Library Delivery 2.0: Delivering Library Materials in the Age of NetFlix

An article in TechEssence.info discusses how Netflix and similar services are shaping expectations about product delivery, which in turn are driving libraries to rethink how items are delivered to their customers. Library Delivery 2.0 refers to the idea of delivering library materials into the user’s hands in a way that is personalized, convenient and fast. Library Delivery 2.0 builds on the concept of Library 2.0, a concept of a very different library service that operates according to the expectations of today’s library users.

Taming the Digital Beast

Andy Patrizio of Campus Technology Magazine asks, "Is your digital institutional repository out of control? It’s time to step back and look at contribution, access, rights, storage, and functionality—issues you don’t want to monkey with."

Well worth a read! Link to the article. And thanks to The Orange Grove

Museopen - online repository of classical music

Musopen is a community driven, online music repository started by a music and economics college student named Aaron Dunn.

This site takes music that is in the public domain, meaning a work that belongs to the community, and has it recorded by individuals and college/community orchestras throughout the United States and stored online so it can be accessed for free through this website.

Google on iPods and the future of digital media

Speaking at the FT World Communications Conference, Nikesh Arora, Google's VP of European operations, told delegates that, in the coming years, the plummeting price of storage and its increasing volume-to-size ratio will give iPods almost unlimited potential to hold music and video. Arora said, by 2012, iPods could launch at similar prices to those on sale now and yet be capable of holding a whole year's worth of video releases. Around 10 years down the line that could be expanded, creating iPods that can hold all the music ever sold commercially." He also said that that there will be greater convergence between mobile and internet, as consumers expect to be able to access traditional web content and services on the mobile platform.

From Silicon.com

LIBWORM - over 1000 library-related RSS feeds

LibWorm is a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries. LibWorm collects updates from about 1400 RSS feeds (and growing). The contents of these feeds are then available for searching, and search results can themselves be output as an RSS feed that the user can subscribe to either in his/her favourite aggregator or in LibWorm's built-in aggregator.

Amazon Launches "Askville"

Amazon has released a Question & Answers site of their own called Askville. Currently in invite-only Beta, the site looks cleaner than Yahoo Answers, and as opposed to Google Answers, you don’t have to pay to ask questions. Activity on the site – like asking a question, or answering one – is rewarded with “quest coins” which can later on be spent in Questville.

Topix

Monday, November 06, 2006
Go Topix! Go
TechCrunch has a piece on Topix, my favorite news engine. Here's a few things to keep in mind:"What does Topix offer that Yahoo! News and Google News don’t? A few things. When Topix relaunched in August, the company said its index had grown to include 50,000 news sources - 10 times more than the Google News and 7 times as large as Yahoo! News. Topix has topical pages, has strong search by zip code, integrates relatively active forums and visualization. The year long time line displayed with every search is a fast way to skip to a particular date in a news search and shows the context of the point in time you are skipping to. Try using the timeline on Topix and then try to accomplish the same result with Yahoo or Google news search. Topix also has the most extensive support for RSS."If you think you are doing a complete free news search by using Yahoo and/or Google news, think again.

Zamzar - Free online file conversion

From Library Stuff

Zamzar is a really handy site to which you upload files in most any format - whether a document, image, video or music file - convert them to most any format and have them emailed back to you. Really handy if you want go from, say, .avi to .ogg, or .m4a to .mp3. Lots of options!

Check out Zotero.

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

Some cool features include automatic capture of citation information from web pages, note taking and tagging.

Zotero is open source.

Free Library Journal Subscription for Lib School Students

From Librarian in Black

Library Journal is offering a free one year subscription to library school students. All you need is a valid and current student ID. To download a subscription request, go here.

Google launches mobile version of G-Mail

From CNET News

Google is very smart about mobile devices. On a PDA or cell phone, the Google search experience has been, for quite a while, very different than it is on a full-size screen. Google even parses Web pages it links to and tries to repackage them in a mobile-friendly way. (To force the Google mobile version, go to www.google.com/m.)

Gmail, though, has not been a great experience on mobile devices. But on Thursday Google released a mobile Java Gmail application for cell phones that makes using your Gmail account much easier. The new app--which will be preloaded onto some new Sprint phones, or available for download for anyone else who has a Java-capable phone here--is a very good mobile version of the Gmail Web app. The app gives Gmail its own custom menu system, which is much easier to navigate than a Web-based app would be on a cell phone. Gmail's message threading also shows up clearly, and the site displays attachments (like photos, Word documents) in the app.

National Novel Writing Month

From the site:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Pretty cool!