I happened to get a chance to review incoming ALA President Michael Gorman’s new book this month on Info Career Trends: Our Own Selves: More Meditations for Librarian
Category: books
more edible book 2005 photos
Here are photos from another of this year’s edible book festivals: Edible Book Festival 2005 in Seattle.
Krug: keys to usability
Apropos of looking at ebrary last night comes a post about a talk given by Steve Krug, writer of one of my favorite web books about usability: Don’t Make Me Think. In a nutshell, clarity [of purpose, of design, of color] is the key to usability. Read more about what he said over at Librarian Way.
bad scan = bad information
Erica mentions something that has always sort of bugged me about scanned books, keyword searchable or no: bitonal image scanning. I use Heritage Quest at my library to do genealogical research. They have about 25,000 history and family name books scanned and searchable online. It’s sort of amazing except that the thing I really like to look at old books for — the fancy pictures and odd typography and illustrations — are almost unreadable. At some point, someone made a decision to do this, and I think it was the wrong decision. If we’re saving shelves and shelves of storage space and preservation costs, and I’m not so sure we are, couldn’t we spend a few cents extra to get at least grayscale renditions of the images in these books?
edible book, yum!
I encourage all librarians to try to get involved in their local Edible Books Festival, coming up soon at the tail end of National Library Week.