Karen shows Jason Drupal tips
Conference sessions aren’t the only place where knowledge is imparted at a conference. Out in the foyer Karen Coombs was explaining some fine points of Drupal to Jason Clark. This is the kind of peripheral “event” that sets a physical conference apart from a virtual one.
Marydee
Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals
Ran Hock
You may be familiar with Google Earth, but there’s a lot beyond the surface. Search guru Ran Hock has applied his considerable expertise to this unusual database. A lot of content is available, but it’s not necessarily easy to find; Ran suggests spending some time exploring the panels and menus. Photos from Panoramio, YouTube videos, links from Google Books, historical maps (you can even integrate the map on a Google Earth map and change its transparency!) are all available. Even Ran says he continues to be amazed at how much is out there and the amount of traditional and geographic content has been integrated.
Google has begun integrating new high resolution data into its maps, so for example, you can see people’s shadows, plates on restaurant tables, people outside their homes. This has led to privacy and security concerns–some government buildings have been deliberately pixelated.
Different types of data have been integrated into many maps. Ran showed maps of solar job growth in the US, location maps relating to Henry VIII’s wives, information from blogs, etc. Popup boxes present websites related to maps, and animation is frequent.
Ran’s advice for searching:
If you are a lover of maps (like me), one caution is appropriate: you can use up (waste?) a lot of time on Google Earth. But it’s really fascinating!
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL2009 Blog Coordinator
Jaap van de Geer filmed an interview by Erik Boekesteijn with our morning keynote speaker, Lee Raine. Enjoy.
Jane Dysart, Conference Program Chair
There were some great sessions scheduled for this morning, but I had to miss them because I had my own to give! My talk was Building Community Partnerships: 25 Ideas in 40 Minutes, and it was indeed fast-paced, leaving me breathless at the end. Happily, I managed to get all my tips into the alloted time and I think that all the attendees went away with something they could use.
I always encourage librarians to partner with other people, especially to trade for in-kind services. There are lots of folks that you might not think about swapping services with. For instance: Do you need a new logo, but don’t have money to hire a designer? Check with local colleges that have graphic design courses and ask professors if they might assign their classes to create a logo for your library. You get lots of fresh designs to choose from, the prof gets a useful, real-world project for his class, and the students get good experience with understanding a real client and creating something to fit an organization’s needs. Everybody wins!
I also urge librarians not to be shy about creating new relationships outside of their own organizations and their comfort zones. Get to know people in your community; put a human face on the library. Tell them about the valuable services and knowledge that you have to offer them. Trade your knowledge in researching and vetting information for their knowledge. Don’t feel as if you don’t have something to offer. These days, everyone is looking to get more for less; many individuals and groups are more open to partnerships than ever before.
You can find my other 24 ideas in the conference proceedings. I bet there will be something there for you!
~Kathy Dempsey, Marketing Library Services editor
Thanks for looking after us!
Yesterday, one of our CIL conference attendees had to leave a workshop suddenly due to a medical emergency. The Crystal City Hyatt staff helped get an ambulance for her, gave her a taxi coupon for when she was ready to come back, and later in the day when hotel security staff saw her, said they were glad to see she was doing better and told her that if she was hungry, food was on the house. Amazing service. What a great hotel! Thank you for looking after not only this attendee, but all of our attendees.
Jane Dysart, Conference Program Chair
Andrew Pace (L) and Roy Tennant (R) of OCLC Discussed Cloud Computing
When you hear “cloud computing” do you think it refers to something etherial or nebulous, appearing and disappearing as conditions change and difficult to get an understanding about?
Clouds are often a metaphor for the Internet “Moving to the Cloud” lets you use resources through the Internet that you don’t have available to you locally. (Wikipedia has a good definition and summary). So moving libraries to the cloud means moving library data and applications to the network level. Roy Tennant led off an overflow session with an overview of cloud computing. This has benefits: low barriers to entry, no capital investment because you can pay as you go, no local server capacity needed. Software upgrades are automatic, and you don’t need a dedicated staff. Of course everything has its drawbacks: you are giving up some control, and are relying on the network being available when you want to use it. Amazon Web Services has become a leader in cloud computing.
Libraries have been using cloud computing without realizing it when they used OCLC to create bibliographic records and then add value to them. The benefits of the information added by local catalogers thus become available to all. OCLC is a leader in cloud computing for libraries–click here for further information. Events and workshops on cloud computing for librarians are starting to appear, such as the WorldCat Hackathon, Mashed Libraries in the UK, and OCLC Code4Lib Bootcamp. These are working conferences; developers bring their laptops, collaborate, and produce working code. You can find WorldCat citations in Facebook, OCLC’s terminology services to enhance searches, visualizations of local holdings on a Google map, and WorldCat widgets for the WordPress blogging platform. All these are examples of the power off cloud computing when library data are moved to the Internet.
Andrew Pace said that moving to the cloud implies large-scale applications–you want many people to use them. The old model of users coming to libraries is not scalable, but then things like resource sharing, shared cataloging and consortial activities like journal licensing came along. These were the first attempts at attempting to scale library services. How can these be expanded? Repositories, shared discovery layers for catalogs, electronic journal management and link resolution are an entrance into the scalable library management in the cloud.
