July 24th, 2008 Brian Herzog
Last week, I was invited to participate in the first Simmons Tech Summit.
Organized and hosted by a few instructors in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, it was a small unconference of tech librarians discussing using web 2.0 tools to reach out to patrons.
It was fun. I was the only public librarian there (and, it seemed, the only one without an iPhone), and it was interesting to hear how academic librarians approach web 2.0 tools. Also, I like meeting other librarians, especially when they’re doing cool things.
We created a del.icio.us account for the tools we covered - a lot I don’t use, a few I’d never heard of, and some I need to investigate further. Check out the full list, but here’s a few highlights:
- VoiceThread and Animoto are different, but similar in that they are both easy tools for creating videos. Animoto puts music over photos, to create fun music videos. VoiceThread is a bit more powerful, and is a tool for creating presentations with slides and voice - but best of all, viewers can leave comments on the slides. Great for interaction in the classroom, but questions/feedback is also great for instructional screencasts or collaborative creativity
- LibraryFind came up early in the day, as any meeting of tech librarians will quickly turn to lamenting the state of ILS software. LibraryFind is an open source metasearch/federated search tool developed (and in use!) by Oregon State University - definitely worth some play time
- ChaCha was new to me - it’s basically a reference service for mobile devices. Send them a reference question via text message or phone call, and they send you back an answer. Registering your mobile devices means it can log the questions you ask, so you can see who answered it (the “Guide”) and where they found the answer. It looks like Guides can be anyone, and are paid $0.20/answer
- Wordle.net was new to me, too - upload a block of text to it and it creates a pretty “word cloud.” Like a tag cloud, but not linked, so it can be eye-catching but not inherently useful. But I like the concept, though, and it’s fun: here’s a wordle of the Tech Summit delicious feed, this blog, and the White House’s news feed
Keeping up by reading journals and blogs is okay, but I usually learn a lot more by talking to people and hearing their ideas on tools. Yay for sharing and working together.
Tags: 2.0, gslis, libraries, Library, library 2.0, public, simmons, simmons tech summit, tech, Technology, unconference, web 2.0, web2.0 See Also
Posted under Conferences, Library, Technology | 2 Comments »
July 22nd, 2008 Brian Herzog
I noticed this interesting juxtaposition of the difference in the way the Democratic and Republican parties are approaching technology at campaign events.
The Arizona Star reported that the GOP wanted to prevent any attendees of a Tucson fundraiser from recording the event, out of fear of what might show up on YouTube. Bush himself asked the attendees to turn off all recording devices, and was quoted as saying
I don’t know a lot about technology…but I do know about YouTube.
On the other hand, an email from the Obama campaign goes in the exact opposite direction. The email mentioned an upcoming rally in Massachusetts on August 4th (Obama’s birthday, incidentally), and read in part:
…remember to bring your camera and snap a few photos! You can share them with us at eventsforobama@gmail.com. We’ll start posting photos soon!
Not that there is any one right way to approach technology, but I did find this contrast telling. The Bush Administration has a long reputation of trying to suppress and control information and keep things behind closed doors, whereas the Obama campaign has embraced modern technology and has put effort into learning it to use it to their advantage.
Politics is politics, but I am all for being encouraged to participate. Besides, I like misunderstanding or fear.
Tags: democratic, democrats, political, political parties, politics, republican, republicans, social networking, Technology, web 2.0, web2.0, youtube See Also
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June 14th, 2007 Brian Herzog
Yesterday, a few major libraryland blogs talked about Michael Gorman’s outlook on the state of Web 2.0, as posted on Encyclopedia Britannica’s blog. Since I agree with most of what they said, I won’t post my own comments here. But what I do want to say is this:
I wasn’t really surprised to see this much activity by library-related bloggers. This is what we do for a living, so when the former President of the American Library Association makes some narrow-minded comments that are counter to the direction of the field, it make sense that we’d whip up our own little tempest.
However, when someone outside our teapot, in a forum as large as Boing Boing, also takes note of him, I start to feel ashamed. To offend a bunch of librarians is one thing; to make librarianship look bad (by poo-pooing the very tools we and our patrons are using to organize and access information) to the rest of the world is entirely different.
gorman, librarianship, libraries, library, library 2.0, library2.0, michael gorman, web 2.0, web2.0
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Posted under Library, Technology | 2 Comments »
