Thanks to Mick for organizing the Chicagoland Library Drupal Meeting in Oak Park. The presentation on "Top 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules" by Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL was excellent (see slideshare). My presentation on implementing WYSIWYG is below. I'll have the audio up shortly. [link to earlier version of write-up].
I missed this article on ways to save money on college textbooks when it first came out. Most of it your average college student would know by heart after the first quarter or semester -- they'd know it that is, if they wanted to avoid bankruptcy. But what really caught my eye was this final warning from 'textbooks advocate' Nicole Allen about e-books:
The one option Allen warned students against buying was e-book versions of texts. A number of publishers offer online books for purchase, she noted, but they are one-year rentals.
By and large, the e-books are available only through an Internet connection, and many restrict the number of pages you can print at one time.
In this case, the calculus e-book cost $100, about $40 more than Chegg's rental and only about $20 less than buying a used hard copy. And you have nothing to resell. [Kristof, Kathy M., "Turning the Page on Pricey Textbooks", Chicago Tribune (9/4/2009):1,29.]
Basically they're saying, why should you rent it for a limited time when for just $20 more it can be yours forever? I think this kind of calculation is absolutely de rigueur not only for students but for institutions thinking of investing in these potentially ephemeral yet costly products.
It's for a great statewide organization that's very active in health care reform among other things.
Basically I took what they already had -- essentially a site consisting of links and pdf files -- and completely automated the thing so that in-house staff can add content themselves rather than sending it out to a web specialist.
The thing's running on Drupal with Panels for the front page. My focus was on automating as much of the site as possible including all the navigation and menus -- so that again, in-house staff could manage these things.
I went with WYSIWYG for the first time for content creation, including IMCE for managing stock photos and of course, ImageCache for pretty much everything else. Since the in-house staff was more comfortable with MS Word, going this way made sense.
Style-wise, I pretty much worked off the design of the previous site. This allowed me, again, to focus on the automation side, while leaving the option, further down the road, of coming up with something a bit more snazzy.
For the moment, it's totally serviceable and meets the needs of the organization. And that's what ultimately counts.
There must have been another copy of the site settings (from like say, 2005) that Dreamweaver grabbed when I upgraded from the admittedly ancient Dreamweaver 8 to a still shamefully retro CS3*.
There still were a number of sites in the "Manage sites" window which is why I didn't notice right away. Then when I started looking for anything I'd done in the past 2 years -- MPOW, a couple of other sites I'm working on -- denada. I had wiped them.
Thank God for TimeMachine. I was able to export the site settings from the deleted old version and then import them into the new version.
This Thankgiving I'm thankful for TimeMachine.
_____
* And no jokes about the version -- I'm just waiting for CS5 like the rest of humanity.
Actually they didn't but you'd think they would have right after their library director made the following comment to CNET:
[Library Director Ken] Frazier added that a suitable device would include better "accessibility, higher-quality graphics, and improved navigation and note-taking. I think that there will be a huge payoff for the company that creates a truly universal e-book reader."
Hmm, "accessibility, higher-quality graphics, and improved navigation and note-taking"? When, oh when, will we ever get a device like that? [/irony]
Of course, he forgot to include, a device 'already owned by 93% of the student body'.
We'll be having a get-together of the Chicagoland Library Drupal Group on Mon., Dec. 7 (9:30-12noon) at the Oak Park Public Library.
I'll be doing a presentation that's been near and dear to my heart recently: incorporating WYSIWYG into Drupal. It's called, appropriately enough, "The Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG".
Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL (who recently launched their site in Drupal) will also be presenting.
Announcement from organizer Mick Jacobsen (Skokie Public) after the jump...
Web-Related Networking Group http://j.mp/zUCZ0
When: Monday, December 7, 2009 (9:30 AM - 12:00 PM) Where: Oak Park Public Library (In Person) (Oak Park, IL) Cost: FreeJoin us for a discussion about content management systems. Learn from brief presentations by veterans and share your own stories, issues, and successes. Beginners welcome!
