I think I first read about Twitter on Creating Passionate Users, but soon thereafter it started popping up on a lot of library blogs I read. I didn’t want to get crushed in the stampede, so I waited out the buzz until this weekend when I got talking about it with a friend and decided to set up an account. If you’re interested, you can find me at acbtanya, but be forewarned: I have no idea how or how often I’ll use it.
To cope with some serious anxiety while waiting for my spouse to come back from an interview and waiting to find out whether we’re getting the apartment we want, I added some stuff to this site. There’s a del.icio.us feed in the blog sidebar, and on my main page I’ve added my promised pre-print (come on, you know you want to read about e-journal cataloging), plus a del.icio.us link and a LibraryThing link.
From this Thingology post:
Some day, if we have enough shared users [with Cork’d], LibraryThing can recommend books based on the wines you drink!
Awesome!
I’m in the Atlanta airport for a good while, waiting for my flight to San Antonio for Open Repositories, so I shelled out for wifi access. And now that I have, I’m going to find things to do online until the last possible minute or until my battery dies!
One good way to pass time online today is to head over to the Ann Arbor District Library’s fabulous catalog, which is newly enhanced with the ability to tag, review, and more. John Blyberg describes his work on the development here. Be sure to look at the catalog cards, too, if you haven’t yet, and at their website in general, which won LAMA’s 2006 Best in Show award for library websites in its budget category.
Two interesting pieces recently came across my aggregator on the topic of the web’s impact on traditional publishing.
The first is an article in the Chronicle, “Book 2.0,” about an experimental book format that allows readers to comment on the original text and the author to respond. The book under discussion, GAM3R 7H30RY by McKenzie Wark, is hosted by the Institute for the Future of the Book. The project description indicates that the book will eventually be published “in print by a conventional press” and that “Our hunch is that a good conversation generated here will result in a better book.” Wark has gotten many comments on his text, ranging from simple copy editing to close examinations of the book’s arguments.
The second piece is a blog post by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Derivative Myth.” The key questions of the post are whether or not blogging is inherently derivative and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Gladwell’s comments follow his participation in a Slate panel on print journalism and resulting conversation (partially via blogs) with Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of the recently-published The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, who took issue with some of Gladwell’s comments at the panel discussion. The whole thing is worth reading partly for its very meta feel.
A short piece on All Things Considered reveals that mother and daughter have very different perspectives on the site, online privacy, and the nature of the web.
Last week I decided to register with Facebook and see what all the fuss is about.
Wow-ee, is it eye-opening! In addition to my Binghamton e-mail address I have an alumna e-mail address for my alma mater, so I registered for both networks.
For those of you who don’t know, Facebook is a social networking site for colleges, universities, schools, and workplaces. In contrast to MySpace.com, which anyone can join, you need to have an e-mail address with your organization in order to register with the site. There has been a lot of talk about social networking sites among librarians recently (should libraries have profiles? should the sites be banned from libraries because they’re too popular and using up bandwidth? etc.) and Meredith Farkas recently wrote up an interesting post on the topic, complete with all the links you could ever want down at the bottom.
My observation for libraries: one size definitely does not fit all, and the culture on Facebook may vary wildly from one network to another, reflecting the culture of the campus and the student body. If you think there are significant cultural differences between a small women’s college and a large co-ed university, you’re right (guess which has a group called “I Dress Like a Librarian”).
If you are considering a library or librarian profile, my advice is to log on as an individual and get to know the community first, before you fill out an extensive profile. I think both sites I logged onto might be equally welcoming to a library account, but the content and presence for each would surely differ according to local customs and how people use the site.
NASIG’s first Vision Session (aka plenary session) featured Robin Sloan of Current TV. The description was intriguing: “…Media is becoming digitized and disaggregated, free to float across the internet and get downloaded and uploaded, blogged and sold, pirated and appreciated, remixed and reimagined…. So what about libraries and scholarly communication?…” What I didn’t realize until he was introduced is that Robin Sloan is one of the EPIC 2014 guys.
Robin showed the EPIC 2014 movie and then talked through a similar scenario concerning libraries in the year 2016.
Two points I took from Robin’s talk:
A few other points that caught my ear:
Robin is one of two contributors to the wide-ranging blog Snarkmarket and was formerly employed by the Poynter Institute, which has an interesting website.