August 30, 2009 at 6:19 pm (Food for Thought, Magical Thinking, emerging technology)
Check out this blogpost from Liz Lawley about the Picturing the Impossible project she’s working on — http://mamamusings.net/archives/2009/08/14/picturing_the_impossible.php
Liz will speak at the MCLS Imagine.Create.innivate Leadership & Technology conference on October 22. If you haven’t registered for the conference yet, do it now! You won’t want to miss Liz’s presentation.
Patty
August 11, 2009 at 6:43 pm (Food for Thought, Random Observations, emerging technology)
There was a link to a UK paper which showed how it took only 12 minutes using off the shelf equipment to completely alter the UK’s new national ID card. Since US passports now have these, it is cause for thought. See:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1204641/New-ID-cards-supposed-unforgeable–took-expert-12-minutes-clone-programme-false-data.html#
August 3, 2009 at 4:28 am (Convenience, emerging technology)
I love this concept and I really, really, really hope this will work with our MCLS library cards. Can someone out there who has an iPhone test this for me?
http://www.socialcustomer.com/2009/07/introducing-scanaroo.html
Thanks.
Patty
May 20, 2009 at 5:01 am (emerging technology)
Check this out…
Maybe you’ve already heard of this new search engine called Wolfram/Alpha? http://www.wolframalpha.com/
If not, check it out – it’s got lots of cool capabilities you might find useful for a plethora of science questions. Enter your birth date and see exactly how many days you’ve lived – if you dare!
“Making the world’s knowledge computable
Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.”
Thanks to Jackie Katz for sharing this….
Patty
March 4, 2009 at 10:36 pm (Food for Thought, emerging technology)
I just read an article at: http://www.dailypress.com/business/sns-ap-tec-amazon-kindle-application,0,5106545.story, which describes Amazon making available an app for the iPhone which allows it to play Kindle materials.
What do you guys think about this? I had a chance to attend an in-store presentation about the iPhone over my vacation, and while it is a really cool piece of technology, and not expensive in and of itself, the minimum amount for decent service is a 2 year contract at 130 plus tax per month. That’s a deal killer for me.
February 14, 2009 at 2:57 am (Magical Thinking, emerging technology)
Dropbox. Just found this on the web. What do you all think of it, esp vis a vis Google Docs?
https://www.getdropbox.com
and
http://www.macworld.com/article/138810/2009/02/mwvodcast93.html?lsrc=rss_main
Larry
February 11, 2009 at 9:22 am (emerging technology)
I briefly skimmed an article in one of the newest issues of Library Hotline about how some libraries are exprimenting with geotagging their materials. For those of you who use GPS devices, you’ll immediately know what I mean. For those of you not familiar with the technology, just imagine entering the ISBN of a book you want to read into your mobile phone or PDA and having it find the one copy available in the library closest to where you are. Then imagine you head to the library and get turn by turn directions to where the book is in the building. Then imagine that you take your mobile phone, scan the barcode and have the item checked out on your library account! Pretty cool, huh?
The only downside I can see immediately is a little thing to do with privacy. We’d have to have a way of deactivating the geotag when an item is checked out. Otherwise, someone jonesing for the latest Nora Roberts will track the book down to whoever has it checked out. But other than that, sounds pretty sweet to me!
Patty
January 29, 2009 at 2:28 am (Food for Thought, emerging technology)
http://cultofmac.com/dc-public-library-has-nations-first-iphone-app/7637 shows that the DC PL has a nifty way of reaching out and touching their users.
Larry
January 27, 2009 at 2:31 am (emerging technology)
The LITA blog has a video of the Top Tech Trends presentation from ALA. Take a peek – http://litablog.org/2009/01/26/top-tech-trends-midwinter-2009-video/
Patty
January 2, 2009 at 8:52 pm (Convenience, emerging technology)
I’m always coming across cool little tools for making digital life easier, but most often they are flashy and fun but not very useful. However, every once in awhile, something comes along that is really innovative and incredibly powerful and useful. My “cool tool” for 2008 was Book Burro, a Firefox add-on that pops up whenever you view a page with an ISBN or other recognizable book info on it, and allows you to search WorldCat for the closest library location that has the book. I read the Amazon feeds every day, and this makes placing holds in the MCLS catalog a snap. You can find out more about Book Burro here – http://www.bookburro.org/.
Today I came across what will probably be my favorite tool for 2009, although it’s early yet. Hyperwords is another Firefox add-on that essentially makes every word on a webpage a hyperlink. You can select any word or phrase on a page and have a menu pop up that lets you search the word/phrase in Wikipedia, Britannica, or other online sources, or lets you invoke a web search. I tested it in the MCLS catalog and the MCLS databases and it works like a charm. Take a look at Hyperwords here – http://www.hyperwords.net/
Do you have any favorite web or other computer tools you can’t live without? I bet you do, and I’m thinking that we can pull together a nifty Tech Camp around them. What are your favorites?
Patty
| Adults and Libraries… on I Knew It! | |
 | Greg Benoit on Scanaroo! |
| Living Library Proje… on Living Library Project | |
 | Adrienne on Creative Thinking |
 | TidyRead on Readability! |
