kittens

Here’s some super slides.

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I’ve just spent the last month or so making slides for my talk at the National Library about Second Life Libraries next Tuesday.

JESSAMYN WEST’S HTML
I try not to use proprietary software if possible, so at first I thought I’d use Jessamyn West’s HTML slide method, which is simple and elegant and very lightweight. They allow you to add notes and to select a “print” version for printing.

JO KAY’S PRETTY SECOND LIFE SLIDES
But then, I saw Jo Kay’s slides which she uses when she talks about Second Life and Australian educators. I just had to have me some of ’em – so, with Jo’s blessing, I stole the idea and made my first ever PowerPoint slides. Jo has taken snapshots in Second Life and used them as the background to her dot points…very pretty and shows the environment of Second Life comprehensively.

jokay.jpg

KEVIN YANK’S SCREENCAST
Another set of slides which caught my eye this week are Kevin Yank’s slides from a talk he did for VALA libraryfolk in Melbourne in November 2006 about Recognising Web 2.0. He’s made a screencast using the live audio (including audience responses) from his talk as the soundtrack to the relevant slides. There is a captioned version, which somehow made his points clearer still. It would have been nice if the questions from the floor were audible as well as the answers – but it’s a small quibble.

STEPHEN ABRAMS AND CUTE KITTENS
I also like Stephen Abram’s slides, like the 124 he made for this talk, The Social Library2.0, before the SLA New York Chapter on 10 January 2007. Who wouldn’t at least be interested by someone who started a talk with a picture of a gun pointing at a kitten? (Yay! this is the third post I get to tag “kittens”).

stevekitten.jpg

THE LESSIG METHOD
My favourite, favourite slides of all are from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig. He uses aroung 250 slides each talk, many of them with a single white word in typewriter font on a black background. His timing and recall is perfect, so he will have a single word emphasising the key point of a sentence as he utters it. Here is an example, a talk about Free Culture at OSCON in 2002. People now write about the “Lessig Method” of making slides.

SLIDESHARE.NET
Another slidey sort of discovery recently is slideshare.net. It’s like Flickr or YouTube, but for slides. Watch out for my Flying Librarians of Oz slides appearing there mid-February, under the username sirexkat.

Grow your own OPAC…but save those kittens.

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MPOW recently switched on a function on our III Opac which allows users to add a star rating to items in the catalogue. In one of those late night conversations in Second Life, I showed it to Dave Pattern, who was motivated by the green tinge he felt to code his own version and pop it over his Dynix installation. Gee I wish I had the skills to code that.

Today he’s casually mentioned that the University of Huddersfield will go live with user comments on the OPAC in the next week. Gee I wish I had the skills to code that.

But..Dave, in turn, has said “Gee I wish I had time to do that”….about….

John Blyberg…..

….. who has created a “social OPAC” interface which sits over Ann Arbor’s III Innopac library management system. It allows user rating, tagging and reviews. He’s released the code as well. And made a screencast to show how to use it.

Dave would “kill a box of cute kittens with my bare hands to be able to take on a project like this“. Well, John and Dave, I’d care for a box of cute kittens until they were grown (infinitely more of a sacrifice) to have the coding skills to do what you guys are doing.

Keep it up. Please keep sharing…and those of us with lesser skills promise to try to persuade those higher up in the food chain at our workplaces that guys like you need time and support to do what you do. We’ll even try to change things so we can care for any “free as in kittens” services you produce.

Free kittens for your IT department?

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Sometimes I read things so sensible and so useful that I want to print them out and staple them to the forehead of every librarian I know…and add two copies to mine.

Karen G. Schneider has written a beautifully grounded, good humoured piece about what it’s like to be at the receiving end of IT requests from librarians – IT and Sympathy – in ALA Techsource. It has a very clear message about chanelling technolust to what is achievable, and considering what the usually smart and well intentioned, but very overloaded, IT department may already be doing.

She includes some strategies for IT planning by non-IT departments. A very brief summary below:

  1. Find out what’s already on your IT department’s plate
  2. Plan for your department. Write a timeline including the most basic needs and your blue sky dreams
  3. Work out what’s “free as in beer”, and what’s “free as in kittens”. If it’s the latter, who’s changing the sandbox?
  4. Share your plans with IT.

Will her post stop me from jumping up and down and wanting everything shiny “now, now, now”?. Don’t know. Hope so. Maybe now I’ll add in “when, when, when” and “how,how,how” and “please,please,please” for good measure.