Current Cites for April 2011

Current Cites for April 2011 is out!  You can find the issue here...

End of World Especially Inconvenient This Year

 

What kind of scheduling is this? The end of the world is suppose to happen this year on May 21, 2011? Huh? How inconvenient! Not only is this two days before I'm supposed to celebrate my birthday (gift-givers, please adjust your calendars) but it's two days before Lady Gaga is scheduled to release her new album as well as two days before Lykke Li is supposed to appear at the Smart Bar in Chicago. I'm sorry but if they really want to end the world, they're just going to have to schedule it on a more realistic date.

Generation Gap

 So a group of high school students came into the library, one with a video camera. They asked me a couple of questions, said 'thank you', and then extended their hands which I naturally shook -- until one said they usually do 'fist bumps'.

I'm sorry, I'm just so out of it.

We Were All Librarians and All Human Beings

From an article written in 1944 about the Good Old Days of librarians in Chicago in the 1890s:

William Warner Bishop (1944): "As I look back on these formative years I am struck most of all by the sense of fellowship and solidarity among librarians. It was a new profession in our American conception of its possibilities; there was no little of the "missionary" spirit among its members, and there was much kindly feeling and much sharing of information and experience. A newcomer was made to feel at home. One instinctively felt he could rely on and trust his colleagues. I had a beautiful illustration of these solidarity ten years later, during my first summer at the Library of Congress. One of our messenger boys went swimming in the Potomac and was unfortunately drowned. His people came from a village near Milwaukee. They were too poor to come on to Washington, and the body was sent to Milwaukee to be transferred to their home. I telegraphed to Agnes Van Valkenburgh in the Milwaukee Public Library without any hesitation, and that great-hearted woman not only met the train bearing the corpse but went, provided with flowers, to the small town and to the funeral. It was a perfectly natural action on her part and on mine. We were all librarians and all human beings in distress at the sudden death of a very minor member of our calling. The incident is typical, and I like to recall it. We all felt not only pride in our work but a sense of responsibility toward our fellow librarians. It is a great thing to have been a member of such a profession."

Current Cites for March 2011

 

Current Cites for March 2011 is out! You can find the issue here...

I wrote about two articles, first about a Library 2.0 postmortem written by Walt Crawford, and second, about an excellent study of library databases evaluated for accessibility which concluded, to universal embarrassment, "no database included in the study was rated as largely accessible".

Library Buzzwords We Can Do Without

Roy has a list of library buzzwords that have outlived their usefulness. My question is, why focus on a bunch of golden oldies when there's such a wealth of current -- I'm almost tempted to say, 'next-gen' -- buzzwords to choose from.

A partial list would include:

• Digital Native
• Discovery Tools
• Library as Conversation
• Emerging Technologies
• Whatever 'cataloging' is called this year

Thought of the Day on Web Design

It's really, really hard to make something really, really easy.

Just Freeze Me

The Pew Research Center reports on the 'app gap':

"...[W]hile almost half of adults get local news on mobile devices, just 1 in 10 use apps to do so. Call it the 'app gap'."

Please just put me in cold storage for the next 5 years. I don't know how otherwise I'm going to endure the incessant call to build to particular brands (iPhone! iPhone! iPhone!) rather than to the platform in general. Hopefully by the time I'm revived, they'll have come up with a credible standard. I mean, that's how it usually works.

Dries Speaking at DrupalCon

Dries Buytaert speaking on the exhibit floor at DrupalCon Chicago. Topic: "The Drupal Revolution - Buckle up, we're just getting started!" 

Library BoF at DrupalCon Chicago

We were able to squeeze in more than 50 librarians into the Library BoF. Topics of discussion included migrating to Drupal from other systems, integration with ILSs, creation of research guides, etc.

I put together a complete write-up for Library Hi Tech who'll be publishing it at some point. 

Library BoF on Tues. 1:30p-3p (3/8), Location TBA

 

Okay (in the words of WNYC's Brian Lehrer) after an Informal, Unofficial, Thoroughly Unscientific Availability Poll, it seems like most people can make it to a Library BoF on Tuesday 1:30p-3:00p (3/8).

That takes care of time.

No Points of Distribution

On the way home, I made a last sweep through our local Borders. I went through the bookshelves and magazine racks and wondered what exactly will be the extent of our access to print media when none of this is around any more. Is the publishing industry (no matter how vibrant or moribund) about to run out of outlets? 

The Scourge of Internet Filters in Libraries

The Illinois Library Association has just sent out an 'Action Alert' with the title, "Contact your representative to oppose filtering legislation".

Although I agree with all the 'talking points' it suggests, this one really strikes a nerve:

Early Voting with Mommy - Chicago Mayoral Election 2011

 

Mommy and Leo outside of the Early Voting Polling Place (CPL Lincoln Park) with Voting Receipts.

Bad Investment of the Day

You'd think these people had better things to spend their money on:

Facebook and Google size up takeover of Twitter: report

(Reuters) - Google Inc and Facebook Inc, plus others, have held low level takeover talks with Twitter that give the Internet sensation a value as high as $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Sites like Twitter come in and out of fashion all the time. $10 billion bucks? Can you say, 'MySpace'?

Techno-Infatuation Disorder (TID)

So let's say the iPad Fairy™ comes down and gives everyone at your school a free iPad. Miracle, right?

Well, apparently not at Stanford's School of Medicine. As an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explains:

But when Stanford's School of Medicine lent iPads to all new students last August, a curious thing happened: Many didn't like using them in class.... In most classes, half the students had stopped using their iPads only a few weeks into the term.

How's this possible? Didn't they hear their own Assoc. Dean Charles Prober describe them as "extremely tech-savvy" in a press release from the School earlier in the year:

Because the population of new students is extremely tech-savvy, it makes sense to teach them through the use of the electronic devices they're familiar with, Prober said, adding, "We can either say, 'That's silly. They have to learn the old-fashioned way.' Or we embrace where they are."

Yup, 'embrace where they are'! That's the spirit!

Only they didn't. And you're entitled to ask where exactly 'they' -- in this case the extremely tech-savvy incoming class -- where exactly 'they' are.

Well, wouldn't you know, Stanford provides us with an answer! Every year the University conducts a survey of incoming students as to their computer use and in 2009, for example, they found that "90% have a Windows or Mac laptop".

So basically an overwhelming majority of students already have a computing device. It's called a laptop.

Of course the notion that a laptop might be more useful to students than an iPad, even in this day and age, never seems to dawn on the administrators. Instead they seem to be afflicted with a serious case of 'techno-infatuation disorder' or 'TID' for short. This is where the desire to be seen buying the latest tech gizmo overrides any consideration of whether the intended audience might actually want to use it.

Now if the administrators at Stanford's Medical School truly believed their students were 'extremely tech savvy', they might have left the decision of what to bring into the classroom up to the students themselves. But again, we're talking techno-infatuation disorder here and considerations such as what our users might actually want fade in comparison to what we might want for them.

The New Delicious

I'd say we have a problem here.

Snow Storm Aftermath: DePaul University

 Some shots on the way to work today.

Sign post in snow saying 'Caution: Falling Mice'

Snow sprinkled statues just outside of the DePaul Library.

Devastating News from Amazon

Wonderful! Look what Amazon is recommending to me. Not only do they think I'm a vegan but an overweight vegan at that. I'm devastated.

'Mobile First' Doesn't Mean 'Mobile Everything'

I was reading about a presentation by Ethan Marcotte on re-designing the web-site for the Boston Globe so of course I headed over to have a look.