Author: jessamyn

job opening for displaced librarian, pass it on

Posted on by jessamyn

ALA President Michael Gorman posted this to the Council list and I made a web page for it using pasta. Please pass this information, or this idea, on.

Temporary Librarian Position, For Librarian Displaced by Hurricane Katrina

In order to offer support to those in our profession who have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, the Henry Madden Library of the California State University, Fresno would like to hire one librarian with an ALA accredited M.L.S. or equivalent who was displaced and/or unemployed because of the hurricane.

are audiobooks accessible? A TAP report.

Posted on by jessamyn

Accessibility Trial of the Downloadable Digital Audio Book Service from netLibrary and Recorded Books LLC. At least twelve libraries providing content to the print impaired participated in this project. Upshot? Responses vary, though mejor hurdles mentioned include interacting with the website, dealing with DRM and usability of the Windows Media Player.

The volunteers who participated in this two-month trial had a wide variety of experiences and reactions to those experiences. Some volunteers thought this was the best digital audio book system they had ever tried…. Many of the volunteer testers noted that the quality of the texts, the narration, and the sound was very high.

Others thought the overall system was barely functional and marginally accessible. The content website, the digital rights management system, and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player software presented substantial accessibility challenges for a large portion of the group of volunteer testers.

me in Indiana, recap

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m here in Michael Stephens’ basement posting this. Here are the notes for the two talks I gave over the past two days:

CHOICE: Empowerment Through Information Technology [seriously]. See also liveblog, photos and blog post

Hot Hot Robot: Sensible Approaches to Technology in Libraries. See also photos which we took, uploaded, tagged and added notes to during our presentation about Flickr. Update: liveblog too

As a fun side bonus, LibraryMan was also in South Bend tonight and we all got to sit around scheming about our ideal future library utopias. Hot!

public access computing vs. OPACs

Posted on by jessamyn

How does your library determine how many computers to “set aside” for OPAC-only use? Is that decision based on anything? At the library I used to work at, we had about 15 public access computers with fully five of them OPAC-only. The other ten computers were mobbed. TechnoBiblio looks at whose using which comptuers at San Francisco Public and has some questions as well.