Libraries conduct about 166 billion transactions a year (about 5,000 per second). If you try to power this amount of transactions locally, you will soon need to buy more and more generators to supply power. When applications are moved to the network level, all you need to do is to plug into the wall to connect to the network, where the generators are backed up, maintained, cooled, centrally. Libraries have added more and more systems and made significant investments in infrastructure, but they still have a fragmented presence on the web. A webscale strategy will provide hardware and software on the Web, where they can use the applications they need. The potential benefits of this approach include user satisfaction and library visibility, workflow improvements, and financial savings.
Far from being nebulous, cloud computing is proving its worth and has generated some definite advantages. It’s worth looking into!
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL2009 Blog Coordinator
Curt Tagtmeier and Nina McHale
Did you think that because your budget has shrunk, you can’t offer innovative Web services to your library users? Well, you can! In a great session, “Help Your Library Be Omnipresent Without Spending A Dime”, Nina McHale, Web Librarian, Auraria Library, University of Colorado-Denver, explained how you can add widgets and other features to your website by using freely available HTML code. And it doesn’t take a programmer, either. If you can cut and paste into your page’s source code, you can do it. Or maybe you want to offer content for mobile platforms–a very popular subject today–and you can do that for free too. Curt Tagtmaier, Adult Services Librarian and Technology Coordinator, Fremont Public Library, Fremont, CA, did a live demo (Curt is a brave man to do a live demo with an audience!) of mobiSiteGalore and created a mobile website.
Some of the things that Nina said you can add are simple catalog search boxes, combined catalog/database search boxes, chat widgets, iGoogle gadgets, social networking sites, and more. She also shared some great advice and things you need to consider. Visit her website to see the links to her presentation, which also contains links to some examples of what libraries have done–all without spending a dime!
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2009 Blog Coordinator
This is a popular session! I couldn’t get into the Washington Room, so I’m in the overflow room where I can view the slides but can’t see the speakers. We’ve started out with speakers from Southern New Hampshire., Carol West and Stephanie Collins. The roles of various stakeholders when it comes to digitization is first on the agenda. Then it’s on to the basics of copyright law. More important is the conflicts inherent in the process. Digital materials are everywhere, distributed by different publishers with different DRM policies, are often non-negotiable, and excessive control can impinge on individual privacy. Librarians are caught in the middle. They want to make information readily accessible but also have to enforce copyright. Guiding principles? DRM should protect rights of originators without limiting rights of libraries and library users. Need to institue new DRM policies, amend copyright laws, encourage new and creative licensing arrangements between originators and distributors. We need more interoperability, open access.
Michael Sauers from Nebaska Library Commission is now explaining Creative Commons. EULA: reasonableagreement.org – he’s READING the whole thing!! We have rights, but copyright is a set of restrictions. Difficult to enforce when it’s digital media. Music mashups: The Grey Album, American Edit, Girl Talk, etc. Build on existing culture, but traditional copyright holders don’t like it. More seriously, he’s reading a copyright statement from a book. What about using an excerpt in an Amazon book review or in a blog? Hmmm.
When common sense says fair use, the lawyers disagree. Takedown notice for 27 second video on YouTube about little kid dancing to Prince song on radio. EFF got involved and got a fair use judgement. Even Mickey Mouse is not original Steamboat Willie was based on Buster Keaton as Steamboat Bill Jr.
We’re in a permission culture. That wasn’t what copyright was meant to be. But fair use now equals the right to hire a lawyer and defend yourself. Lawrence Lessig was upset about Sonny Bono copyright extention, lost the case in the Supreme Court, and came up with Creative Commons. CC says what it will allow rather than what you need to ask permission for. Attribution is requested, use content in non-commerical manner, don’t change or make derivative copies, can add “pay it forward” model. You can search for materials covered under CC in advanced search.
It’s not perfect. Once you choose a license for your work, it’s irrevocable. Maybe there’s a negative market effects, particularly in photography world. And what is the definition of “non-commercial”?? What about unintended use? What if your photo is used to illustrate a point with which you absolutely disagree? And then there’s “right of publicity” – what if a photo he takes of me gets used commercially? Is this a violation of my rights?
He’s putting his slides up on Slideshare.
Marydee
Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals
Derik Badman's ad for his Wed session, #D305!
How’s this for marketing your session, #D305, Wednesday at 3.45pm! Am waiting for your sketches of CIL speakers too, Derik. Great to have you with us.
Jane Dysart, CIL Conference Program Chair
You have to hand it to our Dutch friends, Erik Boekesteijn and Jaap Van de Geer. Not only are they Information Today authors and speakers as well as Library Journal Movers & Shakers for 2009, but they continue to push the envelope. This year, while Erik is interviewing Paul Hodergraber of the New York Public Library in CIL’s Tuesday morning keynote presentation [for more info see earlier post], Jaap will be live streaming the event. So if you can’t be with us here in DC where the sun is shining and the cherry blossoms are in full splendor, check out the live feed of tomorrow’s keynote from your computer. There is a link to the right of this post — under Links, click on CILLive. Enjoy and let us know how it works and how you like it.
Jane Dysart, CIL Conference Program Chair