Want to put things like RSS feeds, Flickr photos, music, chat, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and other stuff into your website? Check out this post from Digital Inspiration: How to Embed Almost Anything in Your Website. This kind of question comes in to me a lot, and I now have a copy and paste answer source 
Hurrah for other people doing work and sharing it! If you want to make your website sparkly to make it look like you are "all 2.0" (as some librarians describe it to me), then this post will help you on your way.
If your library answers in-person patrons before IM patrons…
If your library tells email reference customers they have to wait any more than 1 hour for an answer…
If your library pushes people to use analog reference services instead of digital ones…
If your library treats digital customers like second-class citizens…
READ THIS.
Thank you, DLK, for a good kick in the pants for this profession.
A site I was introduced to by our local police department has me excited: CrimeReports.com. You can look at a map that shows crimes of various kinds in any area you choose – a city, county, etc. You can specify a time period as well, if you're looking for something specific. You can sort in different ways, limit by crime type, etc. Lots of bells and whistles, and great information, including what time the crime occurred, exactly what type of crime, where, and how far from your point of origin (e.g. house). You can also sign up for email alerts for crimes in your area. The data is provided by law enforcement agencies and in most locations is updated daily. See below for traffic accidents during a 2 week period in December in downtown San Rafael.
I think that many library users would be interested in learning about a site like this – a good one to promote on your library blog, with a sign at the information desk, or with a little promotional ad on your homepage.
The Audiobook Blog posted on an interesting new service available for a few books, on a few devices, from a few places: text-synchronized audiobooks. Basically, you listen to the book as text scrolls by. Think of it as closed-captioning for eAudioBooks. Librivox community folks have been discussing different methods for adding text to audio, Tantor Media has eAudioBooks (on CD or MP3 discs) with the entire book as a PDF too. And a new iPhone app, the iClassix, offers scrolling text synched up with public domain eAudioBooks (that run $0.99 at iTunes). It seems that a lot of different minds are on the same wavelength right now. Check out the Audiobook Blog post for more details and links.
This should be of interest to libraries because we are required to provide accessible resources and services, and legally we're all bound to caption our podcasts and videocasts (if you didn't know that, you probably should talk to your legal department). This kind of service would be a great way of making those eAudioBooks accessible to anybody and everybody. Lots of times a title is only released as an eBook in PDF, or as an eAudioBook. That can frustrate users with sight or hearing disabilities who want an eCopy of that particular title. Keep an eye on this area–I see huge growth potential.
If you have not yet heard or looked at the D.C. Public Library's iPhone application, you're in for a treat. Aaron Schmidt worked on this and has posted about the application and process on his blog, walking paper. They have also created a feedback form asking for thoughts on the app, so feel free to leave them a note. This is the first iPhone application designed by a library, so my hearty congratulations go out to DCPL and Aaron. Great work in pushing that lovely, bleeding edge.
American Libraries, the print publication you get as an ALA member, now has a Digital Supplement. The first one was published today and it looks good. It's being hosted on ZMags, a souped up PDF viewer webpage you access in your web browser. It looks just like an American Libraries issue, and the page-turning feature even makes it look like the pages are turning. As with all on-screen reading, I'd prefer to do it on paper if I could (which you can – easy to print – and yes, I know it's not green, but I do use scratch paper to print it if that makes you feel better). You can also search the publication, a nice added-bonus that we also found was a huge plus for eBooks. At a time when people are asking more from ALA for their membership dollars, it's nice to see them getting into e-publishing in a way that seems to work pretty well, at least for me.
LibWorld – Library Blogs Worldwide is now available as a book (free download or $16.96 printed version via lulu.com). The content is from the Infobib LibWorld project, a long-term project seeking contributions from dozens of countries (they're still looking for contributors for many countries – if you blog in an unrepresented country, please consider contributing an essay). I contributed the United States section (which is the most recent one done for the project and was impossible to write – how do you sum up the U.S. biblioblogosphere in just a few paragraphs?). Overall, the project is a really interesting look at how the library blogs across the world are more similar than one might think and how we're all working toward the same goal – ultimate information access.
Lifehacker's Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2008 include several items that I already use, and a couple of ones that were interesting enough to warrant a download: Free PDF to Word Doc Converter and CCleaner (cleans up junk files and registry issues). I'm also going to try DExposE2 (which creates that awesome-looking windows interaction interface like Mac OSX's) at home to see if I am swayed into Mac-love.Take a look and see what new programs you want to add!
If you have not yet heard, OCLC has made some people in the library community really upset with their revised “Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records.” This drama has been going on for two months now, even rubbing enough people the wrong way to appear as an American Libraries news article. One major problem is that the policy's development was not open or transparent, immediately drawing much attention to the resulting policy. The main two complaints about the policy itself are that a "reasonable use" clause in the policy is interpreted by most as unfairly and unreasonably restricting members' rights to use records including those that are self-created. There is also a new recommended (but not yet firmly policy) WorldCat Record Use Form which is another impediment to open record use. OCLC has created two revisions of the policy at this point, which are outlined in detail on a Code4Lib wiki page.
The Code4Lib wiki page also includes links to a petition asking OCLC to repeal the policy and a second, and separate, more specific and in-depth petition asking OCLC to vacate the policy and start anew with more openess and other requests. I stand in solidarity with the petition-writers, with the many bloggers who have spoken out against this (who are listed on the Code4Lib wiki page) in asking OCLC to rethink its policy and policy process
All California residents can now sign up for a San Francisco Public
Library eCard via their online application (also available in Spanish and Chinese). The eCards are allow immediate access to all of SFPL's databases, eBooks, and other virtual content. Users would have to visit a physical SFPL library to pick up a "real" full-service card to check out materials. They offer an FAQ about eCards with more information.
More and more libraries are following this dual model of eCards and "full-service" cards. SFPL has a host of awesome databases (where do they get the money for all of these?) so California residents just got a huge boon. If your library in California is short on databases, point your users to SFPL's service. Don't feel badly – it's not about the inadequacy of your own collection (which many libraries freely admit). Budget times are tough, after all. What it's about is expanding your users' access to more materials, and showing them the sharing and cooperation-oriented nature of libraries. Let's face it. Users don't care where they get the stuff online, as long as they get it.
Thank you SFPL for providing access to your wonderful, wonderful resources. I already have an SFPL card (a "full service" card, thank you very much), but if I didn't, I'd be all over this offer.
Recent Comments: