Sunday, October 28, 2007

iHCPL: Week 7: #17 Blog About Technology


Seeking inspiration for this blog I went to my favorite source for technology information, Wired magazine. As a card-carrying member of the AARP I, of course, prefer the print on paper edition Volume 15 issue 11 (November 2007) (ISSN 1059-1028) to the online edition http://www.wired.com/wired/. We geezers find it a far more satisfying sensual experience to flip through the bound on the side sequence of pages than clicking from page to page. It’s even faster to scan and skim than an aggregator.

The first impressive piece of technology I found was on page 88. It’s a photograph by Michael Sugrue of the 15-megawatt solar installation at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. And the fact that, “Dyess Air Force Base in Texas is powered completely by biomass fuel generated from paper industry byproducts, making it one of the largest single-site consumers of green electricity in the world.” “Olive Drab Goes Green: The Military Deploys Solar, Wind, and Biomass Power” by Amanda Griscom Little (page 88) http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-11/st_nellis# It made me think of American philosopher William James’s essay on the need to find a moral equivalent to war. http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

My next source of inspiration could be titled, “It came from Hollywood!” But actually it was called, “Beowulf and Angelina Jolie Give 3-D a Second Chance in Hollywood” by Frank Rose (pages 160,162, 164-166) http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-11/ff_3dhollywood. Yes, coming to a theater near you is the three dimensional illusion that you’ve penetrated Grendel’s underwater underground lair and met his mama, played by Ms. Jolie. The technology is better than it used to be, but you still have to wear the glasses. Children’s librarians, take note of this next bit of news. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are working on a 3-D three movie version of The adventures of Tintin.

But the most fascinating piece was “Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex” by Daniel H. Pink (pages 216-222, 261) http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-11/ff_manga. After a short survey of the retail side of the trade, which is far more mainstream in Japan than its American counterpart, Pink noted that the large publishers of the best-selling comic books, or graphic novels if you prefer, were concerned that their huge market was shrinking ever so slightly.

What’s really hot right now are dojinshi, a subset of the manga trade produced by amateurs. Using the characters owned by the major publishers the dojinshi creators write and draw new stories. In other words, dojinshi is fan fiction. And its sold right along side of the originals from which it’s derived. Pink then describes his visit to a large comic market:

“I spent two days at Super Comic City. But an American intellectual property lawyer probably would not have lasted more than 15minutes. After cruising just one or two aisles, he would have thudded to the floor in a dead faint. About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works. Actually, let me be blunter: The copyright violations are flagrant, shameless, and widespread.” (page 220)

The really interesting part is that the major publishers ignore it. Copyright law in Japan is no more lenient than it is in the United States, but the large Japanese houses are not sending out their lawyers with cease-and-desist orders to protect their market share. Instead they deliberately ignore the poaching, because they view it as customer care, a place to scout for new talent, and an excellent place to do market research.

“In other words, where there was once a clear divide between producers and consumers and between pros and amateurs, the boundaries are now murky. The people selling their wares at the comics markets are consumers and producers, amateurs and pros. They nourish both the top and the bottom. If publishers were to squash the emerging middle, they would disrupt, and perhaps destroy, this delicate new triangular ecosystem.” (page 222)

It struck me that this is also the market, the underling social interactions and economic assumptions, of Web 2.0 with its mashups and Library 2.0 where the reader get to remix the library and choose his or her own adventure as well as his or her own book.

And, last but not least there was the cover story, “How manga conquered America” story by Jason Thompson; art by Atsuhisa Okura (pages 333-223) No, I didn’t transpose the page numbers, like manga it reads left to right .

And, last but not least there was the cover story, “How manga conquered America” story by Jason Thompson; art by Atsuhisa Okura (pages 333-223) No, I didn’t transpose the page numbers, like manga it reads left to right . http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2007/1511_ff_manga


Tuesday, October 23, 2007

iHCPL Week 7: #16 So what's in a wiki?

