Blog posts from December 2008

We're wrapping up our 2008 here at ALA, and as we head into the Holiday, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of our readers for helping to make this a great year for ALA TechSource. It's been a privilege to come on board as your editor and to be able to spend time discussing exciting new developments with you. I'm looking forward to an even better 2009!

As we take our Holiday break, we won't be posting much over the next two weeks, but we we will be back at full speed in early January.

Best wishes from all of us at TechSource. Have a great Holiday!

In the spirit of the bazillion other  year-end lists you will see over the coming weeks, I decided to list my Top 5 Most Influential Technologies of the year. These are the technologies that I think librarians need to be aware of, examine, and find uses for in their library. Not all of these started this year, but 2008 was  the year they broke out and became necessities in many people's lives. Read More »

There's been some discussion on the web about whether or not employers should be discriminating against gamers, given some claims that people who use their computers to play games will inevitably do so at the office and thus be less productive employees.

A vigorous discussion on has broken out here.

Is this a vicious stereotype? Is there some truth to it? It seems like there's a lot of mixed messages about gaming going on in our society. I can't say I'm shocked by this, but I'm also saddened given how much librarians have tried to advocate the idea that gaming is a useful educational tool
 that can be used to help children learn and gain valuable problem-solving skills. Read More »

Last Thursday, the Library of Congress released a report on their recent Flick pilot project. Jessamyn West at librarian.net has some great coverage highlighting the key points. Doug Caverly at WebProNews provides some coverage here.

Every now and then, usually when I have a moment by myself, I think about the state of librarianship.  I ponder the opportunities, the problems, and the progress.  Generally, these periodic, informal "state of librarianship" addresses to myself are optimistic. 

Over the past couple of decades, rather than concentrate on outright threats to librarianship, I have tended to focus on things that are holding librarianship back, or retarding its growth and development.  Questions of momentum, acceleration, and deceleration are much more mundanely interesting than questions about the life and death of a profession.  Although Google is doing some interesting and large-scale things to make information findable and usable, and thus seems like it poses something of a threat to librarians, we really cannot do much about what Google does or plans to do.

By concentrating on the retarding factors, perhaps we can identify tangible problems that we can work to solve.
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Last evening's NBC Nightly News included this report on library usage in tough times:

  Read More »

This article from Monday's Wall Street Journal previews the future of movie-watching. As cool as a lot of this stuff sounds, I can't help but think that if these predictions are true, all the time and money libraries are spending to build up their DVD collections could be for naught.

Yesterday's New York Times featured this piece, which discussed how newspaper journalists have become avid users of Twitter:

CNN says it wants newspaper feedback as it creates a news wire service to compete with The Associated Press and other services. At a meeting last week, one newspaper staff member offered his advice — and shared the framework of CNN’s plans — in real time on the social messaging Web site Twitter.

CNN, a division of Time Warner, invited several dozen newspaper editors to Atlanta last week for a summit about its forthcoming news wire. Gatherings of journalists aren’t usually off-the-record affairs, but CNN probably didn’t expect each segment of the summit to be shared with the Web. Then again, the increasingly popular Twitter, which allows users to share short messages with others, sometimes acts as a wire service as well. (CNN declined to comment.)

Hat tip to Steven at Library Stuff, who referenced this article yesterday.

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It's no secret that these are tough times for the publishing industry. We've been discussing the precarious position of the publishing industry for some time now, and the current economic crisis certainly isn't making things any easier. Meanwhile, new, mostly free Web 2.0 technology is flourishing, its popularity growing at an astonishing rate.

Stephen's Lighthouse has some fantastic coverage of this dynamic, particularly the contrast between the sharp decline in newspaper sales and the recent explosion in the popularity of twitter and other social networking tools. Read More »

A: Users! 

My library designed and unveiled a new website for fall 2008, and one task we haven't yet attempted is gathering organized feedback through direct observation of students, while they use the site. We'll be conducting user assessments early in 2009, so I was delighted to hear Cliff Landis, Technology Librarian at Georgia's Valdosta State University talk about doing just that at Internet Librarian 2008 in October. During his talk, "Creating the User-Centered Library," Cliff talked about the Odum Library's use of surveys, focus groups, and recorded user observations to gather user feedback that they are using to make improvements to their website. User observations may seem intimidating, but Cliff's assertions that only a few volunteers are needed, only a few questions are necessary, and that it doesn't take a ton of time or planning, have me excited that we're gearing up to do our own.

The Fall 2008 report is available from the library's blog. Read More »