The folks at Information Today have set up a site on Ustream where you can watch videos of presentations from Internet Librarian, which is going on this week in Monterey, California. If you drop by the Internet Librarian page in Ustream, you might find live webcasts as well as previously recorded session, such as this one of Vint Cerf!
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Ellen Kaufman, Stephen Francoeur, Harold Gee, Joseph Hartnett, Ryan Phillips, Mike Waldman
ARC and ALEPH
We discussed the challenges that the CUNY Office of Library Services is facing as it tries to set up ARC (Aleph 500 Reporting Center), which is a product from Ex Libris that allows Aleph 500 customers to generate sophisticated reports on the items in the catalog and their use.
Capturing User Experience
Ryan discussed capturing user experiences, some ideas and tools presented by Michael Lascarides as part of the NYPL Service Excellence symposium in September. Michael Lascarides is a User Analyst with the Digital Experience Group at NYPL. His presentation was titled “Uncovering Stories”. Two takeaways from his presentation discussed were how to capture user experiences and how users react to bad design and bad user experiences. One tool he mentioned for capturing users’ online experiences is Google Analytics, a tool for analyzing web site traffic. (If you are reading this blog post on the web, then you can view the slides from Lascarides’ presentation below.)
SFX Page with Links to Google Books
We discussed the draft of the SFX FIND IT page that offers Google Books as a target when the item presented is a book that happens to be fully or partially available in Google Books. We also discussed the problems we had a few years ago with a trial to Safari Books.
SFX and bX
We also discussed the Ex Libris bX Recommender, which would function similarly to the Amazon recommendation feature (i.e., “You might also like…”). This tool, highlighted in Eric’s recent email about SFX options, presents article suggestions when you click the SFX Find It link next to an item in your search results. Stephen mentioned that Dave Pattern of University of Huddersfield gave a presentation at Internet Librarian International on how he uses transaction data from his catalog for “you might like” feature in his catalog. (If you are reading this blog post on the web, you can view the slides below; otherwise, you can find them online at Slideshare.)
Until I stumbled on this conference program today, it didn’t occur to me that there might be a whole conference devoted to discussing the ethical issues relating to the way that information is organized All of the presentations from this May 22-23, 2009, event are available as videos, which is a really cool thing for conference organizers to offer.
“Conference Program.” The Ethics of Information Organization, n.d. Web. 9 July 2009.
Eric Frierson, a librarian at the University of Texas, Arlington, wrote recently about an interesting way to engage library staff about core issues:
A couple of weeks ago, I sent out an e-mail to the library inviting them to join me on something I called ‘TED Talk Tuesdays.’ If you haven’t been to ted.com, you should check it out. It features videos from leading thinkers in the technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and other fields – speakers are asked to give ‘the speech of their life’ in under 20 minutes.
…
So what is TED Talk Tuesday? It’s people in a room watching a TED Talk and spending the rest of the hour discussing how it impacts the library and each other at work. No discussion questions, no formal presentation, just watching a video and talking to each other.
Read the rest of his post here. Below are some of my favorite TED talks.
Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity
Ray Kurzweil Announces Singularity University
Tim Berners-Lee on the Next Web
Brewster Kahle Builds a Free Digital Library
There are many more videos to explore on this page, where they are organized by themes and topics.
I attended a program on Mashups at SLA yesterday. Nicole Engard, the editor of the forthcoming book on Library Mashups (published by Information Today), was the speaker. You can find more about the book here. Although I thought some librarians in the audience where more knowlegable about certain technical aspects of working with mashups, Nicole engaged the audience throughout. She spent most of an hour actually showing examples of mashups used in business settings and in libraries and then did a live demo of how to use Yahoo Pipes to bring together news streams from the Washington Post and the New York Times. She suggested going to programmableweb.com to search for more examples and reading an article by Jody Fagen, “Mashing Up Multiple Web Feeds Using Yahoo! pipes” in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of Computers in Libraries. The slides from her talk are on the Library Mashups blog here.
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