Ab’s Blog

An April 19th article in Information Week discusses the rise in the use of mobile phones to access the web. The trend is stronger in Japan than either the United States or Canada (no surprise there); nevertheless, over one quarter of mobile users have used their phones to access the internet, according to the article.

The growth of internet-ready devices with small screens–whether video iPods, mobile phones, or “traditional” handhelds like PDAs–has implications for the kind of web design we do and the level of flexibility we need behind the scenes to ensure that everyone can use our websites. This is closely tied to accessibility for people with disabilities, which I’ll talk more about in a future post.

The article also mentions that text messaging is “the most popular mobile and wireless activity” (I think they actually mean most popular after using a mobile to make a phone call). Text messaging is a way to send short messages of up to 160 characters asynchronously to mobile phones.

If you’re interested in reading more about text messaging, blogwithoutalibrary.net has a useful summary of a CIL presentation on the topic by John Iliff of PALINET, including links to some libraries that are offering text messaging reference services.

National Geographic has the story about a real-life Wallace and Gromit were-rabbit situation.

This seemed like a good inaugural use of the “diversions” category, which I promise to use very sparingly.

Microsoft has launched Windows Live Academic. According to the site it “currently indexes content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas.”

The results interface has some interesting features, including a split panel that shows results on the left and an abstract or more info about one citation on the right, as well as a slider that allows you to see more or less information about each citation and therefore more or fewer citations in the results list.

One of the best presentations I attended at Computers in Libraries was the Cool Tools update presented by Frank Cervone from Northwestern University and Darlene Fichter from University of Saskatchewan. The complete title was “Cool Tools for Webmasters,” but many of the tools they discussed were more general than the title implies.

They covered tools for tracking your passwords; widgets for accessing weather, maps, and Flickr photos on your desktop; web-based organizers; the Tiny URL generator; and, of course, Firefox extensions, which I’ll talk more about later.

Complete slides (PPT) via Darlene’s website

You may be familiar with Wikipedia, but you might not know about many other wikis. Are wikis just for geeks, or are they being used by the wider web world?

The Eastwikkers blog is highlighting 33 wikis in 33 days, showcasing all sorts of wikis: Flu Wiki, This Might Be a Wiki (They Might Be Giants fan site that clearly wins for best name), and even a library wiki: Library Success.

There are political wikis, travel wikis, educational wikis, including one just for the Science of Spectroscopy.

On the 34th day, Eastwikkers will post a wiki featuring all nominated wikis.

Closer to home, you might be interested in a wiki being used as a subject guide. Check out Biz Wiki, created and maintained by Chad Boeninger at Ohio University. Chad made a great case for using a wiki as a subject guide at Computers in Libraries. Although the wiki isn’t really collaborative (he was the only person contributing to it as of late March), it improves maintenance, linking, and search and discovery for business resources.

Welcome to Ab’s blog, a place for me to share information about technology and libraries with BU library staff. My goal is to provide links, information, and some analysis about library tech stuff. In the past I have occasionally done this via e-mail, but a blog seems like a less intrusive and more useful way to go. You can see what I think I might blog about from the categories list; undoubtedly the list will change and grow over time. A lot of what I post will be inspired by what I read on other blogs (see the blogroll for a partial list) and in journals and by what I hear at conferences. I hope it’s helpful; if there’s something you’d like to know about just drop me a line via e-mail or IM (acbtanya).