Two presentations have been scheduled for this meeting.
The Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG
A discussion of how and why to go WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and what Drupal can do about it.Presented by: Leo Klein, Reference PT, DePaul; OAR, UIC
University of Illinois Chicago
chicagolibrarian.comTop 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules
Learn which modules proved to be important in building our new site.Presented by: Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing The Center for Research Libraries www.crl.edu
Open discussion will follow the presentations.
I was in Berlin when the Wall came down. In fact I had been living there since 1984.
I had just woken up from an early evening nap when one of the people from the Wohngemeinschaft where I was living told me the Wall had come down.
This seemed strange since it looked perfectly intact only an hour before when I had gone to sleep.
Of course my room-mate was exaggerating. In fact, the Wall hadn't come down -- it had simply opened up. You still had to show your ID to get through. There was one or maybe two cross-points. These are important distinctions which I'll get back to in a moment but at that point it really didn't matter. I like everyone rushed out to welcome the incoming East Germans at Checkpoint Charlie, buying a bottle of Sekt (German sparkling wine) along the way.
East Berlin up to that point had principally been a source of cheap booze and tyranny. It was drab beyond imagination. Other than official communist exhortations plastered on walls here and there, there was absolutely no advertising -- or color of any kind.
Of course, the people living there knew what was going on. They had access to the same radio and tv we did. The Wall surrounded West Berlin but it was the 'Ossies' as they were called who were trapped.
By the time we got to Checkpoint Charlie that night, there already was a huge number of people. It seemed like the East Germans were being processed in lots. Every time a group came through, people would cheer.
Some that night came over just to have a look. They clogged the buses and U-Bahn. It was extremely difficult for the next three days to get into the center of the city. In front of all the banks, there were huge lines of East Berliners waiting to pick up their Begrüßungsgeld (Welcome Money) of 100 DM. They used this money to buy oranges and radio-cassette players -- things they couldn't get in East Berlin.
Everywhere there was this extraordinary sense of euphoria -- summed up best by Walter Momper, mayor of West Berlin, when he called Germans "das glücklichste Volk auf der Welt" (happiest people in the world).
When the Wall Came Down for Me
As days turned into weeks, more and more entry ways were opened between the two parts of the city. The Brandenburg Gate was opened in December. You still had to show your ID to get through but the level of scrutiny became less and less.
I remember one particularly sunny day several months later -- it may even have been summer -- when I was going through the new entry point at Mariannenplatz and there didn't seem to be anyone around. I kept waiting to be stopped at some point as I moved further across -- first through the West Berlin side, and then through the East Berlin side -- but again there was no one. I simply walked through! It was the first time I had been able to do this. That's when the Wall truly came down for me.
Postscript
I never got into taking a hammer to the Wall. It was something I was glad to leave up to the tourists. And I don't really know what I'd do with a chunk of the thing any more than I'd know what to do with a pair of handcuffs from the Stassi or a uniform or hat.
I don't need those things. It's enough to remember what the people I met back then had to endure and that no matter how free-wheeling and wild we were on our side of the Wall (west), that there was a fully-certified police state just a block away (east).
That was the Berlin I knew. By the time of the unification, it was clear that the city and country were embarking on a new chapter.
It was time for me to leave. I had been in Europe for more than ten years, six of them in Berlin. I witnessed the unification ceremony near the Reichstag and flew back to the United States the next day.
It's nice to see Drupal mentioned in the context of "cool thing to do" but I don't think Cindi Trainor in her piece on Sacred Cows in Library IT gets exactly what you can do with it:
Experimenting with low-cost or no-cost tools like Twitter will only cost staff time, but implementing expensive (think federated search) or complex-but-free technologies (think Drupal) because it's the cool thing to do can be a very costly lesson for a library to learn, in terms of budget, staff time, morale and user satisfaction.
First, there's no impediment to 'experimenting' with Drupal any more than there is to experimenting with Twitter. The first implementation I ever dealt with was on my own laptop. I didn't even need a network connection!
