Archive for July 2008

From the George Eastman House Collection

Since the early sucess of Flickr’s The Commons pilot project with The Library of Congress in January of this year, several other organizations have joined up to make their photography collections available to the public. These are the latest members of The Commons:

• George Eastman House - Over 200 photographs.
• Powerhouse Museum of Sydney, Australia - 650 images.
• The Smithsonian Institution - 900 photos.
• The Brooklyn Museum - Over 450 images.
• The Bibliothèque de Toulouse - 800 photographs.

via Open Access News

The New York Times covers the latest trend in file-sharing in First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry. Students who are angry about the cost of textbooks are turning not only to used books, but places like PirateBay.org where they can download scanned textbooks for free.

I have actually been looking into this topic for my upcoming course on Libraries and the Open Movement and have come across quite a few projects with Open Source books which have been made free by their copyright holders. If you are a student or a professor about to choose your readings for the fall semester, you may want to consider some of these choices:

• Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign
• Textbook Revolution
• O’Reilly’s Open Books Project
• Open Source Books from the Internet Archive
• Wikibooks
• Global Text Project
• Flat World Knowledge
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources Open Textbooks Project

If you know of any other open source textbook projects, please link to them in the comments!

The LibrarianInBlack puts together some stellar tips for libraries who are contemplating establishing a presence within social networking communities. Each tip is expertly explained to help libraries maximize the power of social networking websites, check out the full story for more on these recommendations:

1. Do your research.
2. Keep your information current.
3. Use a photo of a real live person.
4. Feel free to have an alias.
5. It’s not all about all your friends.
6. Suss it up.
7. Turn on notifications.
8. Have fun!
9. Know no fear.
10. Deleting accounts is okay.

If you’ve been considering implementing social media such as blogs, podcasting, social networking, etc. in your library or organization, you’ll want to check out Chris Brogan’s 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice. He determines fifty activities that you can pursue to help develop a well-rounded social media presence online. Here are his top ten:

1. If you’re blogging, make that a home base for all your other efforts.
2. Re-read the “passports” section of this post and use it to think about your blog promotion efforts.
3. Pick 3 social networks to join based on where your customers might be. 3 might sound like too few, but it probably will be too many.
4. On those networks and on your “passport” accounts, make sure you link everything back to the blog.
5. Get a second (maybe even a 3rd) person in the company to build accounts on these places. Nice to have backups, in case you get busy.
6. Build an editorial calendar to think about your posting schedule and subject matter.
7. Subscribe to 50 or more blogs in a similar space as yours, including competitors, and any industry blogs.
8. On all your presence points, be human, and write a human-sounding profile. Use a human-seeming profile picture. (Did I mention “human?”)
9. After you’ve written your first blog post, take some time to comment on some of those 50 blogs, but NOT about your first post.
10. Set up a few searches as explained in this post.

The Sunday edition of The New York Times presents the first in a series of articles on the Future of Reading: Digital Versus Print titled Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The article looks at what it means to read in the digital age, taking into account the opinions of literacy experts and readers alike.

“Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.”

SourceForge, community hub for open source software, has announced the 2008 Community Choice Awards Winners for best open source projects in a number of categories. Here are the winners:

• Best Project: OpenOffice.org
• Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org
• Best Project for Educators: OpenOffice.org
• Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin
• Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
• Best Project for Gamers: XBMC
• Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
• Best New Project: Magento
• Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation: WINE
• Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models: eMule
• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
• Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++

Christina Laun from the OEDb puts together the The Ultimate RSS Toolset: 100+ Online Apps and Resources. This annotated resource list is categorized into the following sections:

• Readers
• Personalized Homepages
• Browser Extensions
• Blog Tools and Plugins
• RSS Directories
• Mobile Tools
• RSS Email Tools
• Feed Validators
• RSS Feed Editors
• IM RSS Tools
• Miscellaneous Tools

Earlier today Google officially launched Knol which had previously been in beta and invitation-only (see previous coverage). Knol is a collection of authoritative articles, written by a community of experts and a direct competitor to Wikipedia. Knols are written by individuals or teams who are credited for their contributions and can share in the revenue generated from the Google Adsense ads on their subject pages. Readers can rate, review, and comment on knols as well as suggest changes or additions to the content which is subject to the article authors’ approval.

Further coverage:

Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia - ReadWriteWeb

Google’s Wikipedia rival, Knol, goes public - C|Net News

Google Launches Knol, The Monetizable Wikipedia - TechCrunch

Educators have begun finding instructional uses for the Nintendo Wii game system including as a tool to teach conducting at the College of Music, as an interactive whiteboard, and as an engaging way to teach geography, math, and English at the K-12 levels. The latest “7 Things” document from Educause discusses these innovations as well as addresses seven questions:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Pew posted their latest figures concerning blogging and blog readership today. The results are from their spring 2008 tracking survey in which they took two measurements of readership.

In the first measure they asked the present-tense question - “Do you ever read someone else’s online journal or blog?” This question found that 33% of Internet users say they read blogs with 11% doing so on a typical day.

The second measure asked a past-tense question which was - “Have you ever read someone else’s online journal or blog?” This question resulted in 42% of internet users answering affirmatively.

Pew also asked respondents a question about blog creation which found that 12% of Internet users say they “ever create or work on their own online journal or blog”, with 5% doing so daily.

Check out the full post for further insights and demographic information.

A project of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law presents the ins-and-outs of public domain, fair use, and copyright law in an easy-to-understand format. This 70-page, masterfully illustrated and incredibly detailed comic book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and offers free digital versions for download as well as makes individual pages accessible for remixing. If you’re interested in learning more about intellectual property law in an increasingly digitized and mashed-up culture, or you’re on the lookout for instructional materials, you’ll want to check this one out.

Social media guru Chris Brogan creates an inspirational list of 50 Blog Topics Marketers Could Write For Their Companies, and I can definitely see a lot of useful ideas for library bloggers such as:

• The best way to recommend an improvement to our product or service.
• Our favorite projects over the coming months.
• Five tips for getting more from your ______ . (i.e. library, reference department, ILL department, etc.)
• A little bit about us.
• A walk in our neighborhood.
• Giving back to the community: our plan.
• What we worry about over the coming year.
• Can you recommend a better process for this?
• What we think is unique about us. Do you agree?
• Five promises we’ve kept over the last few years.

Thinking about creating a library mashup? Roy Tennant at TechEssence.info puts together a list of useful library-related APIs or Application Programming Interfaces that you may find helpful. Here are a few of his recommendations to get you started.

Library of Congress Subject Headings
WorldCat Search Service
Amazon
Google Book Search API

Check out the article for many more, and please leave your own suggestions in the comments!

Yesterday, the Google Docs online office suite added a gallery of hundreds of templates for use with its applications. Users can now select “From Template” within the “New” menu of choices to access starter templates for documents, presentations, and spreadsheets.

via Web Worker Daily

School Library Journal will be hosting a free Learning 2.0 course hosted by Michael Stephens beginning on Monday, July 21, 2008. Based on the Learning 2.0 23 Things program originally held by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, the program will focus on a new technology each week. By the conclusion of the course, learners will have had experience with:

Blogs
Podcasts
RSS
Wikis
Flickr
Web Toys
Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
Social Networking Sites
Video Sites
Twitter
Tagging
Google Apps

The course is free and open to everyone to participate.