I’ve been asked a couple of times about the radio mouse I use for presentations. It’s a Logitech VX Revolution .
I’m a fan of using animated entrances in Powerpoint – so any of my talks involve 2-8 mouse clicks per slide – bringing in the headings one by one as I talk. I bought my radio mouse so that I could wander around and click as I went…but it’s become so much more…..
It fits my hand exactly and prevents fatigue.
It is much smoother and has more precise action than regular mice.
It has squillions of buttons that can be programmed. I have set it so that I can do all camera and avatar movement in Second Life from the mouse without using the keyboard at all (Do I do this? No – I’m too used to the keyboard)
It has a free spinning scroll wheel that I just whizz to get instantly to the bottom of a pdf file.
It has a cute little slot at the back that the transmitter fits into so I never lose it
The battery seems to last forever
I even went so far as to buy it’s bigger cousin, the Logitech G5 Gaming mouse, when I found it for 2/3 retail price. Even though the cord is more like rope than wire, and it has super-duper polytetrafluoroehtylene feet that make it glide like Disney-on-Ice , it’s not quite the same. It does improve my experience at my PC considerably, and I would suggest one as a Christmas gift for anyone with both a PC and hands.
If, however, you are completely sick of clicking, pop over to Don’t ClickIt . to see what navigation could look like without mouse clicks (and watch 20 second replays of the paths taken by the last users of the site to see whether they gave into temptation and clicked)
We know that the nature of the web is changing from read only to read/write. Traditionally libraries have been concerned about access to reading material. Is it time to look toward access to read / write material too – not just by cataloguing or linking to it, but by creating a platform for our users ?
It’s disruptive
The novel – mainstay of many public library collections – only came into existence in English in 1740 with Richardson’s Pamela. A sustained fictional narrative was a new thing. I presume its success was partly due to rising literacy among those likely to consume it, but also a new mindset where fiction was accepted as content matter worth reading.
Over 150 years after the first novel – it was still a disruptive technology. American librarians were discussing what they called the “fiction problem” – which was that
people liked fiction, while many librarians regarded fiction-reading as little better than pool-playing.
Readers’ Advisory Service: New Directions. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, RQ v30 n4 p503 – 18 Sum 19
The read/write web is similarly disruptive. Just like the librarians of the 1900s didn’t want to become custodians and enablers of something they considered trivial and contrary to their “real purpose”, social networking software is viewed by many contemporary librarians in a similar way.
Our skills can be easily adapted
Librarians actually have skills that would make us very good at providing social networking platforms for our users. We have skills at evaluating information resources. Many libraries have built complex matrices to assess potential online journal subscriptions – which include technical IT factors like platform independence, compatibility with existing systems – as well as user interface, ease of access, ease of use. We often liaise with technical services or IT to get our databases working well. We have a lot of expertise as the “middle layer” between databases and users – setting it up, integrating it into existing systems, writing and giving training.
Is using other social platforms “privatisating information by stealth” ?
A participant in the Victoria Public Libraries Learning 2.0 programme expressed in their final post (on the deliciously named blog “It’s the Queen of Darkness, Pal” ) concerns about libraries using private internet conglomerates to store their data. I guess this covers services like Picture Australia using Flickr or subject guides created using a del.icio.us tag cloud:
Personally, my take on web 2.0 is that libraries need to get much more actively involved “from the inside” rather than whooping from the sidelines (if I can go back to my Oprah analogy, in case you missed it).
I think that using all the technologies in the learning 2.0 program is a great idea, but really I think we need to move far beyond just using other companies gadgets and gizmos to and going “wow that’s pretty cool, what a nifty idea” to being the ones that are coming up with the ideas and actually inventing the gizmos.
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I have said this before, but, for example, rather than encouraging everyone to use blogger, I think libraries, especially state and national libraries should be setting up their own blogging sites for their users. Where will Blogger be in 100 years? Who will be looking great grandmother Ethel’s blog from when she was a teenager? Rather than entrusting all our cultural data to corporate conglomerates, why not put it in the hands of our oldest, and most esteemed public institutions, our libraries?
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Frankly, I think we need to start doing these things or we will become irrelevant and then disappear (yikes).
Obviously libraries aren’t going to try out-wiki Wikipedia or out-blog blogger, but there are times when it makes sense for someone in an organisation to provide social networking platforms on behalf of the organisation – and I’d argue that our skills perfectly place us to be that someone. Lets take providing blogging software for an institution for example. Here’s some instances where it makes sense for an organisation to self-host.:
If the DNS is important. If you want your users to be able to find you using the URL associated with your institution. Yes, you can associate a hosted site with your own URL, but often the network security department isn’t going to let you do that.