Also, as far as complexity goes, what are we comparing it to? I mean, you can't run a website on Twitter so that's not an option.
It just so happens that an institution's website is a fairly complex organism. It's going to involve a considerable investment no matter how you choose to go about it.
The fact that Drupal can potentially make it less costly in terms of budget, staff time, etc. -- while being far more effective as a tool -- that's what makes it "cool" and why people choose it. Not the other way around.
P.S. It's kind of ironic that the above quote fell under the Sacred Cow, "Cutting-edge is better; bleeding-edge is best" -- considering that the piece grew out of a discussion on the oh-so-bleeding-edge "Google Wave".
Talk about potpourri, this week's DePaulia, the student newspaper of DePaul contains the following highlights:
Bookmark/Search this post with:
You know it's bad news when the FAQs start with:
"The budget for the state of Illinois is in a shambles."
I came upon it fresh from an article on Library Journal with the ominous title:
LJ's 2009 Placements & Salaries Survey Shows Tough Library Job Market
Anyway, back to the Illinois site. The FAQ continues:
Regional library systems received a 16.5% cut resulting in layoffs and cessation of some library support services.
They've got a badge (which you can download here) as well as a Facebook Page.
If you're in Illinois, you can use their 'Take Action' page to contact your state legislator.
Wow, the big Drupal Convention for North America is coming to Chicago in 2011. Here's the announcement from the Drupalcon North American Regional Organizing Group:
"...the [Drupal Association] Board has preemptively made a decision on the location and team for the 2011 North American Drupalcon, tapping Chicago for Drupalcon 2011."
You can follow them on Twitter by going to: http://twitter.com/drupalchicago
I'd like to thank Scott Dixon and his class from the Biomedical Visualization program at UIC for their eager reception and interest in my talk on 'Web 2.0 - Origins, Directions & Methods of Evaluation'.
Slides from the presentation are available below or from GoogleDocs directly here...
The sticker reads, "I Got My Flu Vaccine! Did You?"
Normally I don't bother but this year, it seems like there's a heightened awareness. Judging by the larger crowd even at 10 in the morning, I'd say a lot of people were feeling the same way.
Citizen Action-Illinois had its Annual Dinner yesterday evening. The emphasis, not surprisingly, was on health care reform. The situation for hotel workers also got attention.
Award-winner this year was Gov. Pat Quinn who arrived late due to his attendance at a service in the suburbs honoring an Illinois veteran killed in Afghanistan.
I was out on the prowl for articles for this month's CurrentCites, when I came across an interesting article called "Libraries in the Cloud: Making a Case for Google and Amazon" in this month's 'Computers in Libraries'.
Maybe I'm being too picky but I don't think the author gets off to the best start with this definition of the subject:
"Many definitions exist for cloud computing, and a uniform definition is hard to find. In its most basic form, cloud computing is the availability of IT-type needs offered as services, often through a third-party vendor."
I 'spose that's right but frankly you could say the same thing about the guy who comes in and fixes our HP printers when they're on the fritz.
The missing ingredient of course which admittedly the author gets to a sentence or two further down, is 'hosted through the web'. I think I'd have put that in a bit earlier.
In any case, besides that, the article is a good introduction to the subject from a library point of view.
UPDATE: While I'm at it, CiL also has an interesting article on an almost DIY approach to archiving websites called, "Web Archiving for the Rest of Us". They look at "donation-ware" SiteSucker for harvesting and then Apple's Time Machine and FileMerge for version control. Quite resourceful!
I've posted this before but every year at this time I'm reminded of the incredible tragedy that happened while I was living in New York and its aftermath.
It's strange but maybe understandable: my initial reaction immediately following the attack that morning -- after the shock and confusion -- was simply to go to work, show my face and help in any way needed.
In November, we'll be celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was there and it easily has to be the most significant public event I ever personally witnessed in a good way. By the same token, 9/11 had to be the worst.
