library is described as an 18 year old female). So why not register as a band? That way, you can download an audio file (I think up to 4 of them, actually). And what could those files be? How about:
- A compilation of 30-second samples of new music at the library?
- Your hip library podcast on upcoming teen books
- A regular what’s hot at the library podcast
- original music from local bands
- etc
This type of thing provides the library with another way to get into your teen’s iPod… which is a good thing!
by David Lee King on March 29, 2006
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 the note-taking.
How in the world is typing one’s notes somehow different from using pen and paper to take notes? Is there really a difference, other than laptops might be a bit more noisy?
Compared to what her students just might be doing in the “real world” (as in, using a laptop to take notes, write reports on the go, etc, etc), I’d think the professor would welcome the use of laptops.
But that’s just me.
by David Lee King on March 25, 2006
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 – cams of traffic in DC and NYC
in2tv from AOL – free old TV shows. This is cool…
publicradiofan.com – what’s coming up on public radio – even opens up the live stream.
search engine ordering – a firefox plugin – will it work with an opac? Hmm…
newspaperarchive – free pdf of newspapers
zohowriter – wame as writely – a web-based Word-like application
SECform4.com – free SEC alert service
exalead has proximity searching – 16 words in either direction
rollyo runs on top of the yahoo database, does customized searches
online books page – lots of onlien books, with rss
topix.net – still useful. prebuilt pages for companies and zip codes.
Diplomacy Monitor – primary documents and press releases from world governments
wikiwax, answers.com – word mapping
Gooba – upload and host video content
CIL2006
