Check out infosoup.org

thx, andrew, for showing this to me!   i clicked around and found some great features! among them that made my top 10 list:

1.  clean looking page that does not have lots of clutter

2.  search box front and center (yea - just what patrons want!)

3.  customizing the search box (in the "i'm looking for" box on the right)

4.  their tagline is awesome!

okay, so there weren't 10 things i could name that i liked.  offhand, it doesn't look like a library website either!  there's nothing that hit me in the first few seconds that said LIBRARY, is this good or bad?

i also recently perused the Cleveland Public Library - for what reason i can't remember now.  i like how they designed their site. 

1.  while you immediately know it's a library, they concisely put all their important stuff in the upper left corner where one's eye automatically falls anyway

2.  their tagline is awesome, too

3.  they post an option to read their site as "text only/mobile version" - how cool is that?  (it'd be much cooler if i could go mobile via my iphone, but i guess that's a conversation with santa)

4.  it's most interesting, when you search their catalog it automatically searches their consortium catalog.  what a neat idea!  it's like being able to search our catalog and prospector at the same time.  the way results are presented made sense to me in understanding what was available from my library vs from the larger system.  hmmm, can we do this?

any library websites you have visited/liked/disliked for any reason?

have a wonderful weekend; it's hard to believe there's only 32 days left in the year.  if yr at the parade of lights, wave to me!  i'll be one of the frozen marching parents holding lights in support of public education :)

Its Kindle-time!

there's been some press about Amazon's new ebook reader called Kindle. it caught my eye twice today when one of my newsfeeds mentioned it as well as my weekly LII fix. LII, as always, provides a good link to more information, here's the link to the CNET site/review where there's a nice video review.

if yr interested in new technology or are thinking of a really nice holiday gift, take a look at this video!

as for me, it's quite interesting to hear about what new technology is doing. no backlighting so the reading is easier on the eye. the wireless access w/o needing to be connected to the internet is something that i had not heard of (yes, you may ask i do live under a rock sometimes!). while this is something i won't be looking for from santa, i'm curious as to what's on your tech-christmas-list!

Dewey Browser

Have you heard of DeweyBrowser? A visual interface beta from OCLC. You enter your search term and click on the orange boxes to get to search results. Way more visual but gives some structure to what Dewey really means.

One nice feature is that once you get to a title you can search your own library. Since we’re members of OCLC, it searches our catalog. One bad feature is that if the title is not available it puts you in the ISN list of others located nearby. Duh…this part doesn’t make sense. Another search took me to a keyword search screen instead – which is a better option!

Try out a few searches, let me know what you think!

More info about this project

Teen Site....rollin' along

the home page is a done deal! well, just about. john has been able to import programs from the calendar onto the home page so there will always be fresh content there to entice teens. we have a box which scrolls thru ALD Live, Homework Help and Ask Colorado as reminders of these services. we'll build additional logos for our databases, too.

as we move pages into the teen area, we'll be adding content and testing to make sure there are no broken links.

we'll have a soft launch in january - make the teens aware of the new looking site - and give y'all time to play with it.

want to prepare yourself for this new site? here are some 2.0 things you can do now:

2.0 know how to input a comment to any given site. try this blog as a safe place to experiment! just hit the comment link and type in "test" if you don't actually want to say anything (altho it's fun to hear your thoughts and not just mine :)

2.0 know what del.icio.us is and what it does. think about the functions it can serve as a supplementary reference tool. enter a website into the del.icio.us account. this is the current teen site; if yr interested talk to alyson!

once you've accomplished these, then you'll have a great grasp of the new features of the teen site. let me know when you've hit these milestones (hint, hint prize forthcoming)!!!

Games for Kids

The Games page on Tales' Treehouse was hit 1075 times in October (but guess what?! The Databases page was hit 857 times!). I've made a few changes to the Games page--added some new games, dusted off some old games. What games do you find kids asking for? Oh, and did you know that there is a shortcut on the desktop of the children's computers that takes kids straight to Tales' Games page? You can find your favorites!

Clifford (www.pbs.org)
Little People (http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=2054&e=activities)
I Spy (http://www.scholastic.com/kids/games.htm)

Take a look and let me know what you think!

Productivity during holiday week, hmmmm

tis the challenge to continue to blog during a holiday week when one won't be working, but stuffing, i mean eating and eating well. in my culture the word we use is "gotso" - which i think means feast or to have good food. it's only around the holidays that we make our special dishes so it's no wonder the salvitory glands get ramped up.........

which is nothing even closely resembling a post about technology and there's not even a graceful segueway into the topic of blog interest today so consider this sentence the awkward transition.

what type of internet user are you? take the internet typology test from the pew institute and see where you stack up. i found mine surprisingly close. the test takes only a couple of minutes - what did yours reveal?

del.icio.us

oh what fun del.icio.us is (altho its rather a pain to type it!). attended a meeting where some of our AST's are inputting websites to create a soon-to-be delivered ALD del.icio.us account. why? well, it's geared as a staff tool so that those conducting reference can access sites readily and know they are of quality. it's one way to get at mary kaye's list (or at least part of it) and it's portable ~~ it's wherever you've got a computer.

doing vr? try accessing the account for some readily available websites.

in a fit of 2.0 passion, i actually created my own del.icio.us account and am happily changing over my IE favorites. there have been times when i've wanted to look at something from home and realized the bookmarked site was.....not there, too.

lastly, the new teen site (see yesterday's post) will be using del.icio.us as a homework & research tool. we envision that when you click on this button, one of the things you will see is the tag cloud of subjects. click and get websites!

if you have any websites you feel are worthy of entry into either del.icio.us account, please comment. would love to hear from you about a) websites you use b) creating your own del.icio.us or c) ways we can make this better!

