I’ve been unplugged for a good deal of the past week and I can’t say I’ve minded too much. You can see some pictures here if you like visuals, they have almost no library content, maybe a little museum content. I’m easing back in to plugged-in-edness by reading the latest Cites & Insights and I’m really enjoying the section called ©3: Balancing Rights about the many complicated issues involved with DRM and rights in the digital media world generally. I’ve been scratching the surface of DRM issues in some of my talks, but Walt really picks apart many of the tricky issues involved in his direct and non-axe-grinding way. DRM curious? Go read it.
hi – 26apr
Hi. The notes for the talk that I gave last night at Simmons Choice: Empowerment Through Information Technology [seriously] are online if you’d like to see them.
serving lower literacy users through effective web design
Low-literacy users have different online behaviors than high-literacy users. They don’t scan, they read. It’s easier for them to miss important information that is outside of the normal text-areas. The good news? it’s easy to improve usability for low-literacy users without compromising the effectiveness of web sites for higher-literacy users. Read more at Jakob Nielsen’s excellent usability site, Alertbox, which also has good tips on usability for seniors.
hi – 24apr
I’m polishing my Simmons talk today. I give a few types of talks regularly, but the talks are never the same. They can be loosely grouped as follows:
- new technologies/ten tech tips for libraries
- the information poor/digital divide and technology in libraries
- social responsibiltiy and technology in libraries
Astute readers will recognize that, at their core, these talks all cover the same three topics with different weight given to each topic each time. Put another way they’re
- TECHNOLOGY, politics, libraries
- technology, politics, LIBRARIES
- technology, POLITICS, libraries
I like giving talks, and I’m happy that I now have the time to really do it right. If you’d like me to come talk to your library, your library association or your group of library fans, read my faq and drop me a line.
ALA Annual Wiki – by Meredith
Please check out the ALA Annual Wiki that Meredith has set up if you’re planning on attending the conference in Chicago in June. This is a great idea. There is already a lot of good information there, and if you know anything, feel free to add it. The more I get used to wikis through my work with Wikipedia and my own experiments [yes I had a wiki, no I don’t anymore, yes I will have one again] the more I get excited about the potential benefits of providing simple easy-to-learn ways for people to collaborate online.