SJRLC Connections

New Tech Talk: New Classes May

New Class for May

May 29:       

Tech Talk: Practically Web 2.0: Practical demonstrations of Social Software Technology:

This two hour tech talk will explain the basic concepts of many web 2.0 tools and demonstrate how you can practically use them to manage information and time more efficiently.

Click here for complete details and registration form

 

Interesting Debate on Web 2.0: Weinberger vs. Keen

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a piece, "The Good, the Bad and the Web 2.0" that featured a debate between Andrew Keen, author of, "The Cult of the Amateur" and David Weinberger, author of "Everything is Miscellaneous".

I highly recommend the article, but for you fans of Cliffs notes, here's my quick 'n' dirty summary, followed a by a few questions to ponder.

Notes on Keen's position

IS WEB 2.0 A DREAM OR A NIGHTMARE?  It is: "The radical democratization of media which is enabling anyone to publish anything on the Internet.    

• Web 2.0 tranforms all of us into digital writers, music artists, movie makers, journalists (and critics)
  
• YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Tagging
  
• A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that essential epistemological anchor of truth.  The impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert is replaced by the murkiness of the anonymous amateur.  When everyone claims to be an author, there can be no art. no reliable information, no audience
  
• Web 2.0's Democratization of information is creating a generation of media illiterates.  That's the Nightmare.
  
• Web 2.0 (combined with broadband) will transform the media into "ubiquitous chatter".  Digital abundance will lead to intellectual poverty.  "The more we know, the less we will know."
  
• Traditional media has done a good job in discovering, polishing, and distributing talent.
  
• To use this chaotic media efficaciously, we need to invent our own taxonomies -- which isn't realistic to the majority of the people.

Notes on Weinberger's position

THE WEB IS ABUNDANCE, WHILE THE OLD MEDIA IS PREMISED ON SCARCITY

• The web is problematic because there are no centralized gatekeepers BUT the Web is ALSO the continuing struggle to deal with that problem:  sites that enable users to tag online resources; the Web invents ways to pull together ideas and information, finding the connections and relationships that keep the "misc" from staying that way.
  
• People rely on a wide range of trust mechanisms appropriate to the domain to guide us (i.e. ebay reputations; persistence of posts on blogs; recommendations of other bloggers; Wikipedia's sophisticated governance and complete transparency…)
  
• Amateurs aren't driving out pros.  But the criteria governing our choice of whom to listen to are expanding from "those are the only channels I get".
  
• Keen's picture of talent is formed by the binary view the traditional media has forced on us.  It's been expensive to produce, market, distribute products (book, records, films).  The traditional distribution system made it look like talent is a you-got-it-or-you-don't proposition.  That doesn't reflect the scarcity of talent so much as the scarcity of distribution, a result of the high cost of delivering the first copy.
  
• We couldn't find so much on the web if finding required creating our own taxonomies as Keen says.   We rely on taxonomies created by experts (catalogs, indexes), computer assistance (search engines) and recommendations from people we trust.  We're getting better at all of these.
  
• Consider how much more we know about the world because of bloggers.  They may not be "journalists" but they are sources.

Thoughts/Questions

1. What can libraries be doing to help people find information?
   • Creating (good) expert taxonomies
   • Building recommendations systems into our catalogs and websites
   • Leveraging our reputation as a trusted source
   • Become actively involved with social tagging.   
     
2. What can/should libraries be doing to help customers create and share?  Can/should we be aggregating or creating local community or subject oriented:
   • Blogs
   • Wikis
   • YouTube "channels"
   • Podcasts
     
3. As information professionals, what are our information competencies in the web 2.0 world?
   • Can should we be helping to teach our customers how to use new information technologies to enhance their lives?
   • What do you think of David Lee King's suggested competencies. 
   • How do Livonia Central School's tech competencies for 3rd graders compare/contrast with the current competencies of library staff?   
     
4. Web 2.0 fosters communities of interest.  Are there opportunities for libraries to strengthen their role in their community and/or connect people (or connect with people) in their communities?

Infotubey Awards!

Check out this message from Kathy Dempsey, editor in chief, Computers in Libraries magazine editor, Marketing Library Services newsletter

You Can Enter Information Today's 2007 InfoTubey Awards!

Hi Everyone,

My company is starting a new contest this year to award interesting library promotional work. We're calling it the InfoTubey Awards!  ;-)

We’re looking for videos that librarians have created and posted to YouTube.
Each production must demonstrate creativity, humor, and sincerity in marketing a library, promoting library services, or enhancing a library's value. Videos cannot be more than 5 minutes long.

The deadline is Feb. 14. All submissions will be judged by a panel of distinguished information professionals, who will contact winners in March.

Five InfoTubey Award winners will each receive one free 3-day conference pass to the Computers in Libraries 2007 conference (a $449 value). Awards will be presented at a gala event during the CIL conference on April 17 near Washington, D.C.

The entry form is at https://secure.infotoday.com/InfoTubies/Submit.asp.

You can direct your questions to InfoTubies@infotoday.com.

C'mon, show us what you've done! And feel free to pass this on to your colleagues (unless you're afraid they'll beat you!).

