Lunar Transit of Earth, From 31 Million Miles.
Being a space buff, I’m blown away by this Nasa video, (picked up by the BadAstronomy blog). This is the first recording of this event from “the other side.”
Jim Rettig’s Travel Schedule for 2008/2009
My director, Jim Rettig, is currently the President-elect of the American Library Association. I had the idea of creating a mashup of his travel itinerary for the year to help the library community visualize where he’ll be appearing over the course of the next year. The result is below.
Here’s a link to the full version on Google Maps: http://snurl.com/29z6i
To accomplish this, I created a dedicated calendar in Google Calendar, fed the xml data from the calendar into a custom Yahoo! Pipe, and then exported the KML data back to Google Maps.
Props to the team at Lifehacker for picking up on a post of how to do this!
Friday TechTip - Digital Photo Rodeo, Pt. 1
This week’s tip that I’ve sent out to our staff focuses on digital photo management. Now that warm weather is here, I’m sure more people will be breaking out their digital camera for vacations, cookouts, family gatherings, etc.
Check it out at my *other* blog. 
- Friday TechTips
Mainstream Music!
I participated in a focus group tonight for a local radio station and based on the song selection, I’m 100% sure it’s our classic rock station. The songs ranged from 80s hair metal to 60s protest songs, with singer/songwriters from the 70s, Southern Rock and New Wave all thrown in for good measure. I’ve done this type of focus group before but not for this particular station. Having been a young child in the late 70s and being a mid 80s teen, many of these songs brought back a lot of memories about good friends and good times. I found myself giving the highest ratings to songs from The Eagles, U2, The Rolling Stones, Jackson Browne, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, David Bowie, Queen, Tom Petty, and Heart for starters. Most of the songs fell somewhere in the middle of my ratings, which meant that I didn’t overly like or dislike them. For some reason I found myself tired of hearing songs from Elton John, Eric Clapton, and The Beatles. I’m not sure why. There was a total of 900 songs and we listened to “the most representative” 8 second sections of each. I’m not sure if it was the most effective way to gauge users musical tastes and preferences, but hey, I still got paid for the time! 
Here’s a muxtape I’ve put together which represents some of the songs that were sampled. And like Steely Dan asks, are you reelin’ in the years? 
TechTips Blog
So a few weeks ago, I began distributing tech tips every Friday afternoon to our library staff via our internal mailing list. My goal in doing this is to share some of the more helpful web services and tools that I come across on a regular basis. Recently my director asked me to approach our VP for IS (we’re part of our campus IS group) to see if this would be something of value to the rest of IS. She gave approval and also thinks this is a good idea to try. She also suggested using a blog for archival purposes. Working with our Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, I now have another blog installed on their WordPress MU platform. I will continue to distribute tips via email, but will simultaneously post them to the blog for wider distribution and archiving. Your comments and feedback are welcomed! I may also aggregate them here for further coverage.
Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps Crashes My IE
The following scenario has recently happened to me on multiple occasions on different WinXP systems:
- I visit weather.com
- Type in my zip code for local weather
- I switch to radar view to see how close the weather system du jour is (Weather.com uses Microsoft Virtual Earth for maps)
- IE7 promptly crashes
Is this another case of Microsoft’s left hand not talking to its right? According to the latest report from the Garter Group Microsoft/Windows has become "monolithic" and is currently incapable of competing with the various Linux distributions as well as OS X due to their flexibility and ability to be ported to other devices (OS X on iPhone, Google’s Android OS running on mobile devices). After experiencing this situation, it only reinforces the happiness I feel after "coming home" to the Mac OS (I grew up with II, IIc, early macs). It sort of feels like The Steve putting his arm around me and saying "Welcome home, wayward son. Let’s kill the fatted calf."
Highlights from Wikis: Managing, Marketing, and Making them Work
- Use wikis for internal library communication, collaborative tools for larger organizations (and reach out to users).
- Must define a purpose for the wiki or a problem it can solve.
- Built a reference wiki to maintain internal docs; using Biz Wiki for business subject guide.
- Pick the right solution - see http://wikimatrix.org to choose the platform that’s right for you!
- Choose between local hosting over remote - local hosting allow for total control.
- Provide ample help pages for wiki
- Harvest initial content from blog entries, manuals, docs stored on network, etc.
- Encourage others to add content - won’t work without group buy-in
- Let others add content!!!
- Provide even MORE help.
- Add desirable content - specific guides for course assignments, etc.
- Measure Use - review statistics to guide future content creation.
- Explore new ways to use wiki, experiment with media, chat, etc.
- Spammers WILL find a way to hack your wiki and post crapola - may have to resort to approval of registrations.
- 20% of users will do 80% of work.
- Wikis Wikis everywhere, here a wiki there a wiki, everywhere a wikiwiki - thinking that consolidation is a good thing… One wiki to rule them all.
- Wikis are never done - isn’t a static doc, maintain links, pages, and articles to keep wiki relevant.
Highlight’s from Lee Rainie’s Keynote at CIL2008
- There have been massive changes in web consumption since 2000 - 75% of adults now use internet, 54% have broadband at home, 78% own cell phones. Wireless access is brining back email back in vogue (really?).
- Cloud computing changing everything, much more reliance on web for data storage, scheduling, etc. As long as all devices can access the content, the storage method is not important to user.
- 58% of teens have online profiles on Social Network platforms versus 37% of adults.
- 33% of college students keep blogs and post regularly/54% read blogs
- 12% of online adults have a blog/35% read them
- 62% of 18-30 yr. olds have visited public library in past year - largest group next to 31-42yr. olds at 59%
- Those who visit libraries tend to come from higher income homes, have more education, and are avid users of the Internet and have broadband access.
- Only 13% go to public library to obtain information and recommendations - young adults, 18-29 more likely to go than others.
- Once at library - 69% of users get help from staff, 68% used technology adn 38% recieved one on one instruction, 58% sought reference materials, 42% used newspapers/magazines. 64% were “very successful” in getting help.
- Minorities and young people more likely to plan future visits. Young people have recent positive experiences in libraries - influences decision to continue “patronage.”
- Regular users will keep coming back - very satisified with levels of service.
- “Your patrons are happy and some are zealous advocates. This is teh era of consumer evangelists and you have an abundance of them.”
- “Your un-patrons are primed to seek you out. …the people who might be more dependent on libraries for help area aware of what you offer and your special skills.”
- Era of social networks - “Aspire to be a node in people’s social networks.” People turn to smartest people in their networks to get information and help.
- “Offer your expertise in new literacies.”
Attending CIL2008
I left early this morning from home in Richmond, VA and drove to Arlington/Crystal City to attend Computers in Libraries 2008. I came up early (conference offically starts tomorrow) to attend a preconference, Web Manager’s Academy. It was an all day session with lots of good content and dialog. I’ll post my thoughts later after having some time to digest the content. I’m glad to be here!
Need Online Storage for Library Users? Try drop.io!
A new online storage service, http://drop.io, launched recently and allows users to store up to 100mb of files. Yeah, it’s stingy storage, but great for office docs, a few images, an occasional audio file, etc. The benefits: no registration so you’re privacy is intact (as much as you want to believe that), multiple users can share the space, you can set a deletion date, users can add notes and make changes, etc.
I can really see this being beneficial to library users visit the library, create a project/document, but need a quick way to save it or send it to themselves. Yeah, there’s always Gmail, but I like the ease of use of this site and like the ability to collaborate.
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Professional and personal ideas, thoughts, and comments from your favorite tech-brarian. Actually, that's probably not a valid term, but hey, I'm not sweating the small stuff!
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