LIS conference » Library & Literary Miscellany

5th July 2008

Library & Literary Miscellany Links of the Week

Hoorah, hooray for holiday weekends and for freedom itself! I hope everyone enjoyed the day yesterday and that you find some of the following Links of the Week stimulating, useful, or at least worth looking at:

Library

Dot-Mania: ICANN Opens the Domain Door by Barbara Quint at InfoToday (thanks to Librarian in Black with her dot-library or dot-lib…which do you like better? post for the link)

Keeping Your Computers Running Session posted at the LITA blog summarizing an ALA session on a topic near and dear to all our hearts (by necessity, if not by nature, anyway)-technology maintenance and troubleshooting

LibGig Your Career Your Community is a networking site for librarians and includes sections for careers, schools, and community with a bit of fun on the side such as the recent 6 Books we’d recommend to Batman post (thanks to the post at OPL Plus (not just OPLs anymore) for the heads up)

Mashing Up the Library by Beth Gallaway provides a summary of OCLC’s Library Mashups session

Thoughts on EBSCO 2.0 by The Krafty Librarian…like it or not, EBSCO 2.0’s coming soon and The Krafty Librarian discusses some of the features

Top Technology Trends for Libraries to Note: Sarah’s Top Technology Trends - Virtual Presentation for ALA 2008 by Sarah Houghton-Jan at Librarian in Black and Virtual Karen’s Top Tech Trends by Karen Coombs at the LITA blog; pointing to issues such as APIs, mobile devices, open access, and more

Literary

Comprehension is Not a Commodity presentation by Angela Maiers discussing reading comprehension and the importance of creating a deeper appreciation for reading (as in beyond extrinsic rewards); Maiers has made available other reading-related presentations on Slideshare as well

The Books That Changed Your Lives compilation of opinions over at Lifehacker (list includes the Bible, works from Ayn Rand, Douglas Adams, and many more…also many more opinions are proffered in the comments)

Ancient Plots: the Mystery in History (Part I) and Dark Age Detection: Historical Mysteries (Part II) by Sarah Weinman whose regular blog is Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind; this multi-part series is a fun and informative read for all who enjoy historical mysteries (which I do )

Ultimate Teen Reading List at Teenreads.com has been recently expanded and updated

Miscellany

10 Essential Sites for Tips and How-To’s recommended by Palin Ningthoujam at Mashable

10 Great Software Programs You Can Get Gratis by Peter Grad over at TechNewsWorld lists software recommendations such as OpenOffice and 7-Zip (thanks to iLibrarian for the link)

Common Craft Video: LinkedIn In Simple English embedded in a post over at Digital Inspiration (or view at the Common Craft site)

Keep Rocking: 30+ Sites for Free & Legal Musicby Sean P. Aune overat Mashable

Once Nearly Invisible To Search Engines, Flash Files Can Now Be Found And Indexed: Washington Post Article by Erik Shonfeld from Tech Crunch discussing how swf files have been made search-engine readable

Thing 63: PDF Form-topia PDF Form-filler Freeware by Learning 2.1: Explore…Discover…Play explores the use of Fox-It Reader as “a tool to add to your PDF arsenal” for filling in non-editable PDF forms

The Ultimate Guide to Special Needs Teaching from Teaching Tips offers more than 100+ resources and links pertaining to various special learning needs

What They Play–video game information for the rest of us over at Infodoodads points us to resources to help us move beyond our n00bs status

Internet Librarian 2007

Lots of blogs are talking about all of the ideas and information that were shared recently at the Internet Librarian 2007 conference (held as the eleventh annual conference in Monterey, CA • October 29-31, 2007), so I thought that I’d jump in and share some of my favorite findings. WebJunction (an awesome resource for librarians, by the by) provides a brief overview of the Internet Librarian 2007 conference.

Now that the conference has been held, presentations have been made, and attendees have returned home, WebJunction’s compilation serves to provide access to a sampling of conference presentations and conference summaries.

A couple of conference presenters/attendees whose content that I wanted to highlight are Darlene Fichter and David Lee King. Darlene Fichter followed the Web Development and Design Track at the Internet Librarian 2007conference, and, on her informative blog, she provides a nice summary of some of the highlights of this track for her. In his equally informative blog, David Lee King provides links to the PDF files of the three presentations that he gave at Internet Librarian 2007 (Introduction to Videoblogging (part of a preconference), Setting up the New Stuff: Planning and Implementing Library 2.0, and Topeka’s Second Life: Experiments in a Digital World).

Mainly, though, I have written this whole post just to be able to share the Cool Tools for Library Webmasters slides (for which Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone deserve the credit). Many of the Cool Tools are applicable beyond the webmaster, and 2.0 librarians may find themselves appropriating these Cool Tools to serve library functions such as programming, marketing, and overall customer service enhancements (or perhaps for use in their spare time just for the fun of it all).

A nice summation of the Cool Tools slideshow has been provided by LawLib Tech and by Instructional Design Resources, but there’s nothing like viewing the original slides for yourself. Here’s the slideshow (which can also be viewed via Slideshare…such a cool tool):

Darlene Fichter also makes her slides available at Slideshare for her Mashups & Data Visualizations Session (I didn’t embed this one, but just click on the link to view it).