Author: Robin

The previous carnival – #88 – is posted at Library Garden if you care to see what the format and the content of a top-notch Carnival of the Infosciences looks like! They have a team of bloggers that helped out with the submissions, though. I, alas, am a single person who desperately needs others to find and submit (Email, Web Form or del.icio.us tag – carninfo) articles about information science and/or libraries. Let’s try to make #89 just as good as #88 was, shall we?

I was reading a post on the Micro Persuasion blog that discusses the need for Digital Curators and I got thinking (always a dangerous proposition…). The way he describes the “digital curator”:

Museum curators, like web users, are faced with choices. They can’t put every work of art in a museum. They acquire pieces that fit within the tone, direction and – above all – the purpose of the institution. They travel the corners of the world looking for “finds.” Then, once located, clean them up and make sure they are presentable and offer the patron a high quality experience.

Much the same, the digital realm too needs curators. Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art. It requires a certain finesse and expertise – a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye. Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like digg are not curators. They’re aggregators – and there’s a big difference.

seems to describe what a really good blog could do. It could take the wealth of digital writings, links, podcasts, videos and twittered conversations about a particular topic and distill the huge amount of information into something pretty and easy to follow. One of the folks who commented on that post mentioned that hurrying up and getting the semantic web into more common use would be really helpful (serious paraphrasing there…), if only to assist a digital curator in getting the best and most relevant information in the easiest way possible. Libraries, and librarians, would be a natural fit for some digital curating. We already do some of it, but with the addition of social networking tools – such as blogs – to our arsenals, we could certainly do more!
The post also points to some sites that are offering digital curating of information – those are good starting points for us to use to decide if our expertise and passion can be put to use creating museum-quality collections of information for others to use.

Yes, I do cook (occasionally), but this isn’t that sort of cookbook. This cookbook is chock full of recipes to help libraries learn how other libraries manage their IT offerings. From the announcement of the last cookbook:

TechSoup’s MaintainIT Project is pleased to announce the latest Cookbook, packed with tips, techniques, and stories about supporting public computers from libraries across the country.
Download the FREE Joy of Computing: Recipes for a 5-Star Library here: http://maintainitproject.org/cookbooks
Find out what your colleagues had to say about wireless, time and print management, and laptop checkout programs.
We’d love to hear from more Missouri libraries!
The MaintainIT Project continues to craft guides focused on supporting public computers. Please get in touch and share your challenges and successes so libraries can learn from *your* experiences. Remember, what may be, “that’s nothing!” to you, may be an “aha” to someone else!
Email us: maintainit@techsoup.org

I’ve downloaded and read both of the cookbooks they have put out and some of my words of wisdom (ehem – stop laughing…) will be featured in the next cookbook that they are doing. I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago about the challenges of managing a library IT department and how we overcome some of the issues involved with providing Internet access to so many different people. It was a great conversation, and I can’t wait to see what others in my position had to say about their libraries! Until then, however, I’ll keep referring to the previous cookbooks and I’ll keep using those great recipes they provide to improve the service that my library provides to our patrons!

What is it?
According to the description on its wiki, the Carnival of the Infosciences is basically a traveling exhibition that showcases the best, most thought-provoking and most interesting posts from the biblioblogosphere and about Information Science in general.

How does it work?
Blog readers find an article or post that they think should be mentioned in the next Carnival of the Infosciences. They submit that article or post (see below) to me and I compile them into a smorgasboard of information science and biblioblogospheric goodness.

How do I submit a post?
There are 3 easy ways to let me know about articles that you think should be pointed out in this edition of the Carnival of the Infosciences. Email, a web form or a del.icio.us tag (carninfo). If you are emailing me your submission, please be sure to give me the title, URL and a description or summary of the post and your name (or at least a nom de plume that you would like to be known by). If you are using the del.icio.us tag to send in your submission, make sure you include that description/summary and your name in the bookmark.
When will it be here?
February 18th, 2008. That’s when I’ll post all of the submissions (that aren’t spam, of course) so that we can all be exposed (or re-exposed) to the great ideas that have come out of librarian/infoscience blogging over the past 2 weeks!

Boxes and Arrows has a great little article on making advanced search more usable to people other than the “most fanatical users”:

Tim Bray wrote, “The people who do use Advanced Search are your most fanatical users, the professional librarians, spooks, and private investigators.”

Even if you skim through most of the article, check out the final few paragraphs. I really like the model they are describing for a just-in-time, fully customizable, no-more-than-needed advanced search that pops up after the user realized their simple search didn’t really get them what they needed.

