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Financial Aid
Monday, March 19th, 2012
Lewis Howes at Copyblogger offers advice for How to Use Webinars to Create Great Relationships with Prospects and Customers. Most libraries have begun offering video webcasts and video tutorials, here’s a primer on how to use live video events to better engage patrons.
Friday, March 16th, 2012
Eric S. Riley, Branch Manager of the Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Neighborhood Library creates a list of Ten Things I Didn’t Learn in Library School at Letters to a Young Librarian. This is a great, and honest list of things that do exist in many libraries. Here are the first five points discussed:
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
Rick Thomchick writes for Tame the Web about Pinterest and the New Meaning of Curation.
“I have read quite a bit lately about the concept of social curation and sites such as Pinterest, a “virtual pinboard” for organizing and sharing images. ”Curation” is very much the nom en vogue these days for a number of disparate activities, and I imagine many librarians roll their eyes when they see this term used to describe RSS news aggregators, search filters and even brand strategy. Nevertheless, the rise of Pinterest has been nothing short of meteoric, and even Syracuse University’s iSchool is getting into the act, so I decided to try out the site and see for myself just how “curative” it really is.The first thing to know about Pinterest is that it is currently by invitation only, at least for now. You can be invited by another user, or submit an invitation request (I submitted a request and was granted an invitation 3-4 days later). Once you’ve signed up and logged in, using the site is relatively straightforward. Simply find an image you like on the Web or your own computer, and “pin” it:”
Friday, March 9th, 2012
Bobbi Newman at Librarian by Day asks: Should Libraries Get Out of the eBook Business? This is an excellent post about libraries and the current state of ebooks.
“I know what you are going to say, I can hear it already – “We can’t! Our patrons demand ebooks!” Except the truth is our patrons want a lot of things we can’t give them – to always be first on the waiting list for the new James Patterson, to not pay fines when their books are late, for the library to be open earlier or later, or to have a system besides Dewey because despite using it their entire lives they still cannot figure it out. When it comes to ebooks, we cannot give them what they want, not really, we cannot give them books from Simon and Schuster or MacMillian or new books from Penguin or Hatchet, and not more than 26 times from HarperCollins, and probably not many books from Random House. What we can do, what maybe we should do, is spend their tax money wisely, and I am no longer convinced that spending it on the current ebook system is a wise move.”
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
Sally Pewhairangi at Finding Heroes suggests 20 Everyday Ways To Escape The Library Echo Chamber. This excellent list goes beyond writing and contributing to discussions about libraries and recommends practical ways to find out what’s happening outside libraries and how that can benefit your organization. Here are just five suggestions.
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
If you’re fed up with your eBook package and are looking for other ways to put your library’s budget to good use, you’ll want to check out Andy W’s Alternative Uses for the Pesky eBook Budget at Agnostic Maybe. He suggests five ways to spend that money. Here are the recommendations discussed.
Monday, March 5th, 2012
There were an amazing 395 responses to last week’s poll question: Which new technology(ies) do you think will have the most impact on libraries over the next 2-5 years? e-Books, mobile, and cloud computing technologies dominated the responses. Here are the results:
e-Books: 79 votes, 20%
Mobile Apps: 68 votes, 17.22%
Cloud Computing: 60 votes, 15.19%
Semantic Web: 31 votes, 7.85%
Social Publishing Applications (blogs, wikis, Twitter, YouTube): 30 votes, 7.59%
RFID: 25 votes, 6.33%
Social Networking Applications (Facebook): 23 votes, 5.82%
Augmented Reality Apps: 19 votes, 4.81%
QR Codes: 18 votes, 4.56%
Social Bookmarking (Pinterest): 18 votes, 4.56%
Location-Aware Technology (Foursquare): 12 votes, 3.04%
Other: 12 votes, 3.04%
And here are the results of the “Other” category
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
After looking at Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies predictions for the past couple of years, I wondered what librarians thought were going to be significant technologies for our field over the next 2-5 years. So I created a poll! Please choose as many as you think are relevant:
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
Charles Hamaker, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Technical Services at Atkins Library, University of North Carolina–Charlotte writes for Searcher Magazine about Ebooks on Fire: Controversies Surrounding Ebooks in Libraries. This is a thought-provoking article on the pressing issue of e-books in the library realm:
“Ubiquitous web and print ads tell individuals and libraries to “buy” ebooks. But long-term preservation and retention rights to stable content are not the norm, because many resellers and vendors don’t possess those rights from the publisher or author. Instead of true ownership, most ebook “purchases” are more like leases, and leases with few residual rights at that. The only way to assure continuing access and storage for an ebook is a permanent download to a device with rights not governed by strict DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems. With content delivered from a hosted service on the web (aka the cloud), the “purchaser” has no control over the content. Even Google Books bears the disclaimer:
[I]f Google or the applicable copyright holder loses the rights to provide you any Digital Content, Google will cease serving such Digital Content to you and you may lose the ability to use such Digital Content.”
