Category: ‘puters

Technical services librarian Janet Rubenking wrote a useful column for PC Magazine about online databases, the type that would be connected to a library web site.[thanks carol]

Gates Foundation grants have done a huge amount towards getting libraries online. That said, they have regrettably opened libraries up to a lot of the crappy virii and browser hijacking problems that abound which are almost exclusively the result of insecure software, or software that has the potential to be secure but is configured insecurely out of the box. Microsoft makes, and sets default configurations on, most of this software. Librarian Way has a good short bit about the PC vs Mac dichotomy in the library world. I have been agitating just to get Netscape loaded on our Gates Foundations machines at my library, just so we can give our patrons a bit of a choice.

For those who are already up to speed on assistive technology, user groups are starting to form. The Visually Impaired and Blind User Group of Boston is one of many. And they have a teeny lending library. [thanks don]

So I’ve been messing with my RSS aggregator for the better part of a day now and I have this to say: I enjoy reading sites in the aggregator whose only [or main] function is to provide content. In fact, in some instances reading blogs this way allows me to avoid some very busy pages and just read all their content as black on white text with nice blue links. This is great for news sites, pretty good for most blogs, and downright disturbing for more arty sites where the design is really part of the content, or accentuates the content in some important way. I know the big push in good web design is to separate content from presentation from structure specifically to enable this sort of approach [and allow people to access content via phones, browsers, PDAs etc] which think is great. However I also see a lot of sites really designing specifically for syndication which means bland sites, no “flavor text” in the sidebars, very few images, and no extra content that isn’t their blog or longer blog entries. No real problem, just that watching the shift happen over the past few years has been interesting, and there has been a shift. In my role as web content provider, I’m happy to know how this all works and pleased to be able to both read news this way and provide content this way. As my role as a public librarian in rural Vermont where most of our library patrons are still learning to double-click, I’ll be on the lookout for RSS’s utility.

Slightly off-topic, but I really think you will enjoy this article: Cooking pot markets: an economic model for the trade in free goods and services on the Internet. From the always wonderful people at First Monday.