Tag Archives: Tech

Gettin Smart, the BlackBerry Way

22 Feb

Yes, I know it is so five years ago, but my foray into smartphone ownership does not involve an iPhone or an Android.  This winter I got my very first BlackBerry.

FergieThis Christmas Eve, our beloved hellion Fergie knocked my cellphone into the bathtub with her paw. We took it apart and tried to dry the phone out overnight, but the red water detector of death had already cast its shadow over my poor Samsung.  Luckily, we were able to salvage the SIM card and transfer it to a family member’s unused BlackBerry EDGE 8900.  Anyone who’s ever tried to transfer data to a used cellphone probably knows that it can be tricky to wipe everything out and start fresh — but after lots of googling and finessery, we eventually got it synced with my gmail, Facebook and Twitter.

After about half an hour, AT&T texted me to let me know that they’d added a data package to my monthly cellphone bill.  I thought it was a little sketchy that they just signed me up, but at least I was notified, right?  The main reason I’ve avoided smartphones in the past is because of the high data costs.  But I was pleased to find that I could actually scale back my text plan (which I don’t use very much anymore) and pay only $10 more per month than I’d already been paying when all was said and done.  Pretty affordable!

So far, the BlackBerry apps that I’ve downloaded work really great.  Continue reading →

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1973 Archives: “The Frightening Computer Trend”

11 Feb

Dave Unplugs HAL

Yesterday as I was scavenging historical tidbits to share via my library’s #todayinhistory Twitter feed, I came across this treasure from the August 23, 1973 edition of the Lawrence Journal-World.  I’m fascinated that this satirical piece was published long before the Internet (and especially social networks) were widespread.  Viva technophobia!

To help put this in context: just five years earlier, in 1968, Stanley Kubrick had debuted “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which the computer HAL takes on an eerily human personality.  In 1970, both the VCR and dot matrix printer were introduced, bringing more tangible, enduring qualities to personal technology.  Then, in 1971, IBM introduced the first speech-recognition software (with a vocabulary of 5000 words), and the first synthesized computer voice was also demoed.  And finally, in 1972, the floodgates burst when Atari released Pong.

Yet none of this explains the article’s bizarre fixation with marital infidelity.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present:

EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW?: THE FRIGHTENING COMPUTER TREND
by Art Buchwald

WASHINGTON – Somewhere in this great land of ours there is a computer stashed full of information on you.  Whenever you want a bank loan, a credit card or a job, this computer will, in a matter of seconds, give some total stranger almost every detail of your life. Continue reading →

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Ebook Lending Is a Drag, But Let’s Talk About It.

8 Feb

Grumpy Cat

I can get pretty grumpy (kind of like this cat in a googly-eyed hat) when I think about public libraries and ebook lending.  Our three biggest challenges remain: software interfaces that are too hard to use; steep vendor prices that put a huge strain on library budgets; and limited availability, including no ebooks for Kindle!! But I still believe that libraries can build a better solution.

Last Friday, Sharon Moreland from the NEKLS library system came to our library to talk to us about just that — the future of ebooks in libraries.  Her recent blog post sums up many of the current issues and challenges, and I recommend hopping over there if you want to understand them better!  In the meantime, I want to chronicle a few additional thoughts as part of my ongoing meditation on the issue.

  • Librarians seem eternally optimistic that our vendors will fix the issues we don’t like.  For instance, we wish ebook vendors would create a seamless, user-friendly interface, and eliminate “wait lists” for digital items.  But we have to face that vendors are not going to invest in product development unless there is monetary incentive.  And right now, we have too few ebook vendors to choose from, so they’re able to offer the bare minimum without losing library subscriptions. Continue reading →

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Curating Local Twitter Lists for Your Library

4 Feb

List Me, BabyMy public library’s Twitter account has over 1800 followers.  1800!  This fall, a handful of us sat down to brainstorm how to get the most out of our amazing following.

In the end, we came up with three big goals.  First was to pare down the number of Tweeters we were following back, in order to focus on core users and really zero in on newsworthy happenings in our community.  Second, we came up with some key themes or “series” of tweets that we thought would appeal to our network, such as a “new to the collection” series and a “#todayinhistory” series.  And third, we set out to curate public Twitter lists that anyone in our community could subscribe to.

Ever since we began curating these lists, I get more and more excited about their potential every day.  I love that they’re so community oriented, which I believe really builds goodwill and adds an invaluable service that not many other local organizations are situated to offer.  We’re aggregating lists of individuals who have put themselves and their work out there via Twitter, thus leveraging our position in the community to help them be discovered by others who might have an interest in their work.  Some of our local lists include Lawrence Arts, Lawrence Techies, Lawrence Businesses, Lawrence Events, Lawrence Athletics, and Lawrence Bloggers.

My favorite of all these lists is Lawrence Bloggers!  Where else can you go to find a list of local bloggers??  To curate this list, we combed through all of our local followers and identified those who listed a URL in their bio (seriously, we went through 1800).  Continue reading →

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Everyone Let’s Get Social

26 Jan

Having just attended a workshop where we talked about social bookmarking and tagging, I thought this would be an opportune time to tell you all about a fun project I worked on early last winter!  Two fellow students and I had been tasked with proposing a “digital information resource” — yep, pretty broad!!!  But our group had a strong interest in teen librarianship, and I was riding high on Andrea Lunsford’s Stanford Study of Writing, New Literacy, Content Creation, blah blah blah, and so we easily decided to propose an interactive, social catalog for teens.

