Submitted by Patrick Hogan on June 29, 2012 - 9:25am
In this interview with Ellyssa Kroski, Michael Lascarides, author Next-Gen Library Redesign, notes that next-generation isn’t a checklist. “It’s about positioning yourself to exist in a world where the information landscape is constantly changing,” he says.
Lascarides describes a couple projects from the book. First, starting with the broad, is a methodological approach to looking at your library’s digital presence by taking a full inventory of your Web activities. Moving to the specific, the book describes how to set up and oversee a crowdsourcing project. Examples from the New York Public Library are digitizing maps and transcribing dishes of old restaurant menus into a foods database. "A small set of guidelines can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project," says Lascarides.
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Submitted by Jason Griffey on June 18, 2012 - 9:25am
Once a year, Apple holds its World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the highlight of which for non-developers is the Monday keynote. In prior years, the keynote was the Steve Jobs show, where Steve got to be his most Steve-ish, taking digs at competitors and talking about how awesome things are and will be for Apple over the coming year. This year there is no Jobs, but there was an absolutely deluge of news from the keynote, hosted by CEO Tim Cook and starring the main players in Apple’s current corporate structure.
Practically every news outlet in the world will have a summary of the news coming out of WWDC, so I’m going to focus on the things that I think are important to libraries. Apple had three main announcements: updates to their laptop line, which is their most popular type of computer sold; and what to expect in the two new operating systems launching this year, OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6. Read More »
Submitted by Daniel A. Freeman on June 14, 2012 - 2:17pm
We just wrapped up the ALA TechSource Workshop WordPress Basics: What WordPress can do for Your Library with Polly-Alida Farrington and Amanda Goodman. The slides from the event, which contain some fantastic resources, are posted below.
If you want to go more in-depth with WordPress, go to the ALA Store and learn more about Polly and Amanda’s six-week eCourse, Using WordPress to Build Library Websites. This course gives you the chance to go way-more in-depth and actually build a website!
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Submitted by Patrick Hogan on June 14, 2012 - 9:08am
Series Editor Ellyssa Kroski interviewed Marshall Breeding, author of Cloud Computing for Libraries (11) and noted speaker, writer, and consultant on library technology and the library automation industry.
Note that since the recording of this interview, Marshall resigned his position at Vanderbilt University in order to free up time for what he calls "outside activities" in the interview.
Below the SoundCloud embed are a few highlights from the interview.
2:15 Marshall believes cloud computing is a major transition with "massive implications for libraries."
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Submitted by Patrick Hogan on June 8, 2012 - 10:53am
Amanda Bielskas and Kathleen Dreyer are reference librarians at Columbia University and authors of IM and SMS Reference Services for Libraries, #19 in The TECH SET. They believe that reference through IM and text messaging is not only a service librarians can offer, it's a necessary one. In this brief interview with Ellyssa Kroski, they discuss their inspiration for the book and a few how-to projects covered in the implementation chapter.
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