It's only on weekends and public holidays that I catch up with my readings.
Anyway, I had a look at yet another post on the Twitter v. RSS conundrum. Here are a couple of others (1, 2) that I've read in the past couple of days.
I guess initially my reaction was, if you're depending on Twitter as your aggregator, you're in trouble because it pretty much sucks for that purpose. I mean, I'd sooner try to navigate the credits as they stream by of a feature film.
But that was only my initial reaction. From a practical standpoint, if a significant portion of your potential audience is going somewhere, then whether it sucks or not really doesn't matter.
The whole purpose of our current approach to the web is, to borrow a phrase, 'Write once, read many'. The number of outlets through which we're able to deliver our content -- free of redundancy or duplication of our efforts -- is a measure of success in this digital survival of the fittest.
The question then should never be whether a particular tool sucks but whether the content we're providing can fit into the framework. In other words, it's all about syndication.*
The moment this brilliant conclusion dawned on me, I had a look at Drupal's Twitter Module and opened an account on TwitterFeed. So yes, I've drunk the Koolaide.
-----*Note: happily enough, syndication works both ways. We syndicate our own content and then turn around and reuse the content of others. So even Twitter may suck less depending on how we access it, whether directly or through some value-added intermediary.
This is so unfair! 'The Great Slump of 1930' by John Maynard Keynes which goes for the outrageous price of 'free' at Project Gutenberg Canada is being offered by Amazon to Kindle users for a mere $4.25. How does Amazon get away with it?
So I'm listening to NPR's 'All Things Considered' and they start talking about an old pal of mine from my days in Berlin, Stew. The segment is called, "Wondrous 'Strange': Spike Lee Makes A Musical" and it's about how Spike Lee produced a film version of Stew's musical 'Passing Strange' which won a Tony last year (see my write-up).
The musical is about Stew's experiences growing up in L.A. and then going to Amsterdam and Berlin. Since that's when I knew him (we were in the same group called the 'Wonderful Guise'), I look forward to seeing the film. Here's the trailer.
I liked the article in BusinessWeek on the 'Real-Time Web'. It being BusinessWeek, they naturally devoted a significant portion to speculation on how to make money from this emerging trend and I had to laugh at the illusive precision of there being "at least $5 billion to be made on the real-time Web". What, just $5 billion?
Anyway, to give them their due, they correctly identify the trend:
In just the past couple of years, several developments have come together to make the Web more of a real-time experience: ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections; a growing number of mobile devices such as the iPhone with full Web browsers; and new Web technologies that enable instant transmission of messages and data. That mix has made always-on, real-time communications easy and addictive.
Okay, that sounds pretty 'real-time' to me. What I can't understand though is the focus, bordering on fixation, on Twitter in this and other articles. I mean, here it is, we've got an emerging technology that's giving us real-time group communication both in text, voice and video and the most impressive thing they can think of is a text stream limited to 140 characters?
You can't be serious. Off the top of my head, the number of possibilities include:
And yes, I've seen the video introducing Google's ambitious Wave Project. It's nice but I'm most optimistic about initiatives that build on past successes and move forward by incremental steps. The kind of technology we've become familiar with as hallmarks of Web 2.0 (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc.) has prepared us well for this next step.
[h/t ReadWriteWeb]
I kind of like the idea of "Augmented Reality" (AR) and consider it the next logical step in GPS applications, but I found it strange that the food listings advertised on the iPhone App for London Transit consist almost entirely of U.S. fastfood chains. I mean, it's nice to be fitted out with the latest in technology but you'd hope it could do more than simply direct you to the nearest McDonald's or KFC.
Because I'm sick and tired of their ads popping up on every other website I visit.
Today was the first day of school at UIC. The weather was great.
The first picture is of the East Campus at around noon. The second picture is later in the day of new student Alex (son of friend Aaron) sampling local delicacies -- including a polish sausage with grilled onions and fries from Jim's Original Maxwell St Polish and an authentic piece of original baklava from the Pan Hellenic Pastry Shop on Halsted.