Reading Rants Home

If you don’t know much about social cataloging, don’t worry — it’s a phenomenon that’s been gaining momentum over the past few years, and you can read all about the theory and the nuts & bolts behind it in our paper if you’re interested.  Continue reading →

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Web 2.0 or: RSS, Where Have You Been All My Life?

20 Jan

MissouriYou know it’s going to be a great workshop when you’re given a paper-bag stuffed full of chocolate as you walk through the door!  This Tuesday morning I drove an hour to Independence, Missouri, to attend a KCMLIN workshop called “Web 2.0 in Your Library: Web Applications that Facilitate Interactive Information Sharing.”  Beth Willis, Public Relations & Marketing Coordinator at Mid-Continent Public Library, taught the all-day workshop.

As promised, the workshop offered a “sampler” of several oft-used web tools: WordPress, Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, RSS.  I’m already using most of these tools in my personal and professional life, but I think it can be enlightening to view them through someone else’s eyes.  I’ll share some of the new tips and tricks I picked up with you below, but first I have to take a moment to gush about Beth’s teaching style!

This workshop was especially useful in terms of thinking about how to teach this content to others.  As a technology instructor at my own library, I will definitely take some cues from Beth.  In the first five minutes, she walked us through the process of setting up our own WordPress blogs (which was brand-new to most), and then she had us post to our blogs periodically throughout the 6.5 hour workshop, with ideas we could take back to our libraries about the content we were learning.  This helped participants a) reflect on some practical applications for what we’d learned, and b) get hands-on practice blogging.  It also broke up the 6.5 hours by offering some variety and making the class more interactive, and gave our instructor key down-time to recharge.

OK, now for the content!  Here’s what we covered; you can click on any of these headings to go straight to that portion of the workshop:

I. What’s “Web 2.0″?
II. Blogs
III. RSS Feeds
IV. Social Bookmarking and Tagging
V. Wikis
VI. Social Software in Libraries

Or, just continue to view notes from the entire workshop: Continue reading →

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KCMLIN Workshop: Exploring Web 2.0

18 Jan

This morning I’m attending a great KCMLIN workshop about Web 2.0 at the library.  I’m really enjoying hearing about some of the different options and strategies for libraries to explore when starting blogs of their own.  We’ve been talking about niche blogs that could be fun to try, such genealogy blogs, book blogs or events blogs, and I’m looking forward to suggesting some of these ideas to my colleagues back at home.  I think a genealogy blog could be a fantastic way to highlight our Helen Osma Local History Collection.

Check back in a day or two for an update on what we discussed at the workshop!

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Net Neutrality: Then and Now

5 Jan

Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality(The Daily Show does Net Neutrality, July 19, 2006)

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About two weeks ago, the Federal Communications Commission voted to enact a new set of Net Neutrality rules that will regulate how broadband companies are allowed to direct traffic on the internet.  Although the new regulations don’t go as far as some consumer watchdog groups would like, they do represent the strongest measures taken by the FCC to date.  This is great news for consumers who don’t want their Internet Service Providers to arbitrarily restrict or slow down access to their favorite websites!

To commemorate the occasion, I thought it timely to share with you the very first paper I wrote for my LIS program, just over two years ago; it’s a policy paper addressing Net Neutrality.  I was still feeling a little rusty in academic writing at the time I wrote this, but I think it does an OK job setting out the issues and teasing out a few of the policy consequences on both ends of the spectrum.  Click here to download the pdf, or just follow the jump below.

If you want to know more about Net Neutrality, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge are two great places to start!
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Continue reading →

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Pythons & Snow Bunnies

6 Dec

Around this time last winter, I was learning how to write code in the computer language, Python.  I thought that knowing how to code would make me a better librarian, and so I signed up for a grad class at the U of I.  For the record, I hadn’t cried because of a class since the fifth grade, when Mrs. Recinos gave me a “late” because I forgot to ask my parents to sign my assignment notebook.  But Readers, Python made me cry.

Eventually, though, I ended up with this cute little piece of code that can make collages out of pictures that you like:

Snow Bunny Collage

My professor was really amazing, and in the end I actually did OK in the class.  Having a supportive, code-savvy fiance with a knack for soothing hysterical people also helped.  But librarians — even though I know I couldn’t crank out a Python program on the spot today if my life depended on it, I do know that I could sit down with a text book for a few hours and figure it out, and that I am also now equipped to have intelligent conversations with library IT staff who write code for the library.  It’s nice to know that I can participate in building our library’s tools.

Continue reading →

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Kindle

1 Dec

Kindle

When I first bought my Kindle about 18 months ago, it was kind of a pain in the neck to use.  Amazon offered a pretty limited selection of titles for purchase that didn’t quite suit my nerdy tastes, and I couldn’t buy titles from anyone else because they wouldn’t be compatible with my Kindle.  Which was actually OK by me, because they didn’t have anything I wanted to read either.

Eventually I ended up settling for a copy of War & Peace, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, for three reasons: a) it was available, b) I actually wanted to read it, and c) it seemed like a pretty awesome alternative to carrying around 4 pounds of book (no joke!).  I also experimented with converting several of Project Gutenberg‘s public domain .epub titles to Amazon’s proprietary .azw filetype using some free software that I downloaded from the Internet, but the outcome was fairly hideous.  So really I had spent $375 for War & Peace.

But soon things started to get interesting.  Continue reading →

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