Here’s a link to a cute video about one baaaaaaad librarian:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/08/31/roller.derby.librarian/index.html

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

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#

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

Thing is, it’s a government site that is pretty useful and has won an award.

http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/06/cookcountygenealogycom-wins-naco-achievement-award.html

And also:
http://www.cookcountygenealogy.com/>

Oh my. Take a look at this and be jealous.

http://plablog.org/2009/05/greenpoint-poetry-sites-gps-public-art-project-goes-live.html

What are your thoughts on libraries and community content?

Patty

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

I just found this fantastic little widget called Readability that lets you change the look of text on a website to make it more readable. Go to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ and check it out. Unbelievably simple and surely useful for people who have a hard time reading small print, or reading on a computer. It doesn;t seem to handle multiple stories on a page, but does quite well with single stories — install it and see what it does at www.libraryweb.org, then go to one of the feature stories and try it there.

Patty

At Chili we’re playing around with Meebo reference, and Jeff found a gem of a library! Its called the Franklin Park Public Library. Their website is completely interactive, yet at the same time simple and easy to navigate.
Some of the things that I really liked about the site:

• I really like how simple it looks. The sidebars are a little busy, but not too bad.
• You can rate everything that is put up on the website, from new book reviews, to programs, to even the hours posted.
• They have Meebo online reference (which is anonymous), but if you have AOL, Google, MSN or Yahoo, they have accounts on all of those (all connected through Meebo so that the reference staff don’t have to log onto each) so that you can friend them and see when they’re online conveniently from your own IM program.
• It also looks like their website is actually a blog, but not in a way that might scare some patrons, so that staff can post reviews and patrons can comment on them.

I was also really impressed with Johnson County Public Library’s website. Very simple and clean.

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.