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Lazy Easter patchwork post

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I’m taking Easter off from PCs ‘n’ stuff, I think. I don’t even have a suitably thoughtful post to keep at the top of the aggregator for the next week..so four disjointed, lazy woman bitties…..

1. A GROSS GENERALIZATION BASED ON A HUNCH WITH NO EVIDENCE TO BACK IT UP

The biblioblogosphere has seemed a bit quiet in the last couple of months. Is it because many of our libraries are implementing the projects we’ve been jumping up and down about in the last year?

Last year there was a lot of “Wow..this stuff is so COOOOL and I think we could use it in our libraries, maybe..why doesn’t my workplace GET IT”. Now it seems to be more often “I’ve been asked to talk to a roomful of my colleagues about this Cool Stuff”.

I think there’s a glimmer of “I’m setting up this really great project using the tools I was speculating about last year”..and even “one of my colleagues had this great idea how we could use this stuff”. Maybe I’m just projecting….

2. WHAT THEY SAID

Ever find yourself nodding and saying “aha, aha, yep, aha” all through a post?. Here’s three from the last 24 hours, where the only thing I have to say more on the topic is “what they said”.

3. AN IMAGE

hedgehog_001.jpg

 

Emerald Dumont talks to BrianA Corleone atop his treasure trove and hopes the dragon’s egg will hatch.

4. A CLIP

Via HeyJude

David Berlind, Managing Editor of ZDNet describes mashups in a way that makes me understand where APIs fit in the mashup food chain.
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/U9sENSA_sjI” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]

Embedded video: What’s a mashup

Data as a social space.

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A change is happening in how we relate to our documents and data. We’re moving toward using them as social spaces.

At conferences, where the presentations and papers (the “data”) are the ostensible reason for people to be there, I’ve always found the informal exchange (the “social”) much more fun and beneficial. This is now happening online. Here’s some examples of what I mean…

1. Adding a “meebo me” widget to your library home page. Users don’t have to leave the site to connect with a librarian.

2. A “discuss” function in google docs. Ryan, the Other Librarian, and I have been sharing a couple of google docs while we work on a library related something. Last night I noticed the “discuss” tab on a shared spreadsheet and emailed him so we could test it out. While “in” the document, we were chatting, and uploading and amending the document. We could have opened another document and continued our chat there. He’s in Canada, and – while I can pretend to be a jaded, 2.0 kind of gal, used to the way the net has shrunk the world – I still found it novel and it gave me a buzz.

3. A couple of weeks ago I blogged on VLINT about visiting the Michigan Library Consortium’s library in Second Life and climbing all over a 3D graph they had, representing library membership.

mlcpiegraph_001.jpeg

4. Distance learning in Second Life. I can imagine a building set up with all the resources needed for a class…links to external sites and cached documents..video presentations available on a player. The difference between that and a tradtional web site is that students can send their avs. to that “place” and see who else is there. While accessing the info, they can discuss their experience of the course and are more likely to ask each other for help once they have made that casual contact. More like the intangible social and academic benefits gained by going to lectures or tutes on campus.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Up until now