I sometimes have a hard time talking about technologies I don’t know much about. I can see things like cell phones in a professional context — library policy, kids IM on them, they’re good for updates — as well as in a personal context — I don’t have one, I can’t get service at my house, if I really wanted one, I would have one. I feel this way about podcasts as I’ve said before. I don’t listen much to radio shows, sometimes I feel like the only person of my political persuasion who isn’t an NPR junkie, so podcasting doesn’t appeal. On the other hand, the whole idea of personally created content appeals to me much the same way that zines do. How great is it to be able to produce your own radio show and immediately be able to distribute it internationally? Seems sort of great. With that in mind, I point you to InfoSpeak created by the tech-positive smarties at the University of Washington iSchool (yes I went there, no it wasn’t anything like this when I was there). It’s “student-produced serial media” which, yes, is a podcast, but if you don’t get the whole podcast blah blah blah, you can also just listen to it online, simple. First episode, one of my favorite talkers Joe Janes, iSchool prof and Google pundit talking about how Google is changing the way we work, among other things. Check out the links next to the description, that’s what I’d like to see from more podcasters. Happy inaugural podcast, iSchool! [thanks carolyn]
Category: access
update re: ILL/Mao/DHS
Two stories in Southcoast Today [also in print in the Standard Times] following up on the Homeland Security/ILL report from yesterday. ‘Little Red Book’ story gets wide publicity , an article reporting on the publicity and with several statements from additional folks involved, most notably Homeland Security officials calling the scenario described “unlikely”. Also UMass Dartmouth statement on “Little Red Book” denying that they passed on any confidential information to agents or anyone else. [thanks aaron]
taxonomy vs. ontology vs. folksonomy
One library student tells it like it is: “If librarianship seems buzzwordy now, it’s because the Web has made enough people aware of the problem of classifying and finding information that it seems like our field has sprung up overnight.”
hive mind and libraries
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging. A pretty impressive first post by a reference librarian. Make sure you read down to the “libraries that tag” part of this essay. Bruce Sterling says “pretty bold word s coming from a librarian.” Huh?
ala midwinter page now accessible
Good news, the ALA Midwinter website now has ALT tags for all of their image-based navigation. Thanks to Stephanie Hoerner for making the changes necessary to make this page accessible. Apparently the two emails that I sent asking about this were never received but someone read about my comments on this site and dropped a note to someone who could fix the problem.