The Biblio File

Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian has posted about her experience with ThinkeringSpaces, a beta version of a portable, scalable, learning/teaching/interactive space to be used in libraries. Some of the things they have incorporated so far is using RFID technology to let users add information to library resources, using Wii video game technology to allow users to manipulate library content in different ways, projectors and screens for content display, and a self-contained LAN.

The point is to bring spaces into libraries that let people collaborate around the content that already exists in in our buildings, add new content to the mix, mash it all up to create something new, and share it with the community. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a way to connect people with the physical world and help them make sense of it by interacting with and changing it.

I think something like this would work fabulously to add an interactive aspect to library displays, or to highlight different library resources, or, even better, librarians could work in conjunction with a professor to have such an installation combine course material and library resources to create a different, more interactive learning space.

Need some web work done? I know a guy. Two, in fact. Jesse Ewing (from Inkleaf Studio) and Scott Reid have launched Sons of State, for all your web site needs.

Need some wet work done? I know a guy for that too. (Call me)

Read/Write Web is reporting on a search engine I hadn’t heard of before: WorldWideScience.

WorldWideScience is a science portal developed and maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), an element of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy. The WorldWideScience Alliance, a partnership consisting of participating member countries provides the governance structure for the WorldWideScience.org portal.
When it debuted back in June 2007, it linked to 12 databases from 10 countries. Today, the portal links to 32 national, scientific databases and portals from 44 different countries.

I only ran a couple of searches, but it looks like this could be a good compliment to Google Scholar for those desperation science searches.

Sarah at LibrarianInBlack has pointed to a list of free online tools to help with writing and all the ancillary activities associated with writing. It’s a pretty extensive list, and there are some things there I will likely explore.

To it, though, I’d add another product. For the past several months I’ve been using Scrivener for my writing projects. I have really liked it so far, and I would definitely recommend it. And while I’ve used it for working on short stories, I think it especially shines for any longer writing projects (novels, screenplays, book-length projects). The biggest draw of Scrivener for me is that it combines a lot of useful and necessary tools –word processing, note taking, note organizing, outlining–and integrates them into one interface. Two things to know going in: it’s for Macs only, and it’s $40. But from my experience, it’s been well worth it. Check out the video on their site to get a better sense of how the thing actually works.

Kate at infodoodads reported on an applet that lets you highlight a portion of a web page, and then save or send those highlights. There is an online version, a bookmark version, and a Firefox Extension version. I downloaded the Firefox extension, and here is the link to Kate’s post, with my highlights:

http://awurl.com/rrnrpl75406

I came across this a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to post: Muxtape is an online service that lets you create playlists of mp3 files. Sadly, it looks as if you can only post one playlist per account. But, I’ve found that it’s a great way to browse for new music.

Campus Technology is reporting that Vanderbilt has released a version of its website designed to be accessed via an iPhone:

Vanderbilt University has released a version of its homepage designed for the Apple iPhone. The site was created by the Vanderbilt News Service’s Office of Web Communications, which is working to optimize the university Web site for other mobile devices.

In some ways I think this is cool, but at the same time I wonder if this isn’t jumping the gun a little bit, as I still haven’t seen a whole lot of students walking around with iPhones.

I had been looking forward to reading The Abstinence Teacher, given all the press it got: interviews with Perotta on NPR and BBC, a profile article in the NY Times. And, the premise of the story certainly holds the promise of interesting conflict. Ruth, a divorced, suburban sex-ed teacher is being pressured both at work and through her daughter’s soccer team by an evangelical church that is taking root in the town. They challenge her curriculum at the school, and the coach of her daughter’s team, Tim, is a recovering addict and prominent member of this church. After a particularly emotional victory, Tim leads his team of middle school girls, including Ruth’s daughter, in prayer. This causes the worlds of Ruth and Tim to intersect, and causes a crisis of faith, so to speak, in each character. With a plot like this, you can either end up with a book that challenges conventional (even polemic) perceptions of faith, a book that takes the mundane aspects of suburban living and twists them, blows them up until they represent bigger, more universal truths about how we live and choices we make, a story that compels us to identify with people who are different than we are and, in the process, leaves us different than when we were before we started. Or, you can end up with a TV movie of the week. Sadly, this book is much closer to the latter.

The overwhelming feeling I had when reading this book was that I was hearing a writer at work. Or, rather, an imaginer at work. Ruth and Tim felt like what someone would imagine representatives of these two opposing sides would be like, rather than fully formed people. It seems obvious from their first meeting that they will eventually come together (probably romantically) and the plot seems manipulated to make this happen, even in spite of what little character has been established. (In one scene, Tim shows up at Ruth’s door after having lied to her about her daughter, she slaps him across the face, and then with her next motion invites him into her house and serves him coffee.) Half-way through I started to wonder if Perotta was playing with caricature or archetype to some end. If he was, I hadn’t figured it out by the last page, and was not moved enough by the characters to parse through it again.

A couple of interesting articles on the future of libraries are making the rounds. The first is an article by Robert Darnton, University Librarian at Harvard, which appears in the New York Review of Books. Basically, he thinks there’s still a big future for research libraries:

. . . .Google Book Search, the largest undertaking of them all, will make research libraries obsolete. On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.

You need to read the rest of the article for his eight points, as well as his take on the (in)stability of information.

Harrison Scott Key at World on the Web has a bit of a counter argument, saying librarians need to do more to make their services necessary:

Here’s an idea: it’s never very effective to tell a younger generation that something old is important. They won’t believe you. You have to show them it’s important. So librarians need to do something to make their buildings important. Make them places where students must go. Make the information there more valuable than information somewhere else. Make them places where scholars must go, where they have to go. Make them places where knowledge is found. And if the internet won’t allow it, then we’ll simply be having far fewer libraries.

And, in Metafilter’s roundup of all this, another, alternative theory of librarianship is presented. Who told them about the Secret Society?????

Jesse at Inkleaf Studios sent me this link to Evernote. You should watch the video to appreciate it, but basically it’s an app that will capture a part of web page, save it as an image, and allow you to later search for it. What’s really cool, though, is that it will also allow you to search for text within the image. So you can also take a picture of, say, a business card (say, with your camera phone), import that picture into Evernote, and then be able to search for via the text on the card. Works with Mac OS X and Windows, but, sadly, you need OS X 10.5 if you are running it on the Mac side so those of use still lumbering under 10.4 are out of luck.