Hi. The reason I was curious about the things you can do without your gadgets is because my laptop broke while I was at ALA. I have a back-up laptop, but I learned in a hurry which things I do are laptop-specific. I had only an old copy of my postal-address book on my iPod, my “what I’ve read” RSS feed list was out of wack [I use Bloglines for back-up but NetNewsWire for regular reading], my IM client was ugly and my control key was in the wrong place. Otherwise, mostly not horrible which was good news. I try to have a set of tools that will work in a long power failure in addition to all the lovely blinky beepy widgetry that fills my office.
librarianavengers: Designing for hyper-attentive cyborg children
I have two confessions to make. 1. I never did like the International Children’s Digital Library much. I want to, I just don’t. 2. I haven’t been reading Erica’s LibrarianAvengers blog enough [now added to my RSS feeds]. Today’s post about the ICDL made me laugh out loud.
We need to run everything we do through a filter that asks: “If I click on this without an MLS, will it piss me off?” We need to acknowledge that design matters. We need to remove ourselves from our collections. We need to design websites that don’t mock the resources they contain. We need to do these things because otherwise all of our efforts are worthless. We need to design websites that don’t suck, because otherwise the kids that we care so much about are going to wander off and smoke crack. And it’s going to be our fault.
rochelle: ala council drinking game
And, speaking of laughing out loud, I present: ALA Council: The Drinking Game
who do you serve?
I missed this from the PLA Blog before I left ALA. but there’s a pretty interesting statistic here: 80% of libraries serve populations of less than 10,000. Even a rural-ish library like mine serves a population of almost 30,000.
iRead shuffle – enjoy uncertainty
What is missing from a lot of library weblogs? Fun graphics! Thanks, Aaron for making a whole new graphic out of my old tired Encyclopedia Britannica.