Hi. Happy National Library Week. Check out some free stuff. I’m going to be speaking at Marlboro College tomorrow, check out what they’re saying on their home page. From there it’s down to the New Jersey Library Association Conference and then back up to visit my friend Sharyn before heading to the Edible Books Festival in Albany with my Mom next weekend. My last day at work was yesterday and went pretty well. I took a few vacation hours and left early to catch some sun and a matinee of Sin City [great, but very violent]. I’ll continue volunteering at the library once a month doing book delivery, but they’re on their own for outreach and lunchtime reference. My tech instruction job starts May 1st give or take, I’ll write more about it when I have a signed contract in-hand.
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.
happy National Library Week, please shop here
I have read variants of this on four blogs so far today:
“ebrary is offering one year of free access to 55 library science titles to ALA members. The collection will be integrated with the American Libraries digital archive. More info is available at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ala“
I’m an ALA member, and I may be thick as a brick, but nowhere on that page do I see anything looking like more information. Can anyone give me more actual information on this? Do I have to wait for National Library Week to start? If anyone has more information on finding these 55 periodicals I have free access to, I’d be very grateful.
update: apparently there are contextual menus available via right-click or control-click [see my picture here], as PLABlog alludes to. So you go to American Libraries online, highlight a word in the text of the magazine, from there you can search ebrary’s other content but, searching a word like librarian will get you to books with the word “librarian” in it, someplace. Alternately, you can search Yahoo maps, Biography.com, Excite.com [remember them?] and others. Clicking “explain” takes you to Britannica.com, “define” takes you to m-w.com, “locate” gives you a choice of Mapquest, Yahoo Maps or National Geographic.
It’s all very bizarre, sort of like what I imagine a postmodern search engine would be like. There is no way to just do a keyword search of ebrary content, the box that looks like a keyword search is only for American Libraries. All searches open new browser windows. All content is shown to you in a window that is maximum 3/4 the width of your browser, and if you don’t close the table of contents window, it’s roughly 1/2 the window width. You cannot bookmark content in your browser, only through their in-house “bookshelf” feature. I’m just shutting it down now. The toolbar software that ebrary requires you to download before you can even use this interface has left white stripes across my screen even once it’s closed. I hope there’s something a little more welcoming there when National Library Week actively kicks off, but for now, that’s about as much “more information” as I can share with you.
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?
serving the “internet natives” @ your library
This is a neat thing to find, a newspaper article discussing an event at an ACRL conference. The topic? Serving the new generations of college students who come to the library with all new expectations.
One University of Minnesota student had a bagful of electronics with him: iPod, PalmPilot, cell phone. He was bright, opinionated, well-spoken.
And when was the last time he was in the U’s library?
“Last year,” he said.
The collective intake of breath nearly turned the room into a vacuum. What’s a university librarian to do with this generation of college students?
[thanks kathleen]