Current Cites for March 2007

 

Current Cites for March 2007 is out! I've got three bambinos this month including one on institutional repositories. You can find the issue here...

Telephone Book Delivery : Day 2

Telephone Book Delivery : Day 2: Well, that didn't last long. The maintenance people threw them directly in the trash.

Telephone Book Delivery

 

Telephone Book Delivery: Waiting for me right outside my door. How much longer is this going to last?

Getting Started in Social Networking Doesn't Require Selling Your First Born

One of the librarians on the Usability4lib List was concerned about the amount of investment -- particularly in time -- that embarking on a social networking strategy might require for her library.

Here's what I wrote in reply:

Well, for starters I wouldn't do it simply for the hell of it -- i.e. simply to say you're doing it.

On the other hand, I don't see why it should require an inordinate amount of time, especially if you approach it in small steps.

You say your library is going to do user surveys, and also that your ultimate product will be a CMS-based website.

You could survey the users as to what they use (IM? Facebook, etc.). You could then follow this up by examining a few individuals and their use of these services.

(Personal note: IM's been around for years but it was only when I started looking at how the student workers were using it that I finally got religion.)

On the CMS side, you could use the properties of a CMS system to churn out RSS feeds (such as news, events, classes, etc.). These could be added auto-magically to your Facebook or MySpace Page -- thus lessening potential overhead while still maintaining currency (it's the Web 2.0 way!)

A great first step is just making sure everyone's comfortable with IM'ing and that they all have screen-names. You might also want to get your own Facebook account to test out the waters.

One way or another, this isn't an 'all or nothing' proposition.

PodCasts from SXSW Interactive

If you couldn't make it to the annual get-together of the "interactive" world in Austin, this is just about the next best thing. Here's what's up so far...

Do You 'Twitter'? (And If Not, Why Not?)

It doesn't get any more ephemeral than this: you pop a sentence about what you're doing at the moment in a box and then go back to whatever you were doing.

Who'd bother, you ask? Even more, who'd bother to read it all?

Well, apparently quite a few people. It's called 'Twitter' and it's really taking off. Ev Williams, original creator of Blogger.com, dumped Odeo just to concentrate on this. Now it seems everyone's doing it. Here's the Twitter account of John Edwards, Democratic Candidate for President.

Over the weekend a guide came out called, "The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users".

If being a "wildly successful twitter user" matters to you, I recommend you read the piece. Then get yourself an account and tell us what you're doing in 140 characters or less. Here's my own modest attempt...

Gored For Women Dot Org?

Probably not the intended message but we put spaces in between words for a reason. 'CamelCase' might have helped.

In any case, as seen on the Marquee of the now closed Esquire Theater on Oak St. in Chicago.

Props to the Chicago Public Schools

 From the Chicago Tribune:

After-school tutoring, better-trained teachers and new classroom assessments in Chicago public schools helped drive an "extraordinary" increase in state scores that improved the fortunes of nearly every city elementary school last year, district officials said.

This is just one year's results and from year to year there are enough changes in the way the test is given to make drawing longer-term conclusions problematic. That said, anyone familiar with our school system knows how hard everyone works -- particularly the teachers!

These results are a great credit to their efforts.