Its been radio silence here for awhile due to me switching jobs and getting up and running. I recently accepted the position of System Administrator at Ann Arbor District Library. It wasn’t an easy decision as I wasn’t actively looking for new employment, but sometimes you have to take opportunities when they come. I’m still impressed daily by the culture and innovation present here. Many of us in the technology area of AADL are fans of open source software and work with it every day.

Continue reading →

A nice article in Escapist magazine about gaming in libraries. Hard to choose just a small section to quote but definitely give it a read. The issue can be downloaded in PDF as well. Neiburger stresses that libraries should be places for recreation, too. Their size, resources and virtually unlimited membership mean they can do gaming kids can't do at home, like hold a Mario Kart tournament with eight TVs or broadcast the matches on cable access television.

Continue reading →

I’ve mentioned Wesabe’s Data Bill of Rights before. John Battelle has now posted on his formulation of a bill of rights: So, I submit for your review, editing and clarification, a new draft of what rights we, as consumers, might demand from companies making hay off the data we create as we trip across the web Some of the rights he lists are: Data Transparency The ability to tell what data is stored is probably one of the easier ones to provide but John points out the more difficult point of possibly showing what else is derived from your data such as recommendations.

Continue reading →

Offline-mode has gotten some press since it was added to the Firefox roadmap. Some of the rails programmers have probably been watching Joyent Slingshot: Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work both online and offline (with synchronization), and with drag/drop into and out of the application as in a standard desktop application. There is also the Dojo Offline Toolkit, among many others. Google has entered the offline app area with an opensource browser plugin called Google Gears that allows web applications to have an offline mode.

Continue reading →

From the site: reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly. Digitizing works from Internet Archive right now.

Continue reading →

One the great things about libraries are the events some hold, be it author talks, workshops or movies. Unfortunately I’ve been rather disappointed by the way events are presented on most library sites. Some don’t even feature or list them on the homepage which is a shame. There are some other things I think would be nice or just possibilities. iCal and RSS Many are starting to use blog software so have RSS but few have iCal.

Continue reading →

I read 2600 once in awhile as it usually has a few decent articles on barriers and how to get around them. Its also nice to see what people are using or playing with. In the recent Winter 2006-2007 issue there was an article titled “Library Self-Checkout Machine Exploit”. If you get a copy I suggest browsing through it. The gist is that because on some (all??) machines the barcode is scanned from the top and the book desensitized from the bottom you can abuse it to desensitize books your not checking out (stack the books).

Continue reading →

I’d probably have to agree: I hope ubicomp really does take a hundred years. That way I'll be spared the indignity of having to use it. It’s worth reading the full post. The examples seem too familiar.

Continue reading →

Particletree has a nice post called The Underbelly of a Web App where he talks about things that need to go on behind the scenes. As someone who has worked in support for many years, I can’t stress some enough: Good Administration Interfaces You can have the best people in your support team but if they can’t get the information they need. I have to deal with quite a few interfaces where I’m not completely sure the information I’m getting is complete, useful or accurate.

Continue reading →

Via the Bokardo blog: I think that social features are bigger than many people view them. They are a long-term strategy that takes lots of resources. You can't simply bolt on a feature here or there (well, unless it's article sharing or something super simple like that) and expect to realize the benefits of making a richer social experience for your users. The article he wrote on Brain Sparks talks about some of the benefits that include more data and trust.

Continue reading →