Tableless CSS

One of the newer emerging web technologies is the use of CSS to separate design from content on websites so in the spirit of adopting newer technologies, I converted a webpage to tableless. It was a long arduous process that involved manual coding with notepad, no Frontpage or Dreamweaver to help out. But thanks to sites such as A List Apart, I was able to simply edit existing templates. So check out my tableless webpage at Reading Suggestions.

Drowning in a sea of Web 2.0 sites

The number of Web 2.0 websites seems endless. After just signing up on Facebook, I learn about 3 more new social websites: Hulu, StumbleUpon, Pandora, and get reminded of a few that I forgot all about Digg and Lastfm. Many of these sites I have set up accounts and forgot all about them. Some like Picasa and Delicious I find quite useful for building better websites. In particular, Picasa has a handy slideshow feature for integrating cool slideshows in your website without having to learn any complicated code. Facebook is useful that it imports many of my Web 2.0 accounts into one place, the downside is that users have to sign up for a Facebook account to view my imported Web 2.0 profile.

More about Web 2.0

Besides the social interactivity of Web 2.0 websites, it is also a web graphic design revolution. In the mid to early 2000s the hottest websites had a lot of flash animation and super small tiny text. The emphasis was on graphics rather than content. It resulted in hard to read and hard to navigate sites. Usability was sacrificed for cool looking design. Web 2.0 design is a return to larger text and more obvious navigation, along with a lot of shiny, bold, and colorful graphics.

Check out Web Design from Scratch for an explanation of Web 2.0 design and Web 2.0 Generators for easy graphics for non-Photoshop experts.

Library Catalogs 2.0

First, let's define the whole Web 2.0 term. "SOFTWARE WHICH ENABLES MASS PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL ACTIVITIES" is a term I lifted from Eli Edward's presentation which I'm sure she lifted from somewhere else. Basically, it's a website or web-based software that allows you to interact with people. Prior to that were static web pages, and one couldn't comment or interact with the content. Nowadays, there's blogs and wikis where you can comment - sort of like a giant message board.

The Library world has been quick to promote Web 2.0 and one of the results is an interactive Library Catalog where patrons can rate books, leave reviews, and make comments to make it more Amazon-like, which is the epitome of catalog 2.0. Some products our library has looked at were LibraryThing, BiblioCommons, and Chilifresh. They all required subscription fees, but the main roadblock to implementation was concern of spam, inappropriate reviews, and lack of staff time to moderate. A new social OPAC product is the "free" Sopac 2.0, recently implemented at Darien Library. It will be interesting to see how well this product is developed and if our management decides to take the plunge into opening our catalog up for public interactivity.

California Library Association CLA conference Nov 2008

Web 2.0 Workshops
Infopeople posted all their handouts at http://infopeople.org/cla/2008 where there were handy mini-lectures on CSS web design, Jing, Flickr vs. Picasa and how to create an avatar. There were a few new websites I wasn't aware of. One workshop introduced a new term to me called Microblogging - a fancy term for sites like twitter, jaiku, plurk, pownce, present.ly, yammer which are short one line blog sites that tell people where you are and what you're up to. It could be handy for an in/out board type service. There was discussion of blogs and wikis. One free online wiki site is wetpaint.com. I also went to a workshop on virtual reference for libraries using instant messaging sites like meebo, qwidget, plugoo. There was dicussion of the paid reference sites like Live Person and Tutor.com. There was also the SecondLife site which really is more useful to academic libraries rather than public libraries.


Free Audiobooks
I went to a workshop that discussed how libraries could implement low budget audiobooks as there are a number of free audiobook sites but the selection is limited to mainly classics which are public domain material and sound quality may not be good. Project Gutenberg has the best index of the free audiobooks. I went to a podcasting class by San Diego County Public Library and the best recorder for podcasting was the Samson H4 Zoom portable recorder.

Privacy

I attended several workshops about privacy concerns, one by Eli Edwards about Privacy Concerns of Social Networking where she brought up interesting controversies liked the Linked In site which is like a Myspace for business people where the site tells you and your business contacts if you've changed jobs, who has looked you up, etc. She also mentioned how teenagers are less concerned with privacy yet are shocked when their parents, teachers, employeers look up their info on MySpace. She talked about how Facebook had partnered with Beacon and for a time was tracking people's online shopping habits with cookies and notifying their Facebook friends what they had been looking at online. People couldn't turn off the notifications and had to send in signed written letter to cancel their Facebook accounts.

Patron Data

Another privacy workshop I went to dealt with the privacy of patron information and how San Francisco Public Library went through a long audit process and adopted a privacy policy. They brought up some interesting points on how long a library should retain patron data and the privacy of Internet search history. They pointed out how Google was able to predict a flu outbreak faster than the CDC based on search activity.

Master Speakers

Attended 3 master speakers sessions and the most interesting and informative was by Daniel Pink author of Johnny Bunko and A Whole New Mind. He discussed the reasons why jobs were being outsourced and succintly attributed it to 3 A's: Asia, Automation, and Abundance. He went on to predict that the jobs of future would involve Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. The other 2 speaker sessions included the husband & wife writer team Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman who were entertaining but not really teaching anything. The 3rd speaker I saw was actress Adrienne Barbeau who again was entertaining but I didn't learn anything new other than her life story.