If your clients are not charged for traffic inside a local network. At my uni, students are not charged for traffic on sites within the Western Australian university network – but are for those outside. Independent hosting would force students to pay to access those sites.
If it belongs on an intranet.
If the organisation has an ethical or statutory duty to ensure data is 100% secure and archivable.
Staff are required to use a blog as part of their job – eg. instead of a departmental newsletter. They should be able to use their existing staff authentication to author the blog and not be forced off-site.
It’s already happening
UThink: blogs at the University of Minnesota is a project where the University Libraries are using Movable Type to host and maintain blogs for their university community. I have heard on the grapevine that there are another couple of university libraries in North America planning to do the same thing.
…the Libraries have numerous goals with this project: to promote intellectual freedom, to help build communities of interest on campus, to investigate the connections between blogging and the traditional academic enterprise, and to retain the cultural memory of the institution.
Back in the late 80’s, an Australian band called Little Heroes had a song called One Perfect Day, where a lovelorn chap was singing to his girlfriend in far off “Eng-a-land”. There was a line that I always thought was “Did you get a man for last night?” – which I thought was rather liberal of him. Years later I found out it referred to the coal miners’ strike in Thatcher’s Britain and the line was actually “Did the Government fall last niiiiiight?”.
Yes, our government did fall last night, and yes, we are now rather less Liberal. I’ve had a couple of non-Australians ask me what I think about it. Here’s some random musings…which are biased personal impressions rather than anything informational 🙂
The Parties
In Australia the two major parties – the conservative Liberals and the more liberal Labor (which tends to represent labourers) – are really rather similar and economically conservative. The Liberals team up with the more conservative Nationals (which aims to represent rural voters) to form the Coalition. Historically the major difference is in:
industrial relations (Liberal more employer focus)
support base (Labor traditionally workers and Unions)
John Howard
John Howard was Liberal Prime Ministerfor the last 11 years. He was first elected the year I started school and he’s held the seat for 33 years. With 77% of the vote counted, it looks like he has lost his seat to Maxine McKew. I’m not a great fan of his policies, but I was impressed with his morning habit of a brisk walk (complete with running shoes and bodyguards). His “Go for Growth” slogan turned my stomach – I think we need to focus on reducing consumption and using what we have in a smarter way.
Around the time that Howard was first elected to Bennelong, McKew became a journalist for our national broadcaster, the ABC. She has a reputation for being intelligent and incisive – although last night she made a speech where she refused to claim victory and used rather saccharine tropes – “Sister Catherine the blind 90 year old nun” and “the 9 year old girl who urged her parents to vote for Kevin because “He’s a good Prime Minister for children”. Meh.
Kevin Rudd
Described by one of my twitterfriends last night as “Tin-Tin with grey hair”, Rudd is an ex-diplomat from Queensland and seems like the closest thing to John Howard the Labor party could find – without actually being John Howard.
He has described himself as a Christian Socialist and overtly wants to ensure that God is not commandeered by the conservatives for political purposes. I believe strongly in the separation of church and state and am alarmed at the way religion has crept onto the political agenda worldwide. I’m a bit unsettled by the biases that Rudd may bring to the position.
He seems to be a “steady plodder” who some believe will now implement more radical reforms than hinted at during the electioneering. His acceptance speech last night deliberately touched on many groups of Australians – indigenous, migrant, rural, Union, youth – and he seemed to foreground a more pluralistic society.
Labor promised some big changes which I support-
1. Ratifying the Kyoto protocol
2. Taking Australian troops out of combat positions in IRAQ and moving them to admin positions. (Our troops are still committed there, however, and it doesn’t bring them home 🙁 )
3. Repealing Work Choices laws (this is an industrial relations system that eroded some basic workers’ rights)
My electorate – Fremantle
Strangely enough, I was at school for eight years with Melissa Parke, the woman who was elected our new Labor member. I think she’ll do a very good job with integrity and good will – but wonder whether she’ll be worn down by the cynicism of the whole enterprise.
I’m chuffed that the Greens in the Fremantle electorate here received 14% of the vote compared 7% for the entire country.
I’m rather disturbed by the stated Labor policy on internet filtering and libraries:
Labor believes that the Government should do all that it can to protect Australians, and particularly, Australian children from harmful and inappropriate internet content.
To this end, in March 2006, Labor announced its ISP filtering policy. Labor’s ISP filtering policy will require Internet Service Providers to block access to websites that-are listed as by ACMA as containing prohibited content such as child pornography, acts of extreme violence and X-rated material.