I accessed the iHCPL wiki and created a login account. I added my blog to the favorite blogs page on the iHCPL wiki, although I can’t honestly say it’s my favorite – it’s more a work in progress. Then I saw the opportunity to list my favorite books. So many books so little time even so many favorites I got sidetracked by listing my favorite titles. I made myself stop after the first twenty or so that came to mind.


The SJCPL Subject Guides were wonderful. Book Lovers Wiki from the Princeton Public Library was very nicely designed, but it seemed like a very small selection. What a treasure trove Library Success: a best practices wiki is!!! I’m so excited I’m doing rapid shallow breathing. Even the ALA 2007 Annual Conference wiki was great. I can catch up on all the presentations that I missed because I was attending another one in another part of town.


I’ve experienced a conversion: wikis are more fun than blogs!

Monday, October 22, 2007

iHCPL: Week 6: #15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

Laura Cohen’s posting, A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto is a good tool for regaining perspective whenever I feel myself sliding into the “I’m never going to learn this @#$%^ stuff” mindset that often accompanies the uphill climb part of the learning curve for me.

One of the great references from the Wikipedia on “Library 2.0” entry was "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson, Wired, Oct. 2004 because it explained the comparative advantage that Amazon.com has over retail booksellers and how it can be economically viable. By making available a huge variety of titles it can afford to a few copies of less popular titles, because collectively it sells more of them than its best sellers. But it’s also a warning to libraries that we cannot, as individual institutions, compete with the scope of the online bookseller.

I had an interesting reaction to the five articles OCLC posted in 2006 about “Where the next generation Web will take libraries, Away from Icebergs, Into a new world of librarianship, To more powerful ways to cooperate, To better bibliographic services, To a temporary place in time.”

My reaction was this is all old news. It’s like the authors rediscovered what Ranganathan first published in 1931 (Ranganathan, S. R. (1931) The Five Laws of Library Science. Madras Library Association (Madras, India) and Edward Goldston (London, UK). To me most of it just seems a restatement of law # 5 “A Library is a Growing Organism.”

“It is an accepted biological fact that a growing organism alone will survive. An organism which ceases to grow will petrify and perish. The fifth law invites our attention to the fact that the library, as an institution, has all the attributes of a growing organism. A growing organism takes in new matter, casts off old matter, changes in size and takes new shapes and forms.”

At the same time, the OCLC authors seem to have overlooked what I think is the significant difference that the Internet has made on the library. We have become a center for two-way communication and learning for our customers. Before the Internet we were a place for one-way communication and learning. With a book, a remote or inaccessible author communicated with a reader. The reader’s imagination stimulated by the author’s words or pictures had a new experience and had something new to think about. There was very little dialog between author and reader. Occasionally, a reader might write a letter via the author’s publisher to a living author, or, more publicly, write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, but these were infrequent occurrences and the library, as an institution, was a bystander.

In the final decades of the twentieth century all that changed. Rather than face extinction we reinvented ourselves. To put it in Ranganathan’s terms, our organism grew. Seeing and hearing of new ways to transmit and receive information we acquired, as rapidly as our budgets allowed, the new technologies that enabled us and our readers to take advantage of this new technology. Suddenly tiny branch libraries could have magazine and reference collections to rival those of much larger facilities. It was a sudden metamorphoses rather than the slow continuous change of evolution to which we were accustomed.

At first, I’m not sure we fully understood how significant interactivity was going to change how we did business. We just looked at it as a wonderful new way to get more resources, a way to supplement the book collection. The collection would grow and we wouldn’t have to find a place to store it. It was even more gee-whiz than inter-library loan. Yes, we’d read that e-mail was the most popular of the three uses of the Internet, but what really excited us were the possibilities offered by remote logon and file transfer protocol. Real, live computer information -- right here in your local public library. We could provide more things for people to read and view.

So we were ready for the crowds that came flocking to the library to take advantage of our new and authoritative databases. We would be there to guide them, as always, but now they didn’t have to go through us to get information out of DIALOG. With more self-service we’d be able to help more people.

