Shorpy is a collection of photographs presented using a blog, but it is an especially captivating collection.  A combination of historical photographs, found images, and personal/family photos, there is rarely an entry that doesn’t hold some interest for the viewer.

I especially like the pictures with an element of mystery… the attempt to gain some context of what is happening or where/when the photograph was taken.

found via Librarians’ Internet Index

A few items of note to update yesterday’s post:

The Library is Now Closed (a.k.a. Shuttered Library) is a blog created by an Ohio librarian named Mike (didn’t see a last name) which is compiling links to a vast amount of information and resources for libraries and supporters in Ohio. (thanks Jessamyn!)

Save Ohio Libraries is a blog detailing actions that people and libraries can take to, as the title suggests, save Ohio libraries.

A couple of additional links to Pdf articles that I missed yesterday, both from the “Balanced Budget Framework” page.  Note that neither of these have been properly named; save them to your hard drive and add “.pdf” to the end of the file name so that your computer will know how to open them (or you can open your Pdf reader and open the files from the program’s “File” menu):

• Balance Sheet by Line Item (detailed budget information, including the Governor, Senate, and House versions of  budget allocations)
• Highlighted State Strategies (a list of a dozen states, with their approaches towards balancing their respective budgets)

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest is a New York Times article about blogging, specifically about the study showing an estimated 95% of blogs have not been updated in over 4 months.

Does this signal an end to blogging?  The death of a communication tool?  Not at all.  As the article points out, much of the information conveyed through blogging can also be conveyed through other tools, such as Facebook and Twitter.

As with all tools, users will seek out the tool that best fits their task (or at least the best that fits their skill set, and will still accomplish the task).  Blogging was an early “web 2.0″ tool, and was adopted and adapted to serve many purposes.  Through a combination of better tools for specific tasks, loss of interest/time/support for the creators, and the limits of readers to follow more than a given number of blogs on a particular topic, it is no surprise that many blogs are going into hibernation.

There is also a discussion regarding the expectations of the blogger.  If one strives for fame, fortune and glory, go for it… but a majority of bloggers will not achieve that level.  I suspect that more than a few people set goals beyond what the market could provide their particular skill set and audience.

When I set out to start blogging, I simply wanted to utilize a forum that would allow me to collect thoughts and ideas that I felt were important, and to use it to organize my own interests and actions, as well as to convey what I posted to those who might be interested.  Over time the focus has expanded to include more of my thoughts and ideas (I still cringe a bit when using the word “I”), but still focuses on what is happening in the library technology world.

Blogging has been harder to maintain than I originally thought, but it has also been far more rewarding.  I am still searching for the balance between all of the activities that demand attention, but I suspect that Libology will remain in the “active” category for some time.

found via ResourceShelf

Libology is now available in an audio version.  This is made possible through a service called Odiogo, which works with content providers to enable a streamlined means of creating downloadable audio files of web sites.  What this means for readers is that you can download and listen to posts read by a machine that sounds like Stephen Hawking’s suave younger brother.

While the voice definitely is computer generated, the inflections are quite natural, and the content very understandable.  In addition, I hold any WordPress add-on to the golden rule:  thou shalt not break validation for XHTML, CSS or RSS.

Odiogo found via a post on Catalogablog

OnlineColleges.net has a post listing their Top 10 Commencement Speeches for Tech Lovers, containing descriptions and links to speeches given by, among others,  Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Page (Google), Eric Schmidt (Google), Melissa Mayer (Google), and Ray and Tom Magliozzi (Car Talk on NPR).

thanks to Kelly Sonora for the e-mail tip!

– additional comment:  Kelly Sonora is fictional; the person most directly responsible for the content of the above linked post is Jessica Merritt.  This isn’t a problem, the blog is valid and the information is worthy of our time; just wanted make the credit more accurate….

Feedmil is a search engine for RSS feeds.  It does this specific task very, very well.  Search for feeds relating to any keywords you wish, and modify your results using a set of slides that emphasize/de-emphasize words that show up in your results.

I wish they had a more detailed “about” page, especially information on how they determine popularity, authority, quality, and relevance.

found via RSS4Lib

Eric Shonfeld at TechCrunch writes:

“Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages.”

Twitter.  RSS.  Facebook.  Digg.  You-Name-It-Feed.  It is becoming apparent that this is the next big shift in internet usage, and, as with the previous shifts, it is hard to guess what the effects will be, and who will be affected.

And this, like previous shifts, will not supplant previous internet use trends.  HTML, or some form of it, will still be very dominant.  Blogs and Wikis will continue to exist, and will be useful tools for certain types of communication and interaction.  Integration will continue to be the norm, with the “now” infusing itself throughout.  How will this change be considered dramatic?

“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”

This “cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”  Think about this.  How much of your web presence is based on control:  control of layout, content, contributors, and most of all, control over the rate at which change occurs?   For a library web site, how much of this control is able to be ceded before the concept of a library web site itself changes, without controls?

