Month: May 2007

VLA Wrap-up

Posted on by jessamyn

I just got back from VLA where I gave two half-talks over two days. It’s fun getting to hang out with local librarians. Most of the time I view conferences as a way to meet up with friends and see new places, but the VLA conference is actually good for old-fashioned networking (with new friends who I will see new places with in the future, I am certain).

My first talk was about CSS and I mostly did the intro while Jessica Allard did the bulk of the talk. My second talk was What’s What With Wireless. I gave an overview and then Carl Zeller from Teconic, who I had worked with when I was at the Rutland Free Library, did the safety and networking aspects of it. It was great to do split talks. I think the audience really gains a lot from multiple perspectives even if, as with the wifi talk, the presenters aren’t even always agreeing with each other.

Last night I went over to UVM and hung out with the Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE) and had pizza and talked about Ubuntu and yes, my little video which has now passed 27,000 views on YouTube, almost surpassing the population of my county. I talked to them about Koha and LibLime and Evergreen which no one there really knew about. They repeatedly apologized for the dark dank basement as if I was familiar with perhaps being someplace else, but I really like hanging out with nerds and geeks. I plan to go to the developers conference in Boston and let them know what library/librarian users might like to see out of an open source desktop OS. I encourage other librarians to go.

A few other things I learned:

  • The VLA Intellectual Freedom Committee is working on strengthening the library privacy laws in the state of Vermont.
  • The new incoming VLA preseident-elect is the assistant director of the library I used to work at, and I got to meet him at the conference.
  • One of the Department of Libraries’ Regional Consultants uses Ubuntu and has some experience in/interest in using Evergreen as an ILS.
  • The current (as of yesterday) president of VLA has some interesting ideas about new directions. I introduced myself to her and said “hey I’m short on tact, but I’m pretty good at getting technology projects working, consider letting me help out with the back end on your projects” and she seemed to think that was a great idea.

I’m sure there’s more but I’m operating at a sleep deficit and a keyboard overload so I’ll add in more when I remember it. Thanks to everyone who made my trip to Burlington fun and interesting.

some end of the week short links

Posted on by jessamyn

It’s been a busy week this week. I had eight people come to computer drop-in time on Tuesday which was a tech frenzy of PayPal and email and inserting graphics and Yahoo mail address books. I’ve had a few of these links hanging around for a while waiting to find time to write proper posts, but I figured I’ll drop them in here. I see a lot of blogging as playing hot potato with a bunch of web content. You find it, you pass it on, the next person passes it on. The more content you shift, the easier it is to quickly ascertain which things you need to save for longer perusal and which need to just get passed on for the next person. I’ve read and absorbed these and thought you might like them.

ubunutu follow-up, explanations and links

Posted on by jessamyn

Wow, so that was a crazy 36 hours or so. I posted that video, went to bed and woke up to find I was a minor media sensation. The video has been seen almost 14,000 times. Cory Doctorow called me an “Internet folk-hero” (which cracks me up). I wrote a bit more about that on my personal website. When people ask about social software and what it’s good for, I can now safely say that it’s good for having someone ship you a few boxes of your favorite open source OS on CD (you can get some too!), a few random marriage proposals from guys with hotmail addresses, and leveraging whatever your position is so that more people can know about it. More knowledge is good. The biggest piece of overall feedback I got was that my little video made installing an operating system look “fun” and when was the last time you had fun installing an operating system?

I do need to come clean and say that I haven’t even gone back to the library to see how the desktops are working out yet. I’m there for 90 min or so every week or every other week. I still haven’t tackled stickier issues like Internet and printer drivers. I have to change the root password now that everyone has seen it. I have installed Ubuntu a grand total of four times, once with an awful lot of help. Both my PC and my Mac laptops run Ubuntu but while it’s my OS of choice on the PC, I like the Mac OS better on the MacBook and I apologize for not being a True Believer. Here are some good Ubuntu links that people sent me either over email or in the comments. If you’re Ubuntu-curious, they will help you.

do you ubuntu?

Posted on by jessamyn

Check me out, I made a little video with me in it and I’m putting it here.

I installed Ubuntu on two of the donated PCs at my library yesterday. It took less than an hour. In fact, if I hadn’t been making the little movie at the same time [with my laptop and my little Canon digital Elph; I don’t have a video camera] it would have taken me even less time. Ubuntu comes bundled with a lot of the popular Open Source software titles like OpenOffice, Gimp and Firefox. The Calef Library has two Windows PCs already so if people need specific software that doesn’t run on Ubuntu, they can use those. I’d like to get them a Mac as well and then they can be the only library (to my knowledge) that is triple platform in the entire state of Vermont.

Note: I have not connected these machines to the Internet or the printer yet, so I’m sure there may be pitfalls waiting for me along the way, but I think that would be true no matter what platform I was using. Ubuntu is free. My install process went like this: download and burn the Ubuntu disk image to a CD. Turn on the computer with the Ubuntu CD in the CD drive. The computer boots Ubuntu from the CD. You have the option to run it this way or install it to the hard drive. You have the option to install it on a partition (and keep Windows also) or just erase the drive and install Ubuntu as the only operating system. You restart the machine and it runs Ubuntu and it Just Works. For the Ubuntu curious (I just like saying ubuntu over and over ubuntu ubuntu ubuntu…) you might enjoy this website How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu. If you’re just Linux curious, you might enjoy this article on how Howard County migrated more than 200 PCs to Linux, and this was in 2004. Hope you like the little movie. Please drop a note in the comments if you’re using Ubuntu at your library.

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OCLC Top 1000 on del.icio.us

Posted on by jessamyn

OCLC, in the quest for total brand domination, has taken their OCLC Top 1000 to del.icio.us. While I applaud their use of social tools, this fills up the feed of the toread tag (which I’ve often used to see what other people have on their reading list) with OCLC WorldCat entries. Of course this happened last month so no harm no foul, but I’ve always liked del.icio.us because it was full of humans sharing links to content, not vendors pushing links to products. [web4lib]