Wow - it's the new teen site!

Take a look, take a goooood look! This is the debut of the teen site as it will look when we launch in under 2 months. While this image may not be very readable, let me introduce you:

• the buttons across the top are permanent and will stay as you scroll down the page. they read:

>books & reading
>homework & research
>movies & music
>random stuff
>@ your library

• on the left will be a new pick of the day (e.g. changes daily)
• above the pick of the day are the different "skins" in which you can change your background color
• it is blog style which means we will be filling in little boxes with various content
• the library events box will be auto - filled with teen program information coming from the calendar
• the ALD Live box will rotate images of AskColorado, VR, maybe databases as well as video and podcast content as we have fresh stuff

Your input???????????

Sproose it!

www.sproose.com – yet another new social search engine on the horizon. Take a look at it though and see if you find it useful or better! Here are some of the intriguing things sproose does:

returns results based on user input

you can sign up as a user so you can vote on websites you feel are good ones. The number of votes is returned as part of your search result. You can also vote off bad websites.

In the spirit of community, you can click on the user name to find other pages that person liked

You can choose web pages, video pages, look at popular tags and active users.

Friday Fun and Professional Devt, too!

this blog seemingly seems to be dedicated to not so serious topics on friday....hmmm.....this could be the start of a bad habit.

today's post comes to you thru serendipity...that when you're looking for something else you find good stuff that applies elsewhere, like this blog :)

while i was searching for information on how to practice being more energy efficient and leave a smaller carbon footprint, i came across a website called commoncraft.com. their mission is to produce videos which aim to take the complexity out of communication. the video which relates to energy efficiency is "new light bulbs in plain english" which is cleverly done.

how might this relate you ask to technology --- to the purpose of this blog ? well, they have other videos such as rss in plain english or social networking in plain english. if you have a few minutes (they're not very long) and want to grow your brain, then take a look at these videos. what do you think?

happy weekend!

Encore, updated!

This blog has talked about the new III product, Encore, before. Today was able to sit in on a demonstration of it live, for the first time to see what it does!

Positive features:

• Its version 2.0 that will be out later next year will have the tagging and commenting feature included in it.
• it includes "facets" as part of search results which let you limit by various criteria such as location, type of material. these are nice value-added features
• would include a prominent link to prospector catalog

Negative features:

• the federated search box ends up in the lower right corner which does not much promote the research databases. disclaimer: this can be moved (yea!)
• the other part of the federated search they showed is that search results were returned by names of databases. if you were joe patron, would you click on "general onefile" to know you were getting article results? disclaimer: this was probably demo'd with iii's research pro federated search product. if another product was purchased would different results show?

there are a number of library catalogs which have the encore 1.1 beta out there if you want to take a look. i've listed a few below*****go search and play. tell me how you'd rate your patron experience with encore!

nashville public library

scottsdale public library

michigan state university libraries

Great Stuff Happenin' at Apple!

Am i making a shameless plug for Apple? I hope not. Curiousity about what Apple does with academics prompted me to go looking. They do a lot!

http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/

http://www.apple.com/education/products/ipod/

Check out their great stuff!

Followup on Internet Librarian, still

Was looking on Internet Librarian's website for some of the presentations since i could not scribe quickly enough (at least quickly enough to read my notes later :). Came across the Twitter posts they provided, which led me to Michael Sauer's post about unintended consequences of the social web. thought his column was pretty provacative in terms of raising questions and issues that we will continue to wrestle with as we move the library from a bricks and mortar joint to one that thrives online. take a look, respond on his blog!

Friday fun

in culling thru notes and such from Internet Librarian, I remembered one irreverent youtube video, called the Facebook song.

i leave you w/ this post. enjoy/comment/hate/ but have a great weekend!

playing with itunes

internet librarian was a great experience and one of the best i attended in terms of returning with information that's right up my alley!

yesterday i attended a session in which the presenter talked about using itunes at his college library. don't you love great minds that push boundaries? it's schaffer library (http://www.union.edu/library/) at union college. (i'm home so i have no excuse for not making this a live link except that my time is being marked by child needing computer for homework....)

anyway, schaffer library created playlists of songs which go with classes in which music is being studied. they also loaded ipods with songs for students to "check out" as part of a class. in addition, apple has something called linkmaker in which you can put the URL into the MARC record from itunes. this was authorized under the itunes university college arrangement - something that i think we're gonna have to look at further!

why not deliver in the ipod format whenever possible? cool stuff!