As with many future technology issues, now is the time to begin thinking, discussing, understanding all of this.  We cannot begin the process of deciding or planning, because none of us can predict how this will play out.  What will we have in place to deal with this, to anticipate this, to harness this?  One benefit of this process will be the inevitable inspiration that some will have about the potential of streams; a future must-have library web site technology might come from this.

Start thinking!

Saw a post on TechCrunch that indicated that Amazon has opened their offerings of blog subscriptions for the Kindle reader to all blogs that sign up.  So now Libology is available to readers of the Kindle… with two caveats:

1. It costs.  A lot.  Way more than you are paying now.  A whopping $1.99 per month (and I have no say in the price, so there).
2. I get some of the money, a whopping 30% (that’s 66 cents per month per subscription).

So really, if you don’t feel the need to pay to read this stuff, don’t.  Keep reading this stuff for free, though.  And if you are philosophically inclined (or reclined) against my getting paid, then, again, don’t.

Seriously, if you are really into the Kindle, and find the blog-perusing experience to be great, then I am glad to provide Libology as an option, just as I have provided a mobile-browser friendly version.  They do offer a 14-day trial if you want an excuse to try it out.  Just don’t feel guilty about canceling… I understand, trust me!

6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline is a post on the zenhabits blog which addresses the stress we go through as we try to accomplish projects and achieve goals.

I like that he stresses that discipline is an illusion; what we need to focus on instead is motivation.

The only thing I might add to this would be that we often times set ourselves up for failure in our projects and goals.  Evaluating what we truly want, what can realistically achieve with the resources we have (time, money, energy, etc.), and what is actually worth doing can make all the difference.

found via Journey of a Kitten

This post will contain just a couple of links, but there is a wealth of information on the other end of each:

• 101 Great Free Sites and Downloads You’ve Probably Never Heard Of has been put together by PC World.  I will bet you have heard of at least a few of these, and I would recommend using this as a starting point in your search for resources and applications (i.e. if you see something helpful, look for other resources that provide the same… PC World sometimes skips great resources for simply new and flashy resources).  found via ResourceShelf
• 30+ Places to Find Creative Commons Media is a post on the SitePoint blog, which is a great resource for web developers.  This list is fairly focused, but many people forget about the treasure trove that is Creative Commons when they look for pictures, sound or other media resources.

In its continuing examination of library blogs, HotStuff 2.0 has added a visualization of emotional content.

Here is the current visualization for Libology:

How to read the information, from HotStuff’s description:

1. The overall scatter of words in the ANEW list are shown as small blue dots. This is shown simply as a guide to indicate the overall shape (as per the previous image that resembled the map of Australia).
2. The average emotional content of each blog post is shown as a small green cross. This is a calculated by looking for all occurrences of ANEW words in the blog post. The average position is then calculated. Therefore, if a blog post contained lots of strongly negative content, you would expect the green cross to be towards the bottom-left.
3. The average emotional content of all the blog posts is shown as a larger red cross. This is calculated as before, but is the average for all of the content on the blog. Therefore, if a blog contained lots of posts with strongly positive content, you would expect the red cross to be towards the bottom-right.
4. Word usage frequency is indicated by the transparent circles. This gives an indication of the type of words being used on the blog. Larger circles indicate that words with the same pleasure & arousal values have been used more frequently.

The red X falls in the Neutral Pleasure, Medium Arousal section, but definitely far enough towards the right to suggest that there is Positive Pleasure at work as well.  This seems about right, as I don’t tend to go negative all that often (and when I do I try to remain constructive), and my writing voice tends to be more formal, leading to a Neutral/Medium tone.

I haven’t seen anything on the HotStuff site that makes me feel that there is a grand truth in their categorization of various library blogs, but they are doing some really interesting experiments that provide glimpses of what is there.  I recommend checking out their listings for the library blogs that you follow.

And the title of this post?  Well, I had my Myers-Briggs Type – INFP – as my automobile’s license plate for several years, so this seemed to be the way to go.

found through Walt at Random

Publisher Confidential is a creation by the Unshelved crew that strives to convey to publishers what libraries wish they would know.  It consists of brief statements illustrated with the familiar Mallville Public Library staff.  The booklet is being distributed to the BookExpo America (BEA) mailing list, so a lot of publisher’s representative will see it and hopefully take heed.

Some of the selections I especially like upon first reading:

• Start your periodical with Vol. 1, Issue 1.
• Unusual packaging creates problems.
• In the book, tell us how to pronounce the author’s name.
• Free Ebooks from the shackles of D.R.M.
• Not all fonts are created equal.

There are many more… and all are worth reading.

via the Unshelved Blog

ALA TechSource has a brief blogger forum post on the state of E-Book Readers.  The quote that I think is most worth thinking about comes from Jason Griffey:

E-books are the future of reading in a very real way, simply because at some point they will be too cheap to not use. One of my staff brought a receipt to me this week for a laptop that the library bought in 2000. It was $3600. I just priced netbooks for my library, and can get a machine that is ridiculously more powerful than the year-2000 laptop for under $350. The Kindle, and most other e-readers, are hovering around the $350 or so dollar mark right now. In ten years, what will they cost? How can paper continue to compete with Moore’s Law?