~Kathy

Just to get you in the mood... Here's a little something to whet your youtubey appetite...

Five weeks to a Social Library

from: http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2006/10/07/call-for-participants-five-weeks-to-a-social-library/

Call for Participants - Five Weeks to a Social Library

We are now accepting applications for participants for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course which will take place online between February 12 and March 17, 2007.

We have a really fantastic program planned including webcasts, screencasts, podcasts and group chats, with a very talented group of presenters who will be teaching participants about Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Social Bookmarking, Flickr, MMOGs, and Selling Social Software. Application deadline is December 1,2006. The course will be limited to forty participants, but all of the course content including live Webcasts will be archived and made freely available to the public. Questions should be directed to the planning committee at sociallibrary@gmail.com.

You may also be interested in the "Learning 2.0" class that the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County recently offered. You can follow that class on their blog at your own pace.

Leslie Burger featured on Google Blog

By way of It's All Good, I just found out that Leslie Burger's post on Banned Books week is being featured on the GoogleBlog. 

The GoogleBlog is ranked #22 in Technorati, with 17,053 links from 7053 blogs.  In other words it is one of the most widely subscribed to blogs in the blogosphere, so Leslie's post will do a great job in raising awareness of censorship issues, ALA, and, of course, libraries.

Way to go Leslie!!

New ALA Members Blog

ALA has created a new "Member Blog" available at http://blogs.ala.org/memberblog.php.   

ALA members have an immediate, dynamic impact on the quality of life in a community; on successful student learning outcomes; on the sustainability of critical engagements with the past and the extending access to tools for charting a new future; and on the usefulness of work/life in every field of human endeavor. And this blog would like to show them off.

If you want to add the feed to you bloglines account or other aggregator, enter this feed address: http://blogs.ala.org/xmlsrv/rss2.php?blog=12.

If you're interested in attending the ALA Conference in Washington DC in 2007, don't miss the post on travel awards for the conference.

Performancing Blog Editor: Free plugin for Firefox

Ralph Bingham (Gloucester County Library System) just turned me on to the the "Performancing" blog editor that plugs neatly into Firefox.   I'm posting from it now.   It can work with Blogger, Typepad and many other bloggin platforms.  Can't wait to see how this actually looks!

The one limitation I see is that I can't insert and image from my computer; I have to link from one that's already online or upload through ftp.  I'll do some experimenting and report back!  If you've tried Performancing, leave a comment and let me know what you think.  I'm also playing around with the free metrics/stats feature that Performancing offers.  So for I like what I see.  If you're interested, you don't need to use the blog editor to use the free metrics. 

Here's a screenshot (uploaded after the fact, logged into typepad)

powered by performancing firefox

Blog vs. Listserv

The question has come up:  What's the difference between content you'll be posting to the blog versus content you put on the SJRLC listserv? 

Here are what I see as a few differences:

1. The listserv is, and will continue to be, the main avenue for communicating timely information.  Email gets your attention quickly. 
2. The listserv exists not only as a way for SJRLC to communicate with you, but for you to communicate with each other.  Listserv content is generated by all of us.  The blog content will be generated by SJRLC--certainly with the hope that it will spark conversations by way of comments and cross-linking, but blog authorship is centralized, while listserv authorship is distributed.
3. The blog will be more informal than the listserv, which is not to say it will be unprofessional.  The listserv is business wear, the blog is casual Fridays.
4. Nobody wants too much email, so we try to keep the listserv low-volume, high quality.  Since the blog content is "pulled" by you rather than "pushed" by us, we can be more liberal in sharing content.  For instance, we may blog about a cool presentation on customer service, or an interesting blog post, that is not exactly library-related or a cool website on wikis.  All good stuff!  But not the kind of information we've traditionally shared on the listserv. 
5. The blog is archived, categorized, and searchable, which makes it (hopefully) a continually growing repository of goodies.  Listserv postings are more ephemeral. 
6. Last, but not least, is this:  We're not exactly sure how the blog will be different from the listserv.  That's part of the learning, and the answer to the question rests as much with you as it does with us.  Will you subscribe to the blog?  Will  you read it regularly?  Will you link to posts on your staff blogs?  Will you comment on posts?  Ultimately, we're creating this together.  I look forward to seeing what develops.  :-)

-pjb

Let the blogging begin

This is SJRLC's inaugural post!  Following up on last week's workshop with Michael Stephens, SJRLC has created this blog to keep South Jersey libraries up-to-date on all relevant activities, news, trends and ideas.  The Connections blog will be a little more informal than our official website, and we invite you to participate with us by sharing your comments, feeds, blogs, pictures and posts.  Let's think of this as our "web 2.0" sandbox.  Are you ready to play?

As promised, the handouts from the workshop and the results from our brainstorming session on July 20 are available here.  If you would like to add (or, um, revise) anything on the brainstorming list let me know by leaving a comment on this post. We've also posted some pictures from the event to our new Flickr account. 

Now I saw some amazing looking blogs being created in the lab.  Let's see what y'all have come up with!   If you're willing to share, send me your blog (and/or Suprglu) links and I'll start adding them to the sidebar. 

So add us to your bloglines, and we'll add you to ours.   Thanks everyone, I can't wait to see where this leads!