In a Techsource post a couple of months ago, I talked about the hot video games for the Fall and holiday season. This time around, I want to introduce readers to a type of game that they might not be aware of: the Alternate Reality Game, or ARG. ARG's are becoming more and more popular, and libraries need to be aware of them and ready to embrace them. Read more »

There could hardly be a nicer conference location than Monterey, CA in the Fall. The weather is gorgeous, the town is walkable, and there is a plethora of tourist activities ranging from the phenomenal Monterey Aquarium to the local beaches. So to say that I spent my days at Internet Librarian 2008 sitting in hotel conference rooms should give you some idea of the speakers and the programs that Information Today manages to put together every year. Read more »

In the past year or so, there has been considerable discussion here in libraryland about ebook readers. Still, the actual personal ownership of them is still reasonably low. So we don't have a lot of actual user feedback on how people like the devices, what they find useful, and what users really experience when reading on one. I thought I'd make an attempt to remedy that as much as one person on one blog can. Read more »

As we crawl towards the Christmas season, all of the major video game manufacturers are starting to bring out the big guns for the holidays. If your library has embraced gaming as a way of socializing with patrons or drawing people in, what are they likely to be looking forward to this Fall? Or if your library actually checks out games, what's going to be the hot ones for the next 4 months? Here's a few titles to watch out for... Read more »

There are many stories from the 2008 ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, from Google being MIA on the exhibition floor to what happens when a few hundred librarians descend onto Disneyland. But my favorite story from my time in Anaheim starts like this... Read more »

Every year my preparations for going to the ALA Annual conference go through a series of stages. First, the "Oh, I guess I should buy a ticket and find a hotel room" stage, which fades into the "yes, I know it's coming, but there are still weeks to prepare" stage. Then at some point I start getting emails reminding me about this meeting or that meeting, or I see a note somewhere about a program I really don't want to miss, and amidst all this I think "I should start planning my schedule."

Then, about a week before I leave, I actually try to do it.

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Most everyone reading this blog is familiar with Karen G. Schneider. As a recent member of the Techsource team, she has helped us all understand technology a little more clearly. Her new job as Community Librarian for Equinox Software, Inc. involves working to expand library and librarians knowledge about the Open Source ILS, Evergreen.

I was able to track her down, and ask her a few questions about Evergreen, libraries, and the ILS. As always, she never fails to inform. Read more »

I'd like to talk about a style of software that everyone in libraries is definitely familiar with--the massive interconnected hunk of software that does everything. In libraries, that could be the ILS, but what I'm going to talk about today is something that almost everyone is familiar with: the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, let's just take a single piece of the suite: Microsoft Word. Word is easily the most popular word processing program in the US. But as we know from reality television, popular does not always equal good. Is Word the best at performing a specific function? Pick any single writing assignment or a single piece of functionality from Word. Can you think of a way to do it better, or do it differently that makes more sense for your workflow? What if you could swap out just that one activity for a piece that makes it better? Read more »

As the new guy on the TechSource blog, I'm obliged to introduce myself to the readership, in order to try and give everyone some idea of what to expect over the next year from me. Since I don't really know what ideas will float to the surface in the upcoming year, I think the best way to introduce myself is to show you what I've been involved in in the past.

I'm the Head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and have been at UTC for the last 3 years. My research interests include copyright, especially digital issues surrounding copyright law in the U.S.; open source software and its use in libraries; and how technology is changing the educational process in higher education. As you can tell, I tend to focus on technology in one way or another, and I expect that my columns here at Techsource probably will follow that general trend. Read more »