I had a great time at the Illinois State Fair. I was there on Tuesday and Wednesday. Usually the first day, I hang around the city and the second day, I hang out at the fair.
It's a pretty city.
Of course, I was bummed out to see that Boone's Saloon had closed. The backyard patio was a perennial stop for me.
One thing you absolutely must do when you're at the Fair is see the Butter Cow in the Dairy Building. This year, the Butter Cow was joined by a youngish Abe Lincoln, this being the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Finally, I kind of liked the message from the Illinois Pork Producers. Porkchop-on-a-stick is a favorite of mine.
Make sure your students have a copy of your syllabus just in case the frickin' server breaks down.
It's 2009 and the Chicago Tribune has only now figured out what it takes to design a website. Still, you have to hand it to them, it's a vast improvement over the previous iteration. They even went back to the old letterhead.
You know, as someone living in the city who doesn't drive a car, I've been feeling kind of left out lately with all this talk about 'Cash for Clunkers'. Who should run to the rescue but local furniture retailer Walter E. Smithe?
In a pretty funny commercial I just heard on WBBM radio, they announced they were offering cash discounts of several hundred dollars on new purchases if you bring in your old couch or armoire.
As store owner Walter Smithe explained in this comment to Furniture World:
"While not everyone has a clunker car, almost everyone has at least one piece of clunker furniture they'd like to replace with something nicer. This is a great opportunity for consumers to trade their old furniture for new furniture."
The clever company even has a twitter account where the latest tweet is about -- what else -- their 'Cash for Clunkers' deal!
Here's something interesting. Andrew Sullivan, on his blog, The Daily Dish, has been featuring a series of user-submitted photos called, 'The View From Your Window'. And wouldn't you know, Saturday, he ran a picture from DePaul!
You can look up the image and then compare it to the one above. They're both from the Garden Terrace in the 'DePaul Center' on Jackson and State*. The only difference, strangely enough, is that Sullivan's copy seems to be reversed. How'd that happen?
[h/t Brian]
---------- * Family Tradition: The building, formerly known as Goldblatt's is where my Aunt Shirley for years used to work part-time in Notions & Lotions on 1 and where I continue to toil in Reference on 10.
The ever-wonderful, Smashing Magazine features a good introduction by Tim Wright, called "HTML5 and The Future of the Web". The links and references following the article are particularly helpful.
Even more 'hands-on' is an interesting tutorial called, "HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using" from the site, Nettuts+. The goal is to redesign a blog page using, as the title would suggest, HTML5 and CSS3 tagging. This approach is a wonderful way for those familiar with the current state of tagging (say, you and me) to begin grappling with the new system.
It was a bit rainy but that didn't dampen anyone's spirit at the Evanston 4th of July Parade. The first shot is just before the parade with Gov. Pat Quinn and DPOE President Daniel Biss getting their picture taken by Daniel's wife Karen. The second shot is a group shot taken afterwards.
[h/t CapitolFaxBlog]There are lots of ways to improve failing schools. Charters are one way, but so is investing in traditional schools by offering smaller class sizes, better teachers, financial incentives for teachers and a longer school year. There is no single solution. Pretending otherwise is just as harmful as pretending that scores have gone up miraculously when we know they have not.
When people think of content management, initially they think of blog posts and calendar entries and schemes for keeping the content current.
That's what you'd expect any system to deliver. But what I've found, once you get beyond that point, is that the kinds of problems you routinely have to deal with often require customization. And that's a good thing!
I'll give you an example.
In Registration (my other job) we need a way to get students back into the system after they (usually mistakenly) drop all classes for the semester. All that's required is their name, student ID and the semester when they want this to happen. The Registration people call this 'reinstatement'.
Anyway, it's about as simple a set of requirements as you can get. The student fills out a brief form, the form data goes into a page that only certain staff have access to and, just to be extra careful, a copy of the results is also sent to the person who normally handles these requests.
Sound easy?