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
Marcus Sheridan at the Social Median Examiner comes up with 5 Ways to Get Your Entire Company On Board With Social Media. All of these suggestions would also apply to getting library staff invested in social media. Here are the recommendations discussed:
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
It’s Social Media Week here in NYC and I’ve been lucky enough to attend several sessions that are a part of this cutting-edge conference. On Monday the New York Public Library hosted a session titled Making Collections Possible Through Collaboration during which they discussed 3 exciting digital projects undertaken by NYPL Labs, each involving collaboration with users.
GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator
The NYPL’s Stereogranimator lets users create and share animated GIFs and 3D anaglyphs using more than 40,000 stereographs. Users can browse through the NYPL’s collection of dual photos and then combine them to make a 3D image. This project was inspired by Joshua Heineman’s project that he started four years ago. The San Francisco-based artist was using the NYPL’s collection of stereographs to create animated gif images for his Cursive Buildings site. His project went viral and the Library took notice and began collaborating with him to create the Stereogranimator.
The NYPL’s menu collection includes over 40,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present. In order to be able to search the menus by dish, price, etc., they are transcribing the menus, dish by dish with the help of their users. The What’s on the Menu project has had over 782,059 dishes transcribed from 12,426 menus. Users can share menus via Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media website. All of the data is openly available in zipped format for export, and the NYPL plans an API for release shortly. They are considering incorporating their historic playbill collection, and plan on mashing this application up with their Map Warper.
The NYPL’s Map Warper is an application for digitally aligning (“rectifying”) historical maps from their collections with today’s maps to create a brand new version. This allows for comparative, spatial history. Users can view the maps which have been rectified or warped already, or they can help the NYPL align other maps. The NYPL map collection consists of over 433,000 maps and 24,000 books and atlases. They have been digitizing this collection over the past 12 years and have digitized 15,000 maps, 10,000 of which are NYC maps. They will be making the software package openly available for other libraries to use. To date, they have 1600 collaborators who are helping rectify maps on NYPL’s site.
Monday, February 13th, 2012
The iLibrarian Personal Digital Archiving series of posts was based on a 3-hour hands-on workshop I give on the topic. Here’s a wrap up of all 8 articles as well as some recommended resources that I found exceptionally helpful in putting together the session.
Sunday, February 12th, 2012
Jennifer Amanda Jones at the Social Media Examiner offers 10 Tips for Creating a Social Media Policy for Your Business, each of which could be implemented by libraries. It’s becoming increasingly important for libraries and other organizations to create effective social media policies that protect, guide, and empower staff. This article provides helpful tips to do just that:
Saturday, February 11th, 2012
Bobbi Newman at Librarian by Day offers advice about How to Talk to Your Patrons About Penguin & Other Publishers Not Loaning eBooks to Libraries. This helpful post provides a suggested script for discussing ebooks with patrons, contact info for publishers, and plenty of resources on the topic.
Friday, February 10th, 2012
This post is a follow-up to an earlier post titled 5 Ways to Use Pinterest in Your Library. Since it was so popular I decided to continue with 5 more suggestions for using this hot new social site for your library.
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Since Pinterest supports sharing YouTube videos, the library could create boards highlighting tutorials, webcasts, and instructional videos for researching different subject areas, using specialized databases, or navigating the library website.
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Are you trying to spread the word about your new e-books program? Create a Pinterest board highlighting new and popular e-books. You can even specify which devices each e-book is compatible with and pin video tutorials for uploading to patrons’ eReaders.
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Create a Pinterest board with an annotated photo tour of your library. Show off your new renovation, computer lab, or children’s area through pins. If you’re feeling adventurous, download the mobile app and take the photos with your iPhone and add location information to them.
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Use Pinterest to let patrons know about exciting upcoming events, workshops, and classes at your library. You might even create boards with photos of past events as well.
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The visual display of Pinterest’s boards offers an excellent opportunity for libraries to showcase their special collections. Create boards of interesting manuscripts, exhibits, and image collections.
Bonus Suggestion:
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Pinterest can be used to save ideas for later use, like other social bookmarking applications. Create a space where librarians can pin fun and interesting ideas for library programs, events, and services.
