Ab’s Blog

Looking for free or inexpensive continuing education opportunities? Check out OPAL, which describes itself as “an international collaborative effort by libraries of all types to provide web-based programs and training for library users and library staff members.” Most events are offered for free and past events are archived at the website.

One upcoming event of note for academic librarians is “Collaboration Opportunities for Academic Libraries in Second Life.” Second Life is an online virtual reality environment, and according to the program description, “This fall over 50 institutions of higher education are offering (or preparing to offer) courses in Second Life.” Is this the Next Big Thing?

Emdashes reports that the New Yorker will soon sell the Complete New Yorker on portable hard drive in addition to the DVD set already on sale. For $299 you get an installation CD and a portable 3″x5″ drive. Since $59.99 gets you the same coverage on DVD, I’m curious about their target audience with this venture. My other question’s been answered though; the description includes this: “Plus, there is plenty of extra room on the drive for future updates.”

InfoWorld says, “Search satisfaction on the wane,” but happiness with web portals is increasing.

Compete, a market research firm, asserts that traffic to social networking sites like MySpace is poised to overtake traffic to portal sites like Yahoo!

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that “User-generated content drives half of U.S. top 10 fastest growing web brands.” PDF Report

At the end of the day, library websites are mostly about search. But what does the growth in portals and networking sites imply about future library site design and features? Should our next design strive less for the clean-and-uncluttered look and more for Yahoo’s put-it-all-on-the-front-page look? As our sites start to include more social features, such as tagging and reviews, what else will users want to go along with them? Which features are most applicable to library sites?

No answers yet, sorry; just asking the questions.

For a Monday morning diversion with a grain of truth see What does your browser reveal about you?

“You really don’t care if FF is faster, or safer than IE - you would use it even if it performed 10 times worse. “

You betcha!

Found via Library Garden.

At least library catalogs aren’t the only search tools with problems:

When I search for “A Food Website Spiced with Attitude”, the NYT’s search engine should take a wild, off-the-wall guess about what article I might be looking for, and not return zero results.

At This is Broken

An interesting discussion ensues concerning what search engines should and shouldn’t be expected to do.

I just visited Web Accessibility for All, which is maintained by the Center for Education and Work at the University of Wisconsin. The site’s tagline is, “Failure is Not an Option.”

To gain some understanding of what people with impairments may see or hear on the web, try the following experiments:

1. Using Firefox or Opera, try surfing the web with images, tables, and author-supplied color information turned off and font size doubled. Disable your mouse and use only the keyboard.
2. Using a page reader such as JAWS or IBM Home Page Reader (trial available), try surfing the web with your monitor and mouse disabled. I don’t recommend doing this for more than about 15 minutes.

Not very fun, eh? Failure to ensure that our websites are accessible to our entire population of users can have disastrous consequences, not the least of which is that would-be patrons end up frustrated with the library and take their business elsewhere.

Creating websites with accessibility in mind doesn’t have to take much extra work. In fact, once you know the basics you may find that the same techniques that improve your site’s accessibility also make maintenance easier and allow for better viewing on handhelds, phones, and similar devices.

Resources:

• University of Illinois Course “Designing Universally Accessible Web Resources“: Excellent, in-depth online course
• Illinois Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility: Best practices, evaluation tools, software, links to other resources
• Web Accessibility for All: Tutorial section includes very specific topics, such as SPSS, PDF, and Office documents
• BBC’s My Web My Way: Loads of platform-specific tips for optimizing your browser, computer, keyboard, and mouse
• HTML Validator Firefox Extension: Very handy extension that uses an icon in your status bar to tell you whether the page you’re viewing validates and gives you accessibility warnings

Gosh darn it, one of my unwritten rules for this blog is not to reference other blogs too often. I often appreciate such referencing in the blogs I read, I just don’t want to do it too much myself. But along comes if:book and I find myself wanting to pass on its commentary every time I read it (perhaps because I don’t see it referenced too often in other places). So please, dear reader, if the tidbits below tickle your fancy, please pop over to if:book and subscribe yourself.

On Wikipedia

I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the “truth” is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide. Network-authored works need to be read in a new way that allows one to focus on the process as well as the end product.

Indeed, what I prize most about the Wikipedia is that it acknowledges the messiness of knowledge and the process by which useful knowledge and wisdom accrete over time.

(”Messiness of knowledge”… I don’t see that phrase too often on library blogs!)

On UC, Google, and the Open Content Alliance

During this period of uncertainty, the OCA seems content to let Google be the legal lightning rod. If Google prevails, however, Microsoft and Yahoo will have a lot of catching up to do in stocking their book databases. But the two efforts may not be in such close competition as it would initially seem.

On Cliff Lynch on computational analysis of scholarly literature

Using the metaphor of Google Earth, where one can zoom out from the entire Earth down to a single home, what can we gain from being able to view the sphere of scholarly literature? …What are the potential insights can we learn from viewing the entire corpus of scholarly knowledge from above?

if:book (I’ve been reading it a lot lately) has a post about the future of television.

Today, radio listening habits have shifted, and I only hear the radio in cars and offices. Television viewing (if you can even call it that) is experiencing a similar shift, as people multitask at home, with the television playing in the background.

The post goes on to mention a partnership between YouTube and NBC and the shift from watching TV on, well, TV to watching it on computers and portable players.

It got me thinking: I live by technology at work. The words “digital library initiatives” are in my job title. I blog. I think coding web pages is fun and I actually sort of like vi. I own an MP3 player and connect it frequently to my computer at work (although lately I’ve been listening to my favorite radio station, WXPN 88.5, a lot). I use IM to help patrons with technical problems. I am obsessive about checking my feed reader.

But when I get home at the end of the day it’s a different story. I own a cell phone for emergencies, but I don’t know the number and I definitely can’t check for messages. I am more likely to listen to NPR than to watch television. (I did get addicted to several procedurals last winter, but summer has helped me get things under control and I hope to stay on the wagon. Does anyone know of a CSI 12 step program?) I used to maintain a website for fun but stopped because I was never in the mood to work on it. I spent a recent evening playing a board game with some friends and I have been thinking of taking up sewing or knitting.

What gives? I am getting all digital-ed out at work? Are my roots showing? Is it Gen X nostalgia for my pre-web existence? These are all rhetorical questions, but I am curious to know if anyone else can relate.

This American Life just repeated its episode from 8/5/05, which includes an act about rock concerts in Michigan public libraries. The theme of the episode? “Stories of people and institutions who are worried about what the world thinks of them, and who take action, decisive action.”

Streaming is free, podcasts are not.

John Willinsky of the University of British Columbia has written a book, The Access Priniciple, on open access, digital publishing, and scholarly communication and made the whole darn thing available for download at the MIT Press website.

If you, like me, have been meaning to read up on open access, this looks like a good place to go.

if:book has a lengthy review.