They flocked in, but they didn’t want our help to get information out of DIALOG or most of the databases to which we had purchased access. And they stopped asking us for the population of Pakistan or who there senators were in Washington or Austin. Instead those that were computer-savvy wanted to know why the color printer for the computer wasn’t working and when were we going to get it fixed, or those who weren’t computer-savvy wanted to know why the keys on the keyboard weren’t in alphabetical order? They didn’t particularly want help finding information as we had been providing it for decades. We were disintermediated! We were dissed! And after all we’d done for them. We felt a little hurt. We had to work on our feelings of rejection.

They did, however, very much want us to teach them how to use the computers. We reinvented ourselves as instructors and teachers. This was a somewhat difficult transition for those librarians who had become librarians because earlier in life they’d discovered that they really didn’t like the classroom. But we got over that, mostly.

They scorned our expensive databases and cruised about the Internet for items of doubtful authenticity or, worse, titillating pictures that seemed designed to annoy other customers. They played checkers with people in another state. They watched movies and listened to music. They even found the lyrics to popular songs. Once again, the most popular searches were for those that seemed designed to annoy other customers.

But, most of all, they wanted to check their hotmail, or they wanted us to fix the hotmail if it wasn’t working. The first wave of digital natives came in, took up all of the available computers, got into MUDs (multi-user dungeons or domains) and played MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games) all afternoon, much to the annoyance of their elders who had to type a resume for heaven’s sake! In other words, they came in the library to communicate. We had become a center for two-way communication and learning.

And the library had become one of the places to do it. We had become the much-desired third place, the not-home, not work-or-school place that we had always wanted to be. A side effect was that we had become at all hours just as noisy as we were right after story time let out. Contrary to the expectations of many, instead of withering away the Internet made us flourish. Not everyone was amused. Not everyone is happy with the new arrangement. It’s not perfect, but then, it never was.

For more about the man who invented Library Science:

http://w3.uniroma1.it/vrd/mathematics/i-ranganathan.html

http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr517/03-04-wt2/projects/ranganathan/index.htm

and his continued relevance:

Noruzi, Alireza (2004) Application of Ranganathan's Laws to the Web. Webology 1(2).

Friday, October 19, 2007

iHCPL : Week 6: #14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati






I looked in the Technorati WTF (Where's the Fire?) and wondered why is it "hot" news that WVU (West Virginia University) has the worlds largest dingleberry. I thought of another meaning for the acronym. I looked in the Popular features and discovered that the top search, or at least one of the top searches, was for karen dejo and her new sex video. I saw that the most popular blogs were about the latest consumer gadgets. In short, I observed a vast wasteland. Newton Minnow, where are you now that your county needs you? Audio mp3 Excerpt of Address


I learned that Authority for Technorati means popularity. The more others link to you, the more authority you have.* It's not a bad system. It's also the strategy of Google and the Science Citation Index.

I did an advanced search by typing "Learning 2.0" as an EXACT phrase keyword search in All Blogs and discovered several libraries and the latest ALA Library Technology Reports Blog posts (above right). But it looks like the CPAs are hot on our trails. I hope it’s not an audit trail (sorry, I couldn’t resist)

I did the same search in tags and found much the same thing. And “Twitter and the Power of Micro-Blogging in Emergencies” http://stephensonstrategies.com/2007/10/01/new-on-youtube-use-twitter-in-emergencies/ It appears there is socially redeeming value in Twitter and the Red Cross has put it to use.

I did the same search in the Blog Directory got significantly different results. I found Blogs with Learning 2.0 as the main subject and who else likes the blog and how they tagged it and how many made it their favorite and what they think of it. The hardest thing to find was how to link to it. I discovered that you have to click on its very faint gray URL in one spot of a very cluttered page.

That small gripe aside the popular blogs did link me to other blogs like A Library By Any Other Name http://alibraryisalibrary.edublogs.org, which hooked me in with this eye catching headline: 004.67 Student Participation on the Web.