Depending on your CMS, this can either be a breeze or a nightmare. Drupal, I'm happy to say, can handle this out of the box -- not as the result of some awful API that only a programmer can understand -- but as part of its default feature set that anyone with good administrative skills can master.
Now maybe other CMS's can do the same. I certainly hope so. But the moral of the story is that I get requests like this all the time. It's to be expected, encouraged even, because content management isn't just about blogs and calendar entries but about solving the particular needs of the particular department where you happen to work.
Librarians for example have all sorts of strange and exotic content types -- things like 'citation' and 'resource listing'.
As I told people at both programs where I helped out this year at ALA (Drupal BoF & BIGWIG), if you're going to work with things like citations and resource listings, you might as well make sure that the CMS you're getting is flexible and robust enough to handle them -- in as easy and accessible a way possible.
That's the true 'power and glory' of content management. In my view, it's pretty much a basic requirement.
Robert Reich has a problem with manufacturing. At least he does when it's practiced in the U.S. For some reason, he thinks that actually making things has gone the way of the horse buggy and 45rpm record player.
It's not a new argument. We heard it all the time during the Clinton Administration. The problem is, the people promoting it could never come up with an alternative that wasn't some form of temporary bubble.
America still needs its washing machines and flat panel displays and we can't pay for them with CDO's and IPO's.
Reich seems to think that increases in productivity and greater automation are something new. This is America. We invented the assembly line. We've always had innovation -- only until now we never used it as an excuse to move our operations off-shore.
He talks about "Technophobes, neo-Luddites and anti-globalist" and warns against being on the 'wrong side of history'.
We've been living on his side of history for twenty years or more and all we have to show for it are vast areas of devastation as entire industries move off-shore.
Alderman Tom Tunney welcoming guests at the Young Chicago Lakefront Annual Mtg. & Elections Party held at Trader Todd's on May 19.
Conservative historian Niall Ferguson looks at the growing cry to (re-)regulate financial markets and for some reason only thinks of the Seventies:
My concern is that we're going to get the 1970s for fear of the 1930s.
Naturally he's cherry-picking here. In fact, the same regulations also operated in the Fifties and Sixties -- or in other words, the greatest period of economic expansion the country ever knew.
New York University is closing down its for-profit electronic learning operation, NYUonline, and moving some of its curriculum and staff into its School of Continuing and Professional Studies.U of I Global Campus (2009):
[University of Illinois] trustees meeting in Chicago voted to follow a faculty task force plan to scrap much of the current version of Global Campus.NYUonline (2002):
In two and a half years of operation, NYUonline received nearly $25 million from the university, but enrollment remained anemic at best: just 500 students at its peak.U of I Global Campus (2009):
The $10 million program had only attracted about 360 students as of last month.NYUOnline (2001):
The university blames last month's closure of the distance-learning company, called NYUonline, on the economy.U of I Global Campus (2009):
...[Prof. Nick Burbules] said, a global recession has changed conditions under which the older initiative was established.NYUonline (2001):
"I believe that the value of our work -- some of which will continue to be carried on by the university, and some non-academic portions of which may be acquired by third parties -- will become even clearer with time," [NYUonline CEO Gordon] Macomber said in the release.U of I Global Campus (2009):
Burbules said the 2.0 model draws from the UI's experience with the initiative. "I think what is driving this process is the belief that the mission of expanding the online offerings is important," he said. "I give [U of I President White] full credit for inspiring this work, and I personally believe it is the future of higher education."
Note, there were significant differences between the programs, though stated goals tended to shift over time. Nevertheless, what the two shared was an inability by the people in charge to truly understand what the technology was capable of and what it wasn't. Decision-makers themselves had no strong background in online content development for higher education. This lack of background made it hard to evaluate alternative strategies. Instead of identifying successful initiatives already in place and extending those, they chose to concoct their schemes out of whole cloth.
The outcome should come as no surprise.I'm just as happy as the next person to be paranoid about huge corporate entities trying to dominate our lives but this attack on Google by UK Observer columnist Henry Porter is pure insanity.
