A Passion For 'Puters

It was a slow start, but eventually, I started getting some submissions for this carnival. You all had me worried!! Well, without further ado – let’s get this carnival started!

First, I want to point out that there was a carnival submission that got lost in a spam folder during the last carnival’s run. It’s just an innocent victim of the spam wars, and Janie (from Library Garden) emailed me with the news that the submission ended up in her spam folder, but she thought it was very much worth a post in the carnival, so here it is! Genevive Williams directs our attention to the At Play In The Field Of Ideas blog and the post, “Wither Reference? Part 2: From Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time”. Genevive describes it as the “Second in an occasional and ongoing series about the changing nature of reference work in response to the changing nature of the library”. This post deserves a little carnival love!!

Sol Lederman started things off for this edition of the carnival by pointing to a post about determining quality of results for federated search engines at “What determines quality of search results?” on his blog. It’s a slightly different look at federated search results and in it he discusses quality markers as opposed to which federated search products produce the “best” results.

kmdunneback made excellent use of the del.icio.us tag to submit 3 different posts that all have to do with the recent moves made by publishers (specifically HarperCollins) to give books away for free and how that will affect book pirating sites. The first post is a story from the New York Times titled “HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web – New York Times” and gives the background on the recent decision by HarperCollins to make some of their books available for free on the web. Next tagged is “Romance Novel Reviews – Smart Bitches: Piracy – Still Not the Good Kind” as being tied into the discussion – check the comments for discussion about book piracy in general. Finally, the last site tagged in this “theme” is “How to Get an eBook of Old Man’s War — Free!” from the Whatever blog of John Scalzi (who is also present in the comments of the Smart Bitches post… it really does all tie in!!).

Next up in the carnival is a link from eclecticlibrarian to Pegasus Librarian and her “Musings on Periodicals”. According the to eclecticlibrarian, Iris provides some insight into collection development issues as libraries move towards online-only subscriptions. She includes a lot of the criteria that she uses to decide what subscriptions to get in print and which to get in electronic format.

Eclecticlibrarian also pointed, via del.icio.us, to an post from the Off The Mark blog about the “30 mostly spurious benefits of ebooks“. From eclecticlibrarian’s description: “Mark v. Epublishers Weekly blog smackdown! w00t!”. With that kind of ecstatic description, who wouldn’t want to go read this post?

I’ve added the link to Iris’ post (all I can say in my defense is that my house was overtaken by 3 teenaged boys – only one of which is mine – and that I wasn’t allowed near any of my computers all night last night or most of today, so there wasn’t much editing time for me…) and noted that there is no host for #90 on the carnival wiki!! It’s probably not too late to volunteer, so sign up to host the next carnival on March 3rd!

and a close up of those gorgeous red roses (tiger roses?)

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!!