Blogging Section of SLA-IT

Internet access at Baltimore Convention Center

Thanks to Ted Baldwin on sla-dche for the info.

Looks like bloggers will still be again struggling to post live in Baltimore at the Annual Conference. SLA HQ will not provide service. Individuals can access wireless internet using the WiFi Internet Café service at the Starbucks in the Pratt Street Lobby entrance. There will also be access at the Main and Outdoor Terrace locations on the 300 Level. My understanding is that it is not free.

So, which one will I buy, the access in the Center or my hotel room? Decisions...

UPDATE: I just learned that ALA is paying for wireless access in the New Orleans Convention Center and that it will be available freely to all attendees in all the building except the exhibits hall. I'll keep dreaming for SLA in Denver next year...

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Technorati tag: sla2006

PubSub Community Librarian List

Via a post by Carolyn Sosnowski on the 2006 SLA Conference blog, this PubSub Community list of librarian-authored blogs, complete with ratings. The list is prepared by Steve Cohen of LibraryStuff.net.

What is PubSub? PubSub is a matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription. Using a proprietary Matching Engine, PubSub is able to read millions of data sources on your behalf and notify you instantly whenever a match is made. By capturing and analyzing data about the blogs, PubSub comes up with some stats that can rank them.

My own blog is not really shining on there so I bet get posting :)

Online Session on Second Life's Virtual Library

I've been recently reading about the Second Life online community and the library that has opened within this virtual world.  It's fascinating, a little scary, and at times I wonder if it's gone too far.  But then, we do strive to reach our users in new and unique ways, so why not try try to reach users by building a library inside a virtual community?  Be where your users are (and many of our university students are in strange places like SL as well as the ubiquitous Facebook and MySpace).

OPAL is offering a session next week on the Second Life Library:

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 beginning at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 2:00 Central, 1:00 Mountain, noon Pacific and Second Life Time, and 7:00 p.m. GMT:
Alliance Second Life Library 2.0:  An Introduction
    Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents, also known as avatars. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 200,000 people from around the globe. There are shopping malls, events, homes, lands of different types, and best of all, participants can contribute content, buildings, and other digital creations.  The Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 recently opened to provide library services to the residents of Second Life.  Speakers will include Greg Schwartz, Tom Peters, Lori Bell, Kelly Czarnecki, Jami Lynn Schwarzwalder, and other librarians involved in the project.  NOTE:  This introduction will be held entirely in the OPAL online meeting room.  You need not be in the Second Life online environment to fully experience this online event.   
Sponsor:  Alliance Library System
Location: OPAL Auditorium

 

Award winner

With great joy, I just learned that Stacey Greenwell, IT Division's Chair-Elect, member of the Blogging Section and super-duper contributor to this very blog, received last Friday the Professional Award from the Kentucky Chapter of SLA.

The 2006 recipient of the SLA-KY Chapter Professional Award is Stacey Greenwell, Desktop Support Librarian at the University of Kentucky. The Professional Award shall be given to an individual or group in recognition of a specific achievement in the field of librarianship or to the subject field in which they serve. Stacey's impressive level of professional activity at the national and state levels makes her most deserving of this award (from the KYSLA list).

I have had the pleasure to see Stacey in action for a number of years now, she is "da bomb". Congrats Stacey, you richly deserve it!

CE class at SLA Baltimore and Get-Together

Unfortunately, the CE class I was going to teach on Sunday June 11th, "Continuing Education Course- Weblogging for Beginners: A Practical Approach", was cancelled due to low number of registrations. It's just too bad because we were going to have hands-on activities for the participants. I guess the incredibly high prices for the equipment and Internet access, forcing us to put a higher price on the class registration, did us in...

But fear not, the Webloggers Get-Together is still on! See you there!

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Technorati tag: sla2006

Libraries, MySpace and Facebook

Some libraries, some public and some academic, are creating presences on social software systems like MySpace and Facebook. Why not? Go where your users are.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story in the May 19th edition (available electronically now with a subscription), The Library at CUNY's Brooklyn College Makes Friends on MySpace.

Meredith Farkas, of Information Wants to be Free, published an insightful post on the subject (and complete with links at the end) on May 10th.

Be careful, this is the kind of stuff that will give you ideas galore...

Update: Brian Matthews just published an article on the subject in the latest C&RL News: Do you Facebook? Networking with students online, C&RL News, Vol 67, No 5., pp. 306, May 2006.

Haven't got the chance to read it yet. But if you do, let us know what you think.

Microsoft Office 2007

This morning I attended a Microsoft briefing about the future version of Office, and I have to say I'm kind of excited.  We're a big Microsoft campus, so we tend to take advantage of many of their products.  A few notes from this morning:

• The Office 2007 Beta 2 will be available in the next month or so
• SharePoint Services (are any of you using this--if so, I'd really like to discuss with you as we are implementing 2003 soon) will be considerably more integrated with the Office suite.  We saw several demos of this in action and I was impressed.
• SharePoint Services should include built-in blog and wiki tools!
• Outlook should include several new features, including:
  • Instant Search.  Finally, finally it appears, the default, easy-to-find search is the Advanced Search!
  • Better task integration with the calendar.  I've always been one to post an all-day event to remind myself to do something rather than create a task, but I just might use tasks more after seeing the way tasks neatly display on the calendar.
  • Calendar overlays.  Outlook 2003 offers viewing two calendars side-by-side (great for my team calendar and student schedule), but this takes it one step further by combining the two into a single calendar view.  Neat.
  • Last but definitely not least, Outlook will support the viewing of RSS subscriptions!
• The menus will be considerably different across most of the suite.  I'd seen screen shots before, but it was helpful to watch the live demo.  Apparently 67% of requested features for future versions of Office were already inside their products, so they are making a big effort to make menu options easier to find and organizing them more intuitively.  Hopefully it will help, but I suspect it will take awhile for my users to recover from the shock of something so different.

I just might download the beta next month and check it out for myself.

Five technologies you need to know about

From Tech Web:

• Ajax: The new face of the Web
• Core: Intel's next-gen processor architecture
• Holographic storage: The ultimate data storage solution?
• NAND drives: Flash memory hard disks
• AMD-V and VT: The next step in virtualization

Mobile E-Mail Usage To Triple By 2011 Says Report

According to an article on Tech Web:

E-mail access by mobile employees is set to triple between now and 2011, according to a report released Wednesday by U.K. Market research firm Informa Telecoms and Media. And much of that increased access will be on relatively simple devices such as standard cell phones, and not over more expensive devices such as smartphones, the study claims.

 

If you are going to add a gaming component to your web site...

An article on TechWeb states:

The survey of over 3,000 American adults found the usual -- more men (45 percent) than women (35 percent) play computer and/or video games -- but it also uncovered some new statistics. Women, for instance, prefer to play games solo, while men are more likely to play with others, whether on- or offline.

So if you are going to add a gaming component to something you are building, you should keep in mind this different in how men and women like to play.