In it he identifies Google as a "classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits." You either agree with Google, he says, or you feel "the weight of its boot on your windpipe."
He then goes on to blame Google for the demise of newspapers. He hints darkly that in some future time of "profound challenges", Google may decide to cut newspapers off from their audience. The company is "delinquent and sociopathic", a "nightmarish 11-year-old" which "needs to be stopped in its tracks" etc.
How silly can you get? We're talking about a search-engine here. Its bread and butter are links and snippets of content. It's no more illegal or immoral for Google to use content in this way than it would be for you or me.
Indeed the thought of putting a restriction on this use is far more worrisome than anything Porter can come up with.
But the truth is, Porter really doesn't come up with much. Once you sweep away the invective, you're pretty much left with nothing other than Google is big and successful at what it does.
If this is the best a 'journalist' can produce, it explains the plight of newspapers far better than anything Google allegedly has done.
[h/t Keith Teare]
With opening day tomorrow, it's good to know where the Cubs stand on ketchup, mustard and paper cups.
So yes, everybody and his mother has sent me a message about the Conflicker Worm that's supposed to strike on April 1.
All I can say is, April Fools to you too! ***
___*** I mean, some of us remember Y2K.
I find it amusing that there's so much buzz (some of it manufactured?) about the Amazon Kindle. The real revolution is all around us (which is what you'd expect for a revolution): it's people using smart-phones or netbooks to text each other, send email and photos, and otherwise access the Internet.
Now we have a report by the Pew Research Center which reflects pretty much what anyone taking a train or bus home can observe every day:
Cast a glance at any coffee shop, train station or airport boarding gate, and it is easy to see that mobile access to the internet is taking root in our society. Open laptops or furrowed brows staring at palm-sized screens are evidence of how routinely information is exchanged on wireless networks.
The report goes on to look at the roll that "mobile internet access" plays in various user groups. It concludes that the tech bar "has risen":
In the past, having tech gear such as broadband at home generally placed people on the cutting edge; that is no longer the case in this edition of the typology. Our new study shows that mobile connectivity is the new centerpiece of high-tech life.
[h/t ResourceShelf]
We had a wonderful turnout of close to 20 librarians from all parts of the Chicagoland area. Knowledge and skill-level ran from seasoned veterans to people being introduced to Drupal for the first time.
Project Demos & Participation
We had a number of people show us projects they're working on, including Mikael Jacobsen of Skokie Public, Brian Smith from PALS and Colin Koteles from the College of DuPage. We also had healthy contingents from Loyola, Oak Park Public, [the 3 people sitting next to Mikael?], and the ALA.
Module & Technique Discussion
Questions or issues that came up included transferring a Wiki to Drupal, customizing Themes (in this case the Zen Theme), use of Panels and a short (and conflicted) demo on my part of CiviCRM.
Resources
I was happy to see that at least two other people had read or were reading the O'Reilly Drupal Book. We agreed that it was very good. I added that it was very hands-on and that you really wanted to have a working copy of the CMS in front of you as you went through the chapters.
Other resources that people recommended included, Learn by the Drop, some of the instructional material from UMich, and this interesting site bitnami.org where you can download all the apps you need (Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.) to get Drupal up and running locally.
ALA in July
We also discussed plans for ALA in July. We'll be meeting as part of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG meeting. People expressed an interest in hearing from a speaker who could discuss where Drupal is heading in the near future -- with the next release. Happily, we have a number of excellent Drupal Developers in the Chicagoland area who could talk on this subject.
Most Embarrassing Moment
In an attempt to show beginners how easy it is to set up Drupal using cPanel/Fantastico (just to play around and experiment with), I completely flubbed up, ending with one error after the other. So yes, I will be leaving town and changing my identity. (Here's how it should have gone...).
Thanks to All
First thanks to the wonderful people at DePaul for letting us use their great Instruction Room.