*A fuller explanation is in their FAQs at http://support.technorati.com/faq/topic/71

A Hoboken hipster in Sherwood Forest by Marianne Mancusi


A Hoboken hipster in Sherwood Forest / Marianne Mancusi.— New York : Love Spell, 2007.


322 p. ; 18 cm.
Sequel to: A Connecticut Fashionista in King Arthur's Court


1. Love stories. 2. Robin Hood (Legendary character) -- Fiction. 3. Time travel -- Fiction.

813.6

Fashion photographer Chrissie Hayward is ready to wring the neck of her slacker coworker who has left her stranded at the King Arthur’s Renaissance Faire in upstate New York. She’s completely disappeared. Then Chrissie gets a cell phone call from her. She says she’s trapped in the future. She’s been time-traveling with Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenevere and now they’re all stuck in the twenty-second century, and would Chrissie please come bail them out? Chrissie just needs to check with the gypsy fortuneteller for more instructions. Thinking this is either a bad prank or that something is seriously wrong with her co-worker’s mind Chrissie hurries to the fortuneteller.

She soon finds herself flat on her back in twelfth-century England experiencing a “major freak-outage.” And who’s the first person she meets? Robin Hood, of course, but he’s completely clueless about robbing the rich to give to the poor. He’s moping around the forest with a gang of not-so-merry men. Chrissie passes herself off as a eunuch, and sets about getting Robin off his backside and busy doing what he’s supposed to be doing. She does note in passing that he does have a rather nice backside, and things develop from there.

Chrissie’s transformation from photographer to self-confident strategist does not slow the pace of this swiftly moving romantic adventure. A word of caution to readers who want the flavor of ye olde England to go with the action: Mancusi’s descriptions are nearly all current popular culture references. Here is Chrissie’s description of King Richard:

"I remember that in Prince of Thieves, the Kevin Costner movie, Richard is played by Sean Connery. The real Richard kind of has the same deep foreign voice thing going on, but in the face he more resembles Roger Moore. Funny." (page 314)

If this bothers you, you might try Robin McKinley’s The Outlaws of Sherwood, another woman’s action adventure with the same setting and a slightly different take on most of the same characters. However, if pop culture doesn’t bother you, enjoy Mancusi’s romp in the forest with Robin.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

iHCPL Week 6: #13 Tagging makes the web 2.0 world go round

I watched the Otter Group Del.icio.us tutorial (8 min. video). It was fuzzy, as advertised, but a good introduction. It’s creepy that of the several habits of highly successful Del.icio.us users Habit Five is “Stalk other users.” No wonder politicians go berserk over social networking. Why not call it “follow the recommendations of other users?” And I don’t get why randomly poking around in other people’s sites is any better than any other kind of random poking around. It must be some kind of hunter-gatherer impulse, like getting up real early on Saturday morning to beat everyone else to the garage sales. Us.ef.ul wasn’t – at least not for me I had no idea what the author was rambling on about.

I took a look around Del.icio.us using the iHCPL account that was created for this exercise. It was so good that I tagged it. Now I have a tag of tags, but I didn’t tag it tags; I tagged it iHCPL.

I clicked on a Generator Blog that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users.*
http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ *this url has been saved by 3175 people, and this is what some of them had to say:

= A source of a bunch of silly generating tools. -- Manzan
= Generators -- danieljames
= lista de generadores online -- miguelalas
= Generates software that create software – Neelakantan
= 專門介紹產生器的部落格 – Libraene**
= cool time wasting generators -- uncagedbird

**(I sure hope that penultimate one doesn’t say something really nasty in Chinese)

I learned that Tag or Folksonomy are trendy new slang for "words." As in:

“word, n. II. An element of speech.
12. a. A combination of vocal sounds, or one such sound, used in a language to express an idea (e.g. to denote a thing, attribute, or relation), and constituting an ultimate minimal element of speech having a meaning as such …
b. (a) As designating a thing or person: A name, title, appellation. Obs. (b) As expressing an idea: A term, expression.
c. A written (engraved, printed, etc.) character or set of characters representing this.
a1000 Riddles xlvii[i], Moe word fræt. 1521 [see WRITE v. B. 2]. 1612, 1888 [see SPELL v.2 3]. 1725 WATTS Logic I. iv. §1 We convey [our Ideas] to each other by the Means of certain Sounds, or written Marks, which we call Words. …” Oxford English Dictionary.— 2nd edition. –

Tags are, in effect, what used to be called with justifiable distain, “quick and dirty cataloging.” It’s quick to create at the front end, but not very effective as a finding aid due to its lack of precision and standardization.

