May 2, 2008
“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”
The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries.
I’m so there.
April 27, 2008
Michael Stephens tagged me for a pretty cool meme. Here’s the deal:
Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
Original image here.
This is an image I used in a guest lecture at an LIS class last Fall. The point? Challenge the status quo; switch up your focus and make sure you look at things from a different angle. If you ever find yourself saying the words, “we’ve always done it this way”, that’s your queue to step back, take a deep breath, and change your focus. It’s something I try to impart to my LIS students, but when I was prepping for that guest lecture (which was for Reference class) last Fall, I realized that it’s an approach that really can be applied to any situation — whether it’s an interaction at a reference desk, a website redesign project, an LIS course, whatever.
Thanks for the tag, Michael! And while I’m not much of a meme-tagger myself, this time I’d love to hear from Jason Griffey, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Ryan Deschamps, Chad Boeninger, and Michael Porter. And anyone else who’d like to play, too!
April 22, 2008
Anyone remember Stikipad, the free, hosted wiki solution? Yeah, I did too. Well, guess what? They upped and disappeared.
Yes, this probably happens in the land of web 2.0 all the time, but here’s the rub: the Emerging Technologies Group at MPOW used Stikipad as our documentation wiki and I did that thing I always warn people not to do when using free online tools: I didn’t back things up. It looked like things were going downhill for them some time ago, but as it happens, I didn’t have need to check out old meeting minutes for months, and when I tried to access them recently, I was rudely confronted with a DNS error page. And, no, I didn’t receive a single heads-up message from them warning of their imminent closure.
So, the moral of the story? Back. Things. Up.
Updated later: thanks to David for pointing out that Stikipad seems to be back (if you’re still seeing the DNS error, give it a bit to propagate). Guess who’s moving her data?
April 18, 2008
 Wee announcement at MPOW today about a new service we’re rolling out called the 2.0 Toolbox. It’s a suite of 2.0 tools we’re hosting for faculty which, at the moment, consists of installed blogs (using WordPress MU) and wikis (using PmWiki).
As you probably know, WordPress MU is a multi-user blogging environment (hence the “MU”) that allows users to set up their own blogs with a couple of clicks. It’s pretty sweet overall, but we’ve had our fair share of tussles over getting the admin end to work over SSL (thanks to Kevin Gilbertson at Wake Forest and Karen Coombs for putting up with my numerous questions and sharing their code! And to my super-patient colleague, John Fink, for being a troubleshooting superhero). PmWiki, on the other hand, has been nothing but golden, from an administrative perspective. Installation took all of 6 minutes and configuring the installation as a “wiki farm” took another 3 minutes.
The deal with PmWiki is that data is stored in html files (not databased), which is probably why administration is so lightweight. I’m trying to steer clear of local configurations on a per-wiki basis to keep upgrades streamlined, but we’ll see how long I can stay that course. The only real drawback with PmWiki is the lack of native support for wysiwyg editors like FCKeditor and TinyMCE. Strict adherence to wiki markup is actually part of the PmWiki “philosophy”, which means no one should be holding their breath for that native support. The wiki purist in me gets that wiki markup is way more flexible, but the part of me that has to support faculty use of wikis is a little worried. Looks to me like some attempts have been made to integrate a wysiwyg editor, but those attempts do not look altogether successful. It’s certainly something I’ll continue to fiddle with and I’ve got a keen ear tuned to the developers’ list for any wysiwyg chatter.
Overall, it’s been a fun project to work on and I’m glad it’s out there and ready for action. Project updates right here as progress warrants!
April 14, 2008
CiL2008 was terrific. As many of my blogging compatriots have admitted, there wasn’t a lot that was brand, spanking new (to me) at the conference, but what was (and always is) new and exciting are the people who bring the interesting ideas to the party. And I met a lot of those people at CiL this year — people who presented about neat, new ways they are making use of 2.0 technologies in their libraries, attendees who are planning to use those technologies in different & brilliant ways, and all my amazing CiL/IL colleagues, who I also happily call friends, from whom I always learn something new during all those conversations between sessions and (ahem) beers.
Due to a lingering cold and just being generally worn down (and maybe, just maybe, some of those aforementioned beers), I didn’t get to as many sessions this year as I would have liked, so I don’t have a well fleshed-out play-by-play or hit/miss list, but both have been amply covered elsewhere anyway. The perfect summation in my book? “It’s like Candyland only nerdier!”. Indeed.
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