Then thanks of course to everyone who came! I was so wonderfully surprised by the number and variety of people who came. It really energized me as to ideas and activities we can do for using Drupal for library purposes in the Chicagoland area.
Feel free to leave comments and hope to see everyone again!
Next Meeting(s)
We'll be getting together as part of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG meeting either on the Saturday (7/11) or Sunday (7/12), depending on conflicts, room availability etc. We then have a scheduled meeting in September at the downtown office of the MLS on September 25.
Note: Mikael Jacobsen is also organizing meetings for NSLS.
The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook has just come out. The Chronicle of Higher Education points to the considerable effort the publishers have made to give this "bible of the undergraduate paper-writing process" a substantial web component. They have a password-protected website that contains the full text of the manual along with a whole ton of support material.
Good for them! It's great they're making such an effort. But what I want to know is why they still refuse to acknowledge that 'website' consists of only one word. Doing so would be a sign of true progress.
I think Amazon is taking this community thing way too far. I mean, the 'Inkjet Community'?
Made it over to the early voting station at the Lincoln Park Branch of CPL during a break. It's for the Primary to replace Congressman Rahm Emanuel. The last time I had been there was in October for the General Election. Needless to say, the one or two people waiting to vote this time round in no way matched the scores of people all packed in and waiting just a couple of months ago. Instead of close to an hour, it took maybe 5 minutes.
Am I the last person on earth to realize that Obama writes with his left hand? You know us 'lefties' feel a kinship for one another. Notice he's wearing his watch on his left hand as well. A true lefty might wear it on his right -- to afford mobility to the dominant hand.
Apparently until the following legislation finally passes, if you're dead in Mississippi but don't meet the "residency requirements", your chances of getting a pauper's grave don't look too good:
MS HB 1316, 2007-2007, Holland; An Act To Authorize Counties To Waive The Residency Requirement For Determination Of Pauper Status To Qualify For Burial Costs; To Provide That Counties And Municipalities Burying Paupers May Use County Or Municipal Employees And Equipment, Purchase Necessary Materials And Contract For Necessary Services For That Purpose; To Provide That Those Provisions Do Not Authorize Public Funds To Be Used For Ceremonies Associated With Burials Or Funerals; And For Related Purposes.
No doubt, the current requirement is in place to prevent Mississippi from becoming a haven for transient dead people.
[Found while searching on a demo of Serial Solutions 360 Search for "keyword contains burial and materials"]
I'm pleased to announce a Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF on Friday, 3/20 (1:30p-4p) at DePaul's Loop Campus, 1 E. Jackson (10th fl., Rm# 10028), Chicago.
The Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF will be an opportunity for librarians to get together and discuss how they use (or would like to use) Drupal in a library context. We'll ask people to present projects they're working on and we'll field questions on problems and approaches to implementing Drupal. All levels of knowledge from expert to n00b are welcome.
Also, since we're the 'host' city for the ALA Convention in Chicago in July, we'll have an opportunity to think about what we might want to do for that.
This Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF is a follow-up to our successful get-togethers last year at the Metropolitan Librarian System and at the wildly sold-out Chicago Drupal BarCamp in October.
We'll be doing one of these on a quarterly basis -- or at least that's the intention. The people at DePaul have kindly made their location available for March; We'll be meeting at McCormick Place as part of ALA in July; After that we'll be meeting at the downtown offices of the Metropolitan Library System (MLS).
It goes without saying that your participation and suggestions are welcome. The format is free and open enough to accommodate a ton of different ideas and needs.
You can sign up here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/18820
Feel free to leave a comment there or email me directly -- and everyone start planning for an informative and rewarding event -- on 3/20!
And the winner is: a cornstarch laced brown foamy liquid that apparently is supposed to appeal to easily distracted (and hallucinatory) teenagers. [link]
Current Cites for January 2009 is out! You can find the issue here...
I wrote about an interesting article in Portal that looked at the search habits of undergrads where the authors not only analyzed 100 freshman comp term papers but conducted follow-up interviews and focus groups as well.
