Who owns the lesson plan I gave to the Google Librarian Center? Obviously the link goes to someplace on my own server, so I guess the answer is “me” but what an interesting use of Google. Last night I started teachign a two week, eight hour basic Excel class. I had asked in an online forum I frequent what the best way to teach basic skills to adult ed. students was. Someone sent me a copy of the syllabus they used in their library Excel class and, using it, I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. I love not reinventing the wheel. I know that the local nature of most libraries means that we feel like we need to tailor many of our offerings to our specific communities, but having a place to go where we can at least easily see what others are doing seems like a great place to get some ideas. Anyone want to try searching the ALA website to see if you can find something like this there? I didn’t think so.
Category: ‘puters
who owns the review I gave to worldcat?
worldcat wiki where?
I added a review to a book in Open WorldCat after reading about this functionality in Catalogablog. I’m not certain how having a “post a review” feature or any user posting rights makes this a wiki. Maybe once my comment is approved on this post [if you see it, it’s been approved] I’ll know more. I think these features are great, don’t get me wrong, but a wiki is something pretty specific and at first and second glance, this is not in any way a wiki.
TimesSelect and institutional access
The NYTimes new Times Select service requires a fee for online access to op-eds, editorials and other online content. Home delivery subscribers get access to this content for free. Of course, I live far enough away that home delivery is not an option for me. So I inquired to see if I were a librarian, at a small library, [which I sort of am] if my patrons could use Times Select via my subscription. Answer: no. The same is true if you are a student at a university and get it delivered to your dorm. Of course librarians know that you can get access to the “select” content via Lexis Nexis anyhow, right? Princeton is at least one library lobbying the New York Times to allow some sort of access to content for Institutional subscribers. Perhaps your library should be another?
[Princeton’s] Firestone Library has already contacted the newspaper to determine if institutional access rates might be established for the Princeton campus, said Kevin Barry, head of the Social Science Reference Center.
“It is our intention to lobby hard for an educational institution arrangement,” he said. “I expect that our concern over how TimesSelect restrictions have upset daily patterns of reading key features and opinion pieces is shared by most academic libraries. I hope that those of us who represent the library and its community can prevail successfully upon The New York Times to find a way of opening up the website fully to institutional subscribers.”
a world with the $100 laptop
How does our thinking about the Digital Divide change if it were a world with $100 laptops? What if they were rugged laptops with cranks for backup power, and straps. What if they had wifi? What if all the software needed to run it were free?