I just got done giving a Tiny Tech Talk about good tech tools for small and rural libraries at the Massachusetts Library Association conference. In a country where “small” is often defined as libraries with 50,000 people or fewer, there is a real need for services that work for really tiny libraries serving populations of a few thousand or less. This talk is a variant of my Tech Tips talks but with a lot of the actual words being about specific things that work where there isn’t much access or tech know-how, much less cash. It went well. I enjoy library conferences.
Tag: jessamyn
LoC Blog
Two neat things. Library of Congress has a blog. Librarian.net blog is on its (currently two items long) blogroll. Woo, we love LoC! Now please consider replacing the subject heading Hermphroditism with Intersexuality. Thanks.
me interviewed for the library school newsletter I used to edit in 1993
When I went to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Washington, there was a newsletter called the Sojourner. I was the editor my first year. It was a print newsletter. Now the newsletter is online and they interviewed me talking about how the library school (now the iSchool) has changed, what I’ve been up to and what needs fixing in libraries nowadays.
Happy Birthday Little Weblog
Librarian.net is eight years old today!
You can take a peek at what it looked like when I first started it up, April 20, 1999. Back then we didn’t have CMSes and I had to upload the webpages uphill both ways in the snow to bring you all these excellent links. I didn’t have comments (though to be fair, I was slow on that bandwagon even once I moved to Movable Type). I based my design on Jesse James Garrett’s Infosift which predated lib.net by almost a year. I met Jesse mainly because I asked for design help [and to ask if he minded if I copied him] and my friendship with him and a big group of early bloggers paved the way to my work with MetaFilter and a lot of my interest in 2.0 technologies. Today I’m in Dodge City, Kansas preparing to give a talk about the big 2.0 thing and I’ll see if I can wrap all that in together and make it make sense to folks who don’t have a bunch of stuff on Twitter and who may wonder “Why MySpace?”
My CiL Talk/Slides/Handout
I’m on my way to give my talk in one of the giant ballrooms. For anyone who wants to follow along at home or in the back of the room, here are the links you’ll want.
- Pimp My Firefox How to Make Firefox Really Work for You – slides
- Pimp My Firefox “e-handout” with links for all examples. Also available as a Word document.
Update: Talk went great. I spoke to about 200 or so people and almost all my demos worked! I went to go sit down and catch up on email and I ran into Jesse Andrews who is the guy behind userscripts.org (greasemonkey script repository mentioned in my talk) and BookBurro (very cool, check it out). He’s speaking tomorrow late afternoon, if you get a chance to see him, you should.