Submitted by Shirley Lincicum on July 31, 2009 - 11:58am
ALA Publishing staff working on RDA:Resource Description and Access are watching for library innovation building on bibliographic records. Shirley Lincicum has offered some fantastic coverage of a technology that had catalogers excited at this year's annual conference.
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Submitted by Tom Peters on March 16, 2009 - 10:20am
A quick question: What is the opposite of librarianship? What’s the first thing that comes to mind? I can imagine some of you thinking that the Web is the opposite of librarianship. Perhaps for some of you, tagging came to mind because it’s so uncontrolled and messy. Or perhaps Amazon's Kindle is the opposite of librarianship, as it tries to create an instantaneous celestial bookstore. Perhaps some of you wondered what “opposite” means in the context of this question. Maybe the question prompted you to ask in return, “Well, before we search for its opposite, perhaps we should wonder what librarianship itself is.” There’s no correct answer to this pop quiz...it's just food for thought.
As I think about this question myself, I keep coming back to a very tentative thesis that has been forming in my mind over the years. To wit: The rapid development and deployment of information technologies and computerized networks in the past 25 years, coupled with the explosion of information and data, combined with the diffusion of the power to create and disseminate information (blogs, tags, photos, videos, audio recordings, etc.), has created a situation in which the opposites of librarianship are in the ascendant, creating new relationships with librarianship itself. Although that last sentence reads like a dissertation topic, let me try to begin to address it here in a few hundred words, then save the dissertation writing for much, much later. Read More »
Submitted by Daniel A. Freeman on March 2, 2009 - 12:19pm
I was reading this post on Cloud Computing from the TechCrunch blog earlier today. This post includes some video from a recent Cloud Computing event that they held. Watch it and you'll see various experts and industry leaders singing the praises of cloud computing both on its technical merits and on the business innovation they feel it will bring. As this post argues, it all boils down to the fact that "as a term [cloud computing] is broad enough to encompass most internet startups and already is in danger of being latched onto as the next catch-all category". Or, as a representative of a venture capital company declares on the video, "cloud computing is the new dotcom".
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Submitted by Daniel A. Freeman on January 30, 2009 - 2:02am
There has been a lot of talk recently about Google's newest big development, the G Drive. If you haven't heard, the G Drive is a giant, Google driven file storage system that will essentially allow anyone to access a giant hard drive through the web. Rather than worry about transporting your files from your laptop or desktop, you would simply be able to store just about anything you want (with few size limits) on the G drive.
There has been a lot of speculation about this topic, and reporting has been subject to a lot of rumor and hearsay, but Mashable reported today that the idea is getting freakishly close to reality (Hat tip: Lone Wolf Librarian).
If the G drive does become a reality, it could potentially be a transformative development for computing in general, and libraries in particular. Read More »
Submitted by Jason Griffey on December 22, 2008 - 11:03am
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 »
Submitted by Tom Peters on November 12, 2008 - 8:21am
Second Life is good for a lot of things. Professional networking is one of them. I have met and worked with so many librarians in Second Life that I probably never would have met if I had confined my professional activities to real life.
A few months ago I met Plautia Corvale, the avatar of Victoria Petersen, the Technology Manager of the Mancos Public Library in Colorado. We are, along with several other librarian-avatars, in the process of constructing Emerald City, an island in Second Life devoted to helping libraries and library-related organizations to become more environmentally friendly, and to serve as strong community resources on this topic.
Victoria just returned from the annual conference of the Colorado Association of Libraries with the exciting news that CAL has formed a Second Life Interest Group and is an official sponsor of the Sustainable Living Library on Emerald City in Second Life.
I've never been to Mancos, but I've visited Durango a couple of times. The Durango Public Library has build a new green building, which will open on December 1st. Evidently, southwestern Colorado is a hotbed of green librarianship! Recently I asked Plautia about some of the nitty gritty aspects of the process of building a green library.
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Submitted by Jason Griffey on October 29, 2008 - 9:24pm
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 »
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