Turning the Pages from the British Library

The British Library has developed software that allows viewers to experience rare books in a conventional way. About 20 books, including the original Alice in Wonderland, Sketches by Leonardo, and William Blake's Notebook, are already available for viewing using Turning the Pages.

Librarians - 24/7

Can get enough of the library in your work? How about reading about librarians? I'm sure all the interesting and unusual characters you encounter in your work days -on both sides of the desk- are in these novels.

Thanks to the Library Mistress, Monika Bargmann, for creating an amazing list of novels and some films about female librarians, archivists and booksellers, etc. Most entries are in English, but for those in German, there's always Babel Fish. If you recall the German you took in high school or college and just need a little help, here's an wonderful dictionary

Copyright slide-rule

Copyright law. Not my favorite subject, but an important one to the librarian profession. If you are like me and do not have the time or inclination to wade through pages of legal jargon or sit through hours of mind numbing copyright workshops, then you will appreciate this tool from the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy.

The copyright slide-rule is designed to help librarians determine the copyright status of creative works.

Wordle

At Wordle

Pick any blog or website with RSS feed
Plug it into Wordle
Create and customize a tag cloud
Font, color, and layout can edited
Voila!

Here is one from our very own CL

The Centered Librarian App for Facebook

The Centered Librarian is maintained by dedicated bloggers at the College Center for Library Automation. We have recently ported the blog to a Facebook application! If you enjoy our posts you might want to install the application on your Facebook page so even if you aren't logged into the blog, even if you are not watching your rss aggregator, even if all you are doing is squandering time playing some mindless challenge game on Facebook, you can still stay up to date with TCL posts! Just Do It!

Educators Coop Residential Community in Second Life

A project of the non-profit Educators Virtual Research Group, the Educators Coop is a 3-D virtual world community of university faculty, librarians, and K-12 teachers actively teaching or researching in Second Life. Launched in July 2007, the Educators Coop is a self-funded pilot community of 42 members from 32 different educational institutions who regularly meet to share virtual world teaching strategies, design virtual world research projects, collaborate on interdisciplinary conference sessions, and most importantly, create a support system for geospatially separated education practitioners interested in teaching and research in virtual worlds.

"The heart of our effort is building a real community that provides educators with a unique cooperative residential environment in SL offering opportunities for creating meaningful new relationships and collaborations. Residents enjoy these benefits and share in the responsibility for cultivating and supporting a community spirit."

You can visit them in SL!

Present Like Steve Jobs

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is well known for his electrifying presentations. Communications coach Carmine Gallo discusses the various techniques Jobs uses to captivate and inspire his audience — techniques that can easily be applied to your next presentation. BTW...there are LOTS of videos covering all aspects of marketing, sales, customer relations and more at the BNET site!



And thanks to librarytechie for the link!

Jangle (Just Another Next Generation Library Environment)

Jangle (Just Another Next Generation Library Environment) is an Open Source project to provide API access to library systems. They are following the the DLF ILS Basic Discovery Technical Recommendation. The DLF Technical Recommendation is the end product of the "Berkeley Accord", where most major ILS vendors agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards to harvest data, query available information and permit the creation of stable links. Jangle = middleware for an interface between ILS and external applications.

A more complete description of Jangle is posted on the Dillettante's Ball here and here. It's an ambitious and even audacious attempt. It could change the way librarians interact with their ILS vendors and customers. If you have the skills, Atom Publishing Protocol and "use, manage or just want simple access to a library system" they welcome your participation.

More about Jangle at jangle.org and Google groups. Slides from a lightning talk on Jangle available here.

Cover Flow-style Photo Viewing for the Web

If you haven't seen PicLens yet, you simply MUST try it out! The browser addon is a lot of fun to play with and makes searching and viewing images on the web very enjoyable.

PicLens works on both Mac and PC, and has versions for FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Safari .

PicLens is a photo viewer for the web that operates much like Apple's "Cover-Flow" technology for the iPhone and iTunes. It creates a desktop-like photo viewing experience for supported sites, by pulling out all images on a page (or in an online gallery) and creating a slideshow. PicLens supports a range of sites, including the image search engines from the big five search sites, social networks Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster, and photosharing sites Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, and Smugmug.

I can hardly wait for the day we can browse our virtual "stacks" uing this cool technology!

Send video recording in email with JING

I am crazy about a new easy recording software called Jing

It is made by Techsmith, the same forlks that do Camtasia and SnagIt.

It is like a quick, mini version of Camtasia but the really cool thing is that you can save it as a URL (though Screencast.com) and then pop it in an email or IM message.

I made one to show you. View it here.

The usability of look and feel

Frank Spillers on Demystifying Usability says, "Balancing good visual design with usability is challenging, though not impossible." He offers the following Usability Guidelines for Graphic Elements:

Use of graphical elements generally
Images should have a connection with the audience
Avoid clip-art (excellent advice, in my opinion!)
Icons should be intuitive, crisp and used strategically (not randomly)
Branding elements should be clear and distinct and follow company branding guidelines.
Use graphic design to enhance visual appeal
Be sensible about minimalism

For more details visit Demystifying Usability. Spiller provides monthly posts on a wide range of usability and user centered design topics.

Are you Stumbling yet?

My fave new (well, new to me) social software is StumbleUpon

See what the BBC says...
"StumbleUpon is a brilliant
downloadable toolbar that beds
into your browser and gives you
the chance to surf through thousands
of excellent pages that have been
stumbled upon by other web-users"

I have found sites I am sure I would never have found any other way!

Download that toolbar and... Start Stumbling!!

Are we searching Google?

Edge is a site you can count on to provide thought provoking essays. They say, they seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have them ask each other the questions they're asking themselves. Today I read the story Engineer's Dreams by George Dyson at the Edge. It's only 6 pages and compresses a lot of history about the development of search in that short space. It also manages to be entertaining and throught-provoking as it asks, "Are we searching Google or is Google searching us?"

google newsletter returns

After many posts on many lists about whether or not librarians had been used and dissed (
http://tinyurl.com/59cklf) the Google Newsletter is back. Coincidence or not, it's nice to have it back again. Here's a
link to the newsletter.

The Centered Librarian Returns

We are back and with a full tank and at least four people riding shotgun. After several months hiatus we are more postalicious than ever! So refresh your feeds, clean out your caches and prepare to be illuminated!

(or at least mildly amused)