Blogging Section of SLA-IT

Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress announced it this morning: they are acquiring all the public Twitter archives. More details to follow.

Way to celebrate Library Week! 

Mobile Multitouch UIs and the Library

The latest gadget people are frothing over/poo-pooing is Apple's iPad, a 9.7" screen tablet device which is not available for purchase yet. Regardless of what you think of that specific tablet, a number of vendors are coming out with multi-touch tablet devices and Windows 7 does support multi-touch.

The D.C Public Library has already developed a free iPhone app in early 2009 which lets users search their catalog, and they've made the code available for other libraries to use, so libraries do have some experience dealing with multi-touch interface on a smaller screen. But a larger screen means more real estate for gestures as opposed to controls taking up space - what will this mean for developing mobile apps for the library? And a low-cost device might be an easier pitch than something like a Microsoft Surface - even though libraries are doing cool things with those as well.

Open Source Bookmarks

At SLA I taught a CE course in which I listed tons of open source apps.  Since then I have added even more great resources to my open source bookmarks. Since some of you probably attended my class I thought I should share the new sites I found with you all.

• All for Good
  Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities.
• VirtualBox
  VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
• Fluid Project Wiki
  An open, collaborative project to improve the user experience of community source software.
• Fluid Engage
  Fluid Engage is a new project that will create an open source community that will provide curators and educators within museums and galleries the necessary supports, tools and resources
• MacLibre | Open Source Software Distribution for Mac OS X
  MacLibre is an Open Source Software Distribution for Mac OS X. It's simple, intuitive with applications you need. It brings a new way of software installation on your Mac.
• Three Open Source E-book Readers Worth a Look
• Over 40 Free, Must-Have Open Source Resources
• The EveryBlock source code
  EveryBlock.com is an experimental news Web site that provides information at a "microlocal" level — by neighborhood or city block. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site's backend code to be open-sourced. Here is the code.
• Teaching Open Source
  This is a neutral collaboration point for professors, institutions, communities, and companies to come together and make the teaching of Open Source a global success.
• Melody: Community Powered Publishing
  Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature.
• 40 Mac Freewares and Open Source Software for Web Designers | Desizn Tech
• Sugar on a Stick - Sugar Labs
  A "Linux-based learning environment" that boots from a USB drive and is designed for children’s ease of use.
• Free / Open Source Research Community (Home)
  In the spirit of free and open source software (F/OSS), we are attempting to establish a community in which information will be freely exchanged, so that we may further the understanding of open source and its implications outside the realm of software development.
• SemperTool
  SemperTool introduces the first open source product: Subscription Management Database - SMDB. SMDB is an Electronic Resource Management system - ERM.
• ILS Survey: Open Source vs. Proprietary
  This survey was conducted from October 30, 2007 to January 3, 2008. It was answered by libraries using the open source ILSs Koha (n=113) and Evergreen (n=119), and proprietary ILSs (n=129). The current version of Koha was 2.2.9 and Evergreen was 1.2.
• Mac4Lin
  The goal of this project is to bring the Mac OS X user interface to POSIX Operating Systems (GNU/LInux, FreeBSD, openSolaris etc.).
• Freeciv
  Freeciv is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization.
• Lupo PenSuite
  The Suite includes over 200 highly selected portable programs and games (7-Zip, Audacity, CCleaner, eMule, FileZilla, Firefox, Foxit Reader, GIMP, IrfanView, Miranda, Notepad++, Opera, Thunderbird, µTorrent, VLC and many more). Over 5 million users have downloaded it.
• LiberKey
  LiberKey installed on your USB key (or mini external hard drive, a music player such as iPod...) can be connected on any PC. Immediately you have under hand all your familiar tools, without any installation on the host PC.
• Open Source – Open Libraries
  Open Source – Open Libraries is a consortia of libraries, library systems, and other organizations committed to pursuing Open Source Software (OSS) alternatives for libraries.
• OmCollab
  omCollab is a powerful, Enterprise 2.0 collaboration product completely built on open source software. It provides a web portal environment to create, share and search Microsoft Office content, files, shared bookmarks, blog posts and wiki articles across the enterprise. omCollab integrates some of the most powerful open source software applications into a single collaborative environment. It enables organisations to drive innovation, collaboration and community building.
• Inkscape
  An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
• Library a la Carte
  Librarians have enough to do and maintaining static HTML pages is tedious and time-consuming. The Library à la Carte tool enables librarians to easily and quickly create dynamic web pages that integrate Web 2.0 features, such as chat and RSS feeds, with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases.
• LibData Project Site
  LibData is a library oriented web based application which provides authoring environments for subject pathfinders (Research QuickStart), course related pages (CourseLib) and general purpose web pages (PageScribe).
• Senayan
  Senayan is an open source Library Management System. It is build on Open source technology like PHP and MySQL. Senayan provides many features such as Bibliography database, Circulation, Membership and many more that will help "automating" library tasks.
• LimeSurvey.org
  The Leading Open Source Survey Tool
• Weminaria
  Open source screen recording software, free video capture, video recorder, capture tool, desktop recorder, software tutorial, create software demo
• EmeraldView
  EmeraldView is a lightweight front-end for the digital library software Greenstone.
• Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
  Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier!
• AmpliFeeder
  Open source lifestream platform

