BiblioTech Web

There’s a really good article by Steven on the ACRLog called “What Happened to the Personal Web Site” which discusses the impact that the personal blog has had on academic librarianship. Here is a snippet:

In the pre-blog days if an academic librarian wanted to achieve some of those things for which a blog now serves, a personal web site was the best available option. It could provide a personal profile, access to a CV, a listing of articles and presentations, resources that the site owner wanted to share with colleagues, and specialized resource pages designed to enlighten colleagues, promote new ideas, and create a name for oneself. Perhaps the blog’s ability to accomplish the latter is the primary reason why the personal web site is no longer the first choice - or a choice at all - for many academic librarians who want to establish themselves as thought leaders in the profession and influence their colleagues.

Please click the link above and read the whole thing. It’s a reasonable length and is well worth the read.

Last week I found out about one of the coolest library technologies that’s come down the pike. It’s a Web 2.0 application designed for Library 2.0. It’s called LibGuides and it’s worth getting excited about.

It’s a system for providing information and resources to library patrons in an engaging and organized way, but without the information providers (mainly librarians) needing to learn code or some complicated system. (I’ll refer to the people creating content in LibGuides as librarians from here on in, although they can certainly be non-librarians.) Statistics are even kept automatically, so you can see how many times each link or file was actually clicked on. They count click-throughs, not page views, so your statistics are more accurate.

The coolest part is that LibGuides interfaces with Facebook, allowing your students/patrons to browse your Guides, search your library catalog, and link to various resources that you provide on your library website, all from within Facebook. Librarians who use Facebook can even add the Guides that they’ve created right into their Facebook profiles!

Once you’ve created some Guides, you can make “widgets” that are basically little applet boxes that you can embed on websites, blogs, and even various social networking programs.

Another big part of the LibGuides program is the Community. Librarians can interact with others who are using the system, finding other librarians that specialize in the same subject areas and sharing ideas. You can even browse the Guides from other libraries!

For that matter, the LibGuides are publicly accessible unless they are intentionally made private. So you can use them for internal communications, training, etc., and also make resources that anyone in general can use. There’s even a list of libraries who are using LibGuides along with links to their LibGuides sites.

If you’d just like to see some great examples of Guides that have been created with LibGuides, visit http://www.springshare.com/libguides/examples.html.

NOTE: Butler’s LibGuides are also now available at http://libguides.butler.edu

If you’re interested in learning more about LibGuides, you can get lots of information on their website: http://www.springshare.com/libguides/. Of special interest is their “Introduction to LibGuides” video, for which the link is in the bottom right corner. If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend viewing this.

The following is information from their website. Since it describes LibGuides much better and more succinctly than I can, I figured I’d use it. (The original page is here.)

Description

LibGuides is a “library 2.0″ online publishing system. It combines the best features of social networks, wikis, bookmarks and blogs, to help librarians share information and promote library resources to the community. LibGuides is fully integrated with Facebook, and LibGuides widgets enable the distribution of library content on social networks, blogs, and courseware systems. Patrons can also subscribe to the email updates of their favorite LibGuides content. Simply put, LibGuides connects you with patrons, wherever they are.

How Does It Work?

Every library gets their own customized LibGuides system. The librarians then aggregate and publish useful information by organizing it into Guides. These Guides can be subject guides, info portals, class guides, community guides, research tips… or any type of useful content (see examples). Documents, links, podcasts, rss feeds, videos, search boxes, polls, and any type of dynamic content can be put into Guides, for a true web 2.0 learning experience.

Connect With Patrons

LibGuides provides many options to connect with patrons and distribute information:

• Every librarian has a profile page listing their contact info & all their content.
• Patrons can chat with librarians from any Guide, on Meebo, Plugoo, AOL, Yahoo IM, Google Talk and MSN Messenger.
• Users can participate in polls, rate the resources using star-rating system, and leave comments.
• Everything published in LibGuides is instantly available in Facebook, thru LibGuides Facebook app.
• LibGuides Widgets display LibGuides content on any webpage, blog, or a social network.
• Users can subscribe to email updates whenever new content is published.

