ITI Bloggers April 17th, 2007
Mashups are one of the newest hot technologies, and an overflow crowd turned out to hear Darlene Fichter describe them and give us pointers to making them. Not only was there not an empty seat in the presentation room or in the overflow room, but the crowd spilled out into the hallway where, fortunately, a monitor allowed everyone to see Darlene’s presentation.
Darlene pointed out that mashups are one of today’s fastest growing ecosystems on the Web, and because you don’t need to get anyone’s approval to use the APIs (Application Program Interfaces) from Google, Amazon, Yahoo, etc., they have spread widely. Now there are even simplified point-and-click systems making it easy and simple to create mashups. Darlene likened mashups to Lego building blocks and said that "we are all builders building the skyscrapers of tomorrow.
She showed lots of examples; you can see them and the links to them on her slides which are posted on her blog. However, I thought some of the issues arising from mashups (there are always issues!) were very interesting. Some of the social issues include questions about the "right to remix": mashups mix content from more than one source. Will the original owners have a problem with that? They also make it more difficult to evaluate the validity of the site because you may not know the original sources of the data. And there is always the potential for "malicious mischief", like changing every instance of a term on a web page (a company name, for example) to something much less flattering. These issues will need to be carefully considered in the future.
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2007 Blog Coordinator
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ITI Bloggers April 17th, 2007
Conference planning never stops! Even here in the midst of all the activity of CIL, Genevieve Prifte and Kathy Bayer of ITI’s conference planning department work on the proofs of the program for Streaming Media East, next month in New York City.
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2007 Blog Coordinator
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ITI Bloggers April 17th, 2007
You do not want to miss the new evening session that will happen tonight!
Come to the Regency Ballroom at 7:30 to see which libraries won awards for their YouTube videos. Be ready for some great laughs–and a few surprises!
Kathy Dempsey
Editor-in-Chief, Computers in Libraries
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ITI Bloggers April 17th, 2007
I am most grateful that Andy Carvin was able to join us here at CIL on such short notice. He did a fantastic job and I really loved Jay Rosen’s quote, "The people formerly known as the audience" or as Andy applied to us — "the people formerly known as patrons!" Great ideas and strategies which one librarian is already mulling over as she starts a fund-raising campaign in her community. Thanks again Andy!
Jane Dysart, CIL Conference Program Chair
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ITI Bloggers April 17th, 2007
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Andy Carvin of National Public Radio gave Tuesday morning’s opening keynote, filling in for the scheduled speaker, Liz Lawley, who was ill. Despite his short notice, Andy did a bang-up job of enlightening and entertaining the audience.
Carvin concentrated on the start of and increase in user-generated news content. His whole presentation is worth seeing, so check this link: www.andycarvin.com/complibraries.ppt. But for now, here are a few highlights:
Explaining the explosion of news posts by regular people, Carvin said, "What we’re seeng is a mass democratization of content" via social networking software. According to Pew stats, 48 million Americans have posted content online at some point in time. They used to be mostly young-ish, white, well-educated, suburban people. Now, he said, "The typical online content producer is no longer looking like me." Content creators have gotten more diverse as it’s taken less technology skills and less time to join the online movement.
He went on to highlight a number of really interesting news sites that are asking for and using content from everyday people. Small news organizations started it, but it’s become so popular — and so useful — that now even the big guys like CNN, Reuters, and the BBC are doing it.
Thanks to this "citizen journalism," he said "No single entity has a monopoly anymore on knowledge or a monopoly on ideas."
~KD
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ITI Bloggers April 17th, 2007
During Monday afternoon’s Metasearch & Clustering Engines presentation, Tamas Doszkocs, senior computer scientist at the National Library of Medicine, talked about the beginnings of searching multiple sources.
In the process, he gave a nice endorsement: He said the best multi-faceted clustering search OPAC he’s seen is that of the North Carolina State University libraries, which is powered by Endeca. "It’s a very nice catalog" that lets you drill down further and further into results sets.
~Kathy Dempsey, CIL Editor in Chief
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ITI Bloggers April 17th, 2007
I sat in on a session this afternoon in the "conference within a conference" known as Internet @ Schools East. And, just like in school, I actually learned something!
Dr. Carol Gordon was filling in for the scheduled speaker who couldn’t make it to DC due to the stormy weather in Massachusetts. She explained how younger students sometimes had trouble doing assignments in the library because they didn’t quite grasp concepts yet. For instance, how could they choose a "great athlete" to write about when they were too young to understand the concept of what really made an athlete great? How could they write about what made past comedians like Abbot & Costello funny when that type of humor had no relevance in the world they knew today? Often, Gordon said, teachers who didn’t consider these restrictions made the school librarians’ job much more difficult by sending students in to research things that they couldn’t fully understand.
Ensuring that all educators understand this psychology goes a long way toward enabling real learning.
~Kathy Dempsey
CIL Editor in Chief
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