LITA Top Technology Trends 2009 (video)

This was streamed live on the Internet during ALA and recorded for later viewing. On the panel were Clifford Lynch, John Blyberg, Roy Tennant, Joan Frye Williams, Eric Lease Morgan, and Geert van de Boogaard. Participating online were Marshall Breeding, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and Karen Schneider.  

FriendFeed tips

You've mastered Facebook and Twitter but are you on FriendFeed?

MakeTechEasier recently posted 10 Useful Tips to Using FriendFeed. Tip #1, "Aggregate all of your feeds" is what makes FriendFeed so useful in my opinion. You can all your stuff, and all the stuff posted by the people you want to follow, in one place.  

Pros and cons of URL shorteners

The increase usage of mobile technologies and social media like Twitter probably created an increase in the usage of URL shorteners (those tools that permits to take a some-100 characters long URL and transform it in a link that is much more shorter and manageable).

There are pros and cons, as illustrated in these two posts, one on Mashable (pro) and the other on delicious creator joshua schachter's blog  (con).

Greg Notess on "Searching Conversations: Twitter, Facebook, & the Social Web"

Greg Notess  spoke at Computers in Libraries on "Searching Conversations: Twitter, Facebook, & the Social Web".  We wanted us to realize that the various conversations we have online are searched in different ways.  My notes are bit sketchy, but even so, I think you'll pick up some tips.

Public vs. Private Conversations:

• Lines are blurring
• Fully public: on open web sites
• Semi-public communities - members only
• Mostly private - If no one else shares
• What is archives? And where?

Old databases (old ways of having conversations online) - Conversations occur on:

• Email and email lists
• Usenet (Google Groups)
• Web forums

Discussion forums are search through:

• http://www.omgili.com
• http://www.boardtracker.com/
• http://boardreader.com/
• Google is highlighting forum postings in their search results
• Some forums you have to join in order to search

Email and email lists:

• People want to search their own email
• Web archives - may be only for subscribers
• Some lists are searchable, but it may feel archaic

The Summize Story:

• Searched reviews and options, but people didn't use it much
• Added a Twitter search option
• So good that Twitter bought them (http://search.twitter.com/)
• Should rise to prominence
• There are advance commands - can search for a user, hashtags. emoticons, questions, links and more
• Good for finding people's initial reactions to something (like presidential debates)
• Oh....Twitter advanced search!

Tweetzi: Another Twitter search engine

Facebook:

• Signup
• See in-network profiles
• See most participants' friends
• Community & group demographics
• Facebook's web search may be Live Search (live.com)
• Can limit who can see your profile (and important thing to consider and likely do)
• Few users actually change their default privacy settings, but it seems to be growing in popularity

People Searching in General:

• Pipl -- Surfaces information that you might not find otherwise
• Spokeo -- Find people's social networking activities. Must have an account. Can track all of your friends' social networking activities. Find more of the person's usernames. Fee-based.

Top 100 Librarian Tweeters

Just for fun, a list of the top 100 librarians, libraries and library-related organizations on Twitter. At position #69, the Blogging Section's own Jill Hurst-Wahl.

Using Skype in reference services

The University of Ohio Libraries has installed a kiosk in the lobby of its Alden Library for the usual quick info requests (hours, staff, maps). But the kiosk also sports a webcam and a link to Skype in order to provide instant reference with a live librarian. Chad Boeninger explains the system in a video on his blog. The system is not heavily used but it's an interesting concept.

An article, refered to in the video, has also been written on the topic:

Booth, Char (2008). Developing Skype-Based Reference Services. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 13 (2), 147-165. Retrieved March 12, 2009, from http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/10875300802103684

Abstract:

Internet voice and video calling have demonstrated a dramatic rise in quality in the past several years and have quickly become communication technologies with a disruptive impact on society. Librarians, who regularly adopt such technologies in outreach and public services, should evaluate Web-calling programs as potential sources of innovative reference programming. This article describes the development of Skype video and Internet telephony pilot reference services at the Ohio University Libraries and considers the utility of Skype and VoIP in a library setting.

List of libraries on Twitter

Found via - where else - Twitter, a <a href="http://lindyjb.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/libraries-on-twitter-updated-list/#comment-136">list of libraries that tweet </a>(thanks to <a href="http://twitter.com/CanuckLibrarian">@CanuckLibrarian </a>for the heads up and Lindy Brown for the actual list.)