There you go. Check them out! Yes, they’re a subscription service, so you do have to pay an annual fee, but it’s surprisingly low–much less than some databases we subscribe to and which hardly get used, while THIS resource is practically guaranteed to see some heavy use.

It’s funny how technological innovations eventually become commonplace and then forgotten. My six-year-old was doing his homework last night and had to write the first and last letters of things that were pictured on his worksheet. When he got to a typewriter he asked me what it was.

Isn’t that funny? He asked me what it was and when I looked at it, it was clearly a picture of a typewriter.

And then I found myself EXPLAINING to him how a typewriter works, with the keys hitting the ribbon, etc. My ten-year-old got into it then, asking if each letter hit at the same place, so I explained how the roller moves each time you hit a key.

Who’d have thought it?

How many libraries out there still have a typewriter somewhere, available for public use? We’ve still got one on the basement level, but I don’t think it gets used much.

It won’t be long before we’re getting students as freshmen in college who’ve never seen a typewriter before. This year’s freshmen were generally born in 1989! MAN!! I was a senior in college that year! Where’s the time gone?

Google has done it again–taken something they designed that was already good and improved it. Specifically, the Google Maps now allow you to customize your route on the fly.

You get directions from one place to another just like you always have, but now when you are presented with your route, you can click and drag on any part of the blue line showing you the way and move it someplace else. How awesome is THAT? You can plot your route and make sure you go through a particular place or use a particular street. I’ve been WAITING for some online map program to allow this kind of thing and there’s finally one that does it.

Online map programs have long allowed you to add intermediary stops along the way, so if you were traveling from Baltimore to Las Vegas and wanted to go through Atlanta, you could plot a map from Baltimore to Atlanta to Las Vegas. But NOW….

Pick any part of your route and drag it somewhere else. The blue line showing your route will change to reflect the most direct pathway. Sometimes that will be a leg sticking out from the main route, indicating that if you want to go there your best bet is to get off and back onto your route from the same place. But if you drag the line further, the most direct route going through your point will involve a different route altogether.

And even better, when you drag a point away from the route, it adds a marker there. In your step-by-step route over on the left, you have the option to EDIT that point, so you can label it whatever you like. Want to remove a marker, right above the “Edit” link is a little X just like you’re used to seeing for closing a window or application. Hit it and that change is removed from your route. And all this is on the fly.

This is a great way to plan a trip across a city where you know there’s construction. Just drag your route away from the construction zone and eventually it will flip over to another street.

You can even plot a trip across the country and VERY quickly and easily add any locations you want to stop at. I’m sure there are also other great uses I haven’t mentioned.

Give it a try! This ROCKS!!

Here’s an interesting comic from xkcd, an online comic series that often has insightful perspectives on technology today. The caption was “Wikipedian Protester” and the alt-text when you mouse over it was “Semi-Protect the Constitution.” Food for thought.

A “captcha” is one of those little boxes that have squiggly text in them that you’re supposed to type so that the form you’re trying to submit knows that you’re a real person and not one of those stupid BOTS that plague our networks with spam. You’ve probably seen these when you’ve tried to post a comment one someone’s blog or signed up for an online account of almost any type.

David Warlick posted this morning on his 2 Cents Worth blog about how books are being digitized and thousands of people are helping with these projects by using “captchas.” His article is Re-Capturing Books through Captcha…

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

Since the human eye (and mind) is more accurate than OCR programs, this kind of user-involved digitization project results in a much more accurate transcription. Plus, it takes advantage of Distributed Computing, only of a more organic nature. What a cool way to take a new-ish technology that sometimes seems like a pain and turn it into something useful!

Be sure to visit the ReCAPTCHA site to learn more about how the system works (it’s very ingenious) and to help by typing a few words in.