I’ve been staying out of the “is Library 2.0 overrated” debate that was sparked by John Blyberg – until I read David Lee King’s take on the discussion. As always, David has some intelligent and thought-provoking things to say about the discussion in the blogosphere, and the main theme of his post (are librarians *really* out there in the social networking world or just dipping their toes in the pool and then complaining that they aren’t getting wet?) struck home with me. I’ve said before that participation is key to getting people to notice you in the Web 2.0 arena – that goes for organizations as well as individuals. As David puts it in his article, Has Elvis Left the Building?,

How about #2? Who’s this Elvis guy? Elvis is the librarian – has he left the building? Or is he still sitting behind the oak reference desk, waiting for patrons to visit? You cannot participate if you haven’t “left the building.” What does it take for librarians to be successful in the digital space? Well… we have to go there. Not just randomly peek in once in awhile, but actually be present and active in that space.

He continues on from there, but that is an excellent point. At my library, we have Bobbi, whose job it is to be present and active in the Web 2.0 space. She does a great job and we get a lot of response to our 2.0ish efforts (considering the size of our population, at least) because of it. Not every library is that lucky, I know that, but just randomly posting a comment or two on a mostly ignored blog or creating a profile on a social networking site that you never return to isn’t going to get the masses to come in to see you. You have to be there – commenting on your friend’s pages, commenting on their blog posts, commenting on their Flickr photos… You get the idea.
I’m pretty bad about commenting – I only do it when I’m really fired up about something or I feel I have something important to say (yes, the bold was necessary – it has to be *that* important). I’m going to work on that, both personally and professionally, and become more of a presence outside the building, as well as inside of it.

Just a quick pointer to something I’ve found interesting… Could Instant Messaging XMPP Power the Future of Online Communication? – ReadWriteWeb (RRW). The article discusses the use of Jabber (AKA XMPP and the framework behind Google’s Gmail Chat) as a way to help ease the load of stateless HTTP. Right now, every time a web server updates, browsers have to specifically re-request the page to find updates. RRW says that this may not be required if the browser “logs in” to the page using XMPP and then just waits for updates. According to RRW:

Tivo, they say, no longer requires your box to check in with the Tivo servers periodically – the server sends a signal via XMPP to available boxes when new information is published. Tivo is essentially using machine-to-machine Instant Messaging for real time communication within its service.

So it’s already in use in some applications! There are some other applications that the article mentions – no more hourly checks of RSS feeds – readers can go get the new post only when pinged by the server. That would cut down on a LOT of traffic on the net all by itself! There were also some reservations expressed in the article, such as whether a completely open standard could make it worth a company’s while to build upon it if everyone else can do the same thing with no barriers. I’m hoping to see it used more – I can really see where it would be a handy way to get up-to-the-second updates from a lot of different sites, without constant polling or refreshing involved!

I was just reading through my feeds and discovered a new convert to the Getting Things Done cult. Karen, of the Library Web Chic blog, has found the system and started to use it. She also found an interesting tool that I hadn’t run across (and I thought I’d used ALL the GTD applications…)

Library Web Chic » Blog Archive » Getting things done aka how I keep my head above water
To solve this problem, I went open source software searching and came up with a nice program called Task Freak.

I’ve been using Outlook’s task delegation (with the assistance of the Clear Context GTD plugin for Outlook) to send tasks to my staff – but something like this might be more flexible. Clear Context is only installed on my work computer (cause it’s rather pricey…), but I do work from home sometimes – if I could send tasks via Task Freak instead, I’d be set! Thanks to Karen for pointing this tool out!!

It’s probably too late for my birthday, and most assuredly too expensive (unless more than one person wanted to go together to get it for me…), but the Eye-Fi looks to be the coolest little gadget I’ve seen in a while. I’m seriously considering getting one for my Mom (hassle-free uploads from her camera to Flickr? My laptop? The house’s file server? I’m so there!!!), making this not something I will be able to pick up for myself for a while. Perhaps this and a gift subscription to Flickr would be the way to go for her
. If you can upload directly to Flickr, from your camera, in any wi-fi enabled spot, I’d be in geek heaven!!!

Got a “can’t miss” RSS feed that you really need to keep on top of, even when you aren’t at a computer? Try out this new service called Pingie to transform your RSS feeds into text messages. Admittedly, this really should have gone on the new LL2.1 blog, but we have SO MUCH new and interesting stuff already in the pipeline, that I’m not sure this would have been able to fit in this year. Anyway, I can see LOTS of applications for this – but you’ll still have to be careful about what feeds you redirect in this way. 140 characters is not going to get you the full text of any feed – but for “breaking news” feeds, or “library books about to come due” feeds or the like, this might be an excellent resource!