ISP filtering under a Rudd Labor government will be applied to all households (unless they choose to opt-out), schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as libraries.
The Australian National Library’s Pandora Project has been archiving online election material, like:
My only regret now the election is over is that the Spooky Men will no longer be flashmobbing to sing Vote the Bastards Out (a song we had to counsel our children not to accidentally sing in the schoolyard at their Nice Posh School ).
Here are the slides and notes from my presentation on 23 November 2007 at the Teaching and Learning Sharecase at University of Western Australia. It outlined why we ran workshops in Second Life at our library, how we did it and the outcomes. I had 10 minutes – so had about 2 minutes to explain what Second Life is…..interesting thing to attempt.
(I was tempted to call the presentation Fluffy Librarianship – but of course I didn’t )
Reviewed key trends in the practice of teaching, learning,and creativity
• Trends were identified through a careful analysis of interviews, articles, papers, and published research.
• Ranked in order of importance, to identify those likely to have a the most significant impact in education in the next five years.
…In the same way that the number and sophistication of websites grew very quickly as more people began to browse, virtual locations will become more common and more mature as the trend continues. Virtual worlds offer flexible spaces for learning and exploration— educational use of these spaces is already underway and growing.
A work colleague and I adapted a version for Murdoch University Library and I made this screencast to show staff what it does. If you want to play with LibX, you can download and install our copy here LibX (Murdoch University Library). It is still an experimental version- right now we are testing it for a month or so and trying to break it. If you do play with it, I’d appreciate feedback. Thanks to Matthias for some handholding while we made it.
WHAT DOES IT DO ?
LibX is a Firefox extension, which means that it can change the way your browser looks and displays information. It lets you access library resources without being on the any of the library’s home pages. It was developed at Virginia Tech and anyone can adapt a version for their library using the “do-it yourself” edition builder. Some of the voodoo magic it does is:
1. Puts a library search box into your browser
2. Hotlinks any ISBN displayed in a browser so that clicking it searches your library catalogue
3. Inserts SFX links into web pages so users can click on articles from places like Wikipedia, or books from Amazon, and see whether a library has a work.
4. Lets you authenticate to access a journal article by right clicking on the page and reloading it – rather than going through the library pages.
Your library has a website. Very good. But what do you know about your library’s web presence? I’ve been thinking about this after reading Karen Coombes’ post The future of web services isn’t the Library website .
If your library is like most libraries, you’ve put information on your website with a menu structure with a logical path for people to follow. You do know that your users probably aren’t using those paths, don’t you? You do know that there are other places that they could be finding you online, don’t you?
TRAFFIC
Some of your web pages are louder than others and get more hits – do you know which ones? Have you made these high demand pages the easiest ones to get to from your home page?
HOME PAGE
Is your home page the one that gets the most hits – or have your users decided that another one of your pages is actually the most important page? Are you ensuring that “must know” information is available on your pseudo-home page?
USING SEARCH ENGINES
Do you have a “vanity search” from google set up so you know what people are saying about your library online? How about Technorati ? Have you made sure that all information about your library is “scrape-able” so that it can be indexed by search engines?
VISIBILITY ON THE INTERNET
Have you thought about what “being on the internet” means? Yes, your website is “on the internet”, but that’s a bit like saying – “we put an ad on TV”. Did you put it on Community TV at 2am, or on Channel 10 in the middle of the new “Kath ‘n’ Kim” on a Sunday night?
Is your website visible on the bit of the ‘net where your users hang out?
Have you thought about other places you could be on the web beside your website?
Facebook is the 7th most popular website in the world (Alexa traffic rank 19Nov 2007). Two weeks ago, they allowed organisations to create their own profile via Facebook Pages. Does your library have a Facebook Page?
CHAT
Can your users get to you live using their preferred web tools? Can they contact a librarian via chat from their own chat client? Do you have a Meebo type widget embedded in your pages or available for them to embed where they want?
RSS FEEDS
Do you offer your website content to your users via RSS? Do you have a feed on your library news blog or on your new books list?
TAKE-AWAY TOOLS
Do you make take-away tools that allow your users to embed your web content on their personal bits of the ‘net?
A custom built LibX toolbar will let you embed your library into your users’ browser. It will add searchboxes to your catalogue, hotlink to your catalogue any ISBNs or book titles displayed in the browser and provide Journal authentication just by right clicking on a site. It is free and you can create a do-it-yourself version at the LibX site.
Facebook allows you to create an application that will put a library search box and a link to your “Ask a Librarian” service on user profiles.
OpenSocial allows you to create a google gadget that can be embedded in social networks that are OpenSocial partners – like MySpace, Ning and Plaxo.