SirsiDynix Southern Ca User's Group 2007

SirsiDynix Southern California's User Group Meeting - Newport Beach Library on 5/17/2007.

Stephen Abram, Vice President of Innovation at SirsiDynix gave an informative presentation about the future of technology in libraries. He repeated much of what had been said at CLA and Internet Librarian conferences - that social networking was the biggest thing of the moment. He mentioned Portal technology JSR168, RSS Feeds, Open URL, GPS, Beebo, Library 20.ning.com, Second Life, My Safe Space, Techlife 14, Library Thing, Mozes, Now Public. He stated that for every $ 1 dollar invested in the library that there are $ 6 dollars returned on the investment.

Jeane Spala, West Coast Sales Manager spoke next and gave the users' group a sneak preview of Rome. It looks like it will be based on Sirsi's Unicorn Works product and Horizon 8.0 is being scrapped. They hope to put some support in the new Rome product for Horizon clients but most of the software will likely be based in Unicorn. One drawback of the Unicorn product is that it doesn't allow customization of user screens like Horizon does.

come Playaway, come Playaway, come Playaway with me...

The HBPL Media Center is now offering a new type of audio book called a Playaway. These are audio books in the form of a portable mp3 player device. The device plays only the prerecorded book and no mp3 files can be added. Each time someone checks out the Playaway, library staff insert a new battery and the device goes out for 3 weeks. The patron has to supply his/her own earphones or they can buy some from the Media Center.

California Library Association Conference 2006

CLA Conference Summary

The California Library Association conference had fewer technology workshops than Internet Librarian, yet had more wide-ranging information on budgeting, children's programming, literacy, and management.

My report reflects only a small portion of the conference since I focused on the technology seminars. Much like Internet Librarian, social software was discussed. As libraries struggle to appeal to tech savy teens and kids, one of the out reach efforts was done by building a virtual library in the Second Life video game. The creators of Second Life call it a "3D environment," but it's essentially a downloadable video game with a virtual library in it.

Other ways for libraries to capture the youth market is to create a MySpace or Facebook account and interact with teens via blogging. Creating instant messaging accounts at Yahoo!, MSN, Google, AOL and consolidating them at www.meebo.com was advised to provide patrons with instant message access to librarians.

A representative from Medlineplus.gov was at the exhibits and said that Medline is a FREE online database that has a wealth of information pertaining to health.


NextTen.org is also another non-profit organization that provides FREE information about the California State budget and statistics at their website.


Some speaker weblogs from the conference are at:

http://www.tametheweb.com/
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/

Internet Librarian Conference 2006

Internet Librarian Conference Summary
Reality TV bleeds over to the Internet

Similar to reality TV shows, audience participation is now all the rage on the Internet. The conference was buzzing about social software. Social software are websites that allow public interactivity like blog postings, myspace, flickr, youtube etc. They are all part of the Web 2.0 concept which allow the public to participate in creating web page content like the Wikipedia. A lot of Web 2.0 is built using AJAX technolgy which is a form of Javascript. Library 2.0 is simply making your library site more interactive for the public.

Some Web 2.0 sites mentioned were:

www.librarything.com - Lay people can catalog their own books
www.last.fm - Rate your favorite music and find others who share your taste
www.liveplasma.com - Aquabrowser-like search of connected musicians and bands
http://del.icio.us - Share your bookmarks with people

Mashups were also mentioned. The term was taken from the music industry when several different tracks from songs were thrown together. Mashups take data from different sites and combine them to create a new site. An example is http://www.housingmaps.com which combines data from Google Maps and Craigslist real estate listings to provide maps of real estate. Another mashup is http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm which color codes news stories to see how much world news is being reported vs. nation, business, sports news. You can easily create your own mashup at the www.suprglu.com website.

Search Engines and Websites

A mainstay of the conference has always been a review of hot search engines. Ask.com, formerly known as askjeeves.com was highly touted. Microsoft's version of Google is www.live.com.

Here's a list of other search engine alternatives to Google:

www.exalead.com
www.clusty.com
www.gigablast.com
www.furl.com
www.twingine.com - Shows Google and Yahoo results side-by-side
www.searchforvideo.com - Finds videos from many sites including youtube
www.northernlight.com - Reinvented itself as business search
www.kosmix.com - Category search Health, etc.
www.zillow.com - Real estate MLS for non-real estate agents
www.rollyo.com - Search engine for blogs
www.technorati.com - Search engine for blogs

Some Websites from the Conference and Speakers

http://www.infotodayblog.com/ - Conference blog
http://library2.usask.ca/~fichter/ - Darlene Fichter's site
http://www.freepint.com/gary/bestofresourceshelf06.html - Gary Price's search resource
http://searchengineshowdown.com - Greg Notess' site
http://battellemedia.com/ - John Battelle's Searchblog
http://www.librarystuff.net/2006/01/library-20-questions-and-commentary.html - Article on Library 2.0
http://www.batesinfo.com Mary Ellen Bates' Search Engine Tips