Q. Do you look under:
a) car or
b) cars or
c) automobile or
d) automobiles, or
e) motor vehicle
f) motor vehicles
g) all of the above?

A. g) all of the above, however, the thing you really wanted to find was tagged “Station wagons.”

The big difference between then and now: the faster-than-human gathering and sorting ability of the electronic digital computer and the linking together of lots and lots of these now commonplace replacements for typewriters and adding machines together in a global network. Still, I wonder, are tags any more effective than a key word search as a finding aid? I look forward to the investigation.

My favorite site for tags, formerly known as subject headings, is still: http://authorities.loc.gov/

My other favorite site for words, after the OED, is Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/. Where else can you find a definition for "delurk" or "multislacking?"

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Week 5: #12 The "Library" Elf will remind you!

OHMIGOSH! I read the FAQs, I registered my library cards (one for HCPL and one from another large municipal system where I live) and discovered that I've got an overdue CD that's not with me. I hope I learn where I can get something that will check under the seats of your car to find that missing DVD.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

iHCPL Week 5: #11 A Thing about Library Thing

I took a look around LibraryThing and created an account, or more accurately, I came; I saw; I geeked out. Now my children have to fight me to get to the home computer. Why should they fritter away their time and money on iTunes or check on school assignments when there are still so many books lying around the house that need to be cataloged? So many books – so little time!
Not only can you view your books on a virtual shelf and install a search box* on your blog, but you can also – and this is the fiendishly fun part: Put them in Dewey Decimal Order!

* at the bottom of the blog

iHCPL : Son of Week 5: #10 Play around with Image Generators

I tried out the Avatars from Yahoo a few months ago and did'nt find anything that was my size. All the avatars were young and thin where as I am both calorically and chronologically gifted. And the styles were far too trendy for any day except casual Friday.

I am happy to report that things have improved. This time when I looked I found that I could get grey hair and a suit to match! I was still looking way too svelte. I guess my avatar will have to stay home when I go to Weight Watchers.

There were also inside and outside the library backgrounds so I could feel right at home. However, I felt he looked more dashing in more exotic locales. Such as:



My only remaining concern is it keeps blinking at me. Does anyone know where to get eye drops in cyberspace?



Yahoo! Avatars

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

iHCPL Week 5: #10 Play around with Image Generators






From FDToys I used the Warholizer to alter the cat-who-must-not-be-named. It now appears in more lurid multi-colors on the Flickr badge on the blog along with my favorite avatar from The Mini-Mizer http://www.reasonablyclever.com/mini/flash/minifig.swf. I think it comes the closest to the real me, well except for the Garfield cartoon from Customize comic strips http://www.txt2pic.com/comic-strip/, maybe.



I also tried but don't particularly like Meez. I found to be rather tedious. It took a loooong time and a lot of browsing to come up with a somewhat boring result.



Monday, October 1, 2007

iHCPL Week 4: #8 Make life "really simple" with RSS and a newsreader




I followed the discovery resources above to learn more about RSS and newsreaders, but they just could not compete with the library’s own LOL video inspiration piece. I did find the videos easier to comprehend than Bloglines’ own blog instructions.

Since I’ve been using Google’s Reader as my aggregator for sometime, I used the new one on Bloglines to subscribe to a sampling of iHCPL blogs.


By way of comparison, I must say that using Reader I can move from a link in about 3 seconds compared with the 16 seconds it took to move about on Bloglines. It reminded me of the bad old days on the World Wide Wait as the web was called at the distant turn of the millennium.