MAKING TOOLS AVAILABLE
Take-away tools are for people who want to hang out in their own bit of the web rather than the library website – so publicising these via the website probably isn’t useful. How will you publicise these? (I actually have no idea and would love to hear suggestions ).
MOBILE
Your pages can be accessed sensibly via a mobile device, can’t they? Or do you only have a web presence when users access you via a PC?
PARENT INSTITUTION
Are you intimately involved with web presence of your parent company? Can internal customers find you easily from your parent institution’s web presence?
COLLABORATION
Do you provide chances for your users to help create your web presence? Can other users hear their stories about your library web presence ?
In our household, early December usually means organising Mr9’s birthday party, school holidays and the lead up to Christmas. This year, I’ll be doing all that….but for a week at the start of December, somehow Perth turns into a digital do-er’s paradise.
There are around 40 different digital/cultural/techie sessions between four events. I could:
attend a scholarly paper on immersive environments for displaying cultural heritage
play a game involving the city streets and my bluetooth phone
a Digital Content Festival, featuring a program of screenings, Show ‘n Tells by Industry speakers from around the world, live audiovisual performances and innovative cross-media events.
BM!F will be at the Perth Town Hall, Western Australia 2-9 December 2007, with some events at various venues in the days leading up to then.
We’ve used our secret geek-powers to score some really amazing international speakers – have a look at the speakers list 🙂
Register at the booth at the Perth Town Hall from 10am – 5pm
(Okay, so it’s part of Byte-Me – but this is one event I may actually be able to get to…)
With the aid of your mobile phone as your communication device with the ghosts, you’ll uncover clues and solve puzzles to help unravel the mystery of who the ghosts are and why they were so cruelly imprisoned, all the while exploring some of Perth’s most exciting places….
…Ghost Town’s infrastructure will allow an unlimited number of players to participate whenever they please. Players’ primary interface to their game will be their mobile, which they’ll use to communicate with a number of objects installed throughout the city, including Bluetooth-enabled computers and physical markers. Finding these objects, and the information they contain, will score players points and give them access to plot fragments over phone, SMS, and other media. This innovative application of everyday technologies will provide a truly unique gaming experience.
… the 5th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Australasia and Southeast Asia, an annual event conducted in the Australasia-South East Asia region.
GRAPHITE 2007 will provide a unique atmosphere for researchers, technologists, artists, industry professionals, educators and students to mingle while taking in the latest technical and artistic accomplishments from around the globe.
nullarbor is a demoparty and game development competition combined. It is an event designed to bring together a community of Australasian programmers, designers, artists and musicians to promote interactive technologies and a form of electronic art called demos. We hope to provide a forum where people can get to know each other, exchange ideas, as well as be given an opportunity to demonstrate, and improve, their skills.
The major focus of the event are the competitions which are designed to provide an incentive for individuals and groups to demonstrate their talents.
From it’s origins in Perth Western Australia, MASSIVE is an annual end of year celebration for all the world’s hard working people in the Digital and Computing related fields. At it’s heart, MASSIVE is a reflective social event which salutes you, your work, your colleagues and your industry.
Designers, architects, web developers, film and television, gamers, academics, photographers, animators, authors, programmers, scientists, researchers, musicians, marketing, advertisers, artists are all welcome.
As if you smug twopointopians could ever be the Annoyed Librarian. You guys who influence so many people by your example and change libraries that way !!
As you mentioned, you all have your snarky times that would unmask you as AL. But – my friends – this is just too obvious. Would you really be snarking at all if you were worried about blowing your cover – don’t you think that someone would make the connections that you are now so tenuously pushing? Ergo your snarkiness disproves your claim.
I, however, have never been snarky in my blogging life. (See – I can do “self righteous” just to prove I can get the tone right).
So why have I been doing it? Two reasons:
1) Of course, to sew disharmony in the US biblioblogosphere so that we Antipodean biblioblabbers become the loudest and most successful library blogging voices of our generation.
And the best bit is that – NOONE WOULD SUSPECT… I had the perfect cover.
2) You guys are just all wrong about WRONG – and I had to show it. There is no glory or sense in trying things out when you could be wrong…things just have to be right 100% of the time – as I have constantly shown is possible via my AL persona.
That’s why I’ve been after people like Laura Cohen and David Lee King who try to speak with a sincere voice and take risks. Who do they think they are. Do they really think that anyone will learn anything when they get it wrong? Do they really think that exposing themselves like that will encourage others take similar personal and professional risks? What would happen in libraryland if we all carried on like that? Huh?