Not only does it make sense, for reasons of legality (terms of use) and usability, to wait before purchasing and implementing E-Readers in a library, but it also makes sense from a monetary standpoint.  Amazon’s Kindle is king of the hill right now, but I think the big one is yet to arrive.  Watch for it, however:  when the convergence of price, usability, and usefulness happens, you want to be ready.

Oracle has purchased Sun Microsystems.

This is significant on many levels.  Many of our library systems run on software or hardware from these companies.  The Voyager library I used to work for used an Oracle database running on a Sun Solaris server.  The clients (Circulation, Cataloging, Acquisitions, etc.) for III’s Millennium system run on Java.

Many web-based software platforms use MySQL (an open-source database project owned by Sun), including many, many blogs (including this one) wikis and CMS.

Many of us use OpenOffice as either their primary or as an additional office suite.

I am not saying that we are at risk for losing these foundations of our library and internet software programs.  The fact that OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice are all open source means that we can trust that they will be with us in some form for as long as there is a demand (a trust that cannot be equally placed with any closed source software, which can disappear with the collapse or acquisition of the company holding the software rights).

What I am sure of is that we will see changes.  Oracle has a strategy, or if it doesn’t, it will.  Some of these programs will likely see greater support and resources (hopefully OpenOffice), others will likely see less (hopefully none of them).  Some may become more focused towards a particular segment of the technology world (watch MySQL for this possibility).

Look at what you use, and recognize that today marks a turning point for some of the software.   Hopefully it is for the better.

found via TechCrunch and MetaFilter

Evernote is an online service that serves an interesting purpose:  it allows you to indicate digital items that you wish to remember, it stores them, and then makes the entire collection searchable.

Or more specifically, you can have it remember all your blog posts, tweets, iPhone items (photographs, etc.), typed notes, e-mails… whatever you tell it to store.  Everything gets indexed in their database, and will be there for you to retrieve at whatever time you wish to do so.

Right now this is simply a neat idea, and assuming that it works as smoothly as it’s description, a good way of archiving the wide varieties of communication and digital storage we use in our daily lives.  However, I think it is more than that… I suspect that this is the social leading edge of what is becoming more and more necessary in the digital age: the necessity of having some sort of structure to the hodge-podge of data that accumulates like peanut shells in a sports bar.

Another way of viewing this is that it is similar to the ideas behind the Semantic Web.  This isn’t a perfect match, of course, but the ability to match up commonalities between different chunks of data is the goal in each of these endeavors.  Understand that the amount and variation of the data is not going to be reduced in the years to come… we are going to need tools like this just to keep abreast of the tide of information that we will encounter.

Watch for other companies to address this idea; I will likely wait for something that can reside on my own server space (perhaps syncing indexes with others for greater effect), and preferably open source, rather than trust that this or some other cloud will achieve permanence.

found via the Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian

Now that Google Ventures has been officially announced, I can go public with my own news:

Libology is one of the first group of startup companies which will be receiving Google Ventures funding.  I have been in talks with someone from their Cambridge office over the past few weeks, just sent in the signed contract yesterday, and today the terms of the contract take effect.

The biggest change you will notice is that they requested some design changes to this blog, mainly to make it easier to integrate with other Google services.  (See below for screenshots)  If you are viewing this through a feed reader, check out the main page of this blog, or view this post.

Another change you may notice is that I will stop being critical in any way, shape or form when referring to Google or any of their partners, including OCLC.

And, of course, one must always remember what today is!

Google Style Main Page

Post Googlized

The Internet Resources Newsletter is a British online publication listing items of interest for “academics, students, engineers, scientists and social scientists.”

They should add librarian to that list, because there are quite a few excellent resources in this month’s issue on the current issue, a couple that I recognize from this blog.  There are a variety of ways to subscribe, including e-mail and rss.

Disclaimer:  I am listed in their Blogorama section for April 2009; checking my traffic logs is how I found the newsletter for this post.

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, the Annoyed Librarian addresses the topic of library support staff, library workers, paraprofessionals, library assistants, or whatever it is we’re called these days.  How about paraprofesupportstantstaff?

As with all humor, especially the pointed variety, there is a grain of truth in this that stings a bit.

Time for a coffee break, I guess….

(I am not the annoyed librarian… not that anyone thought I was, mind you….)

Sir Tim Berner-Lee started what is now known as the World Wide Web exactly twenty years ago.

In this posted video from Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) 2009, he discusses how it started, where we are, and where we might be going.

So think about libraries and the web… what we have done in the past 20 years, were we are now, and where we can go.

found via TechCrunch

(and since it happens to be on the same topic, a happy birthday shout-out to Kristine as well!)

The Washington State Library has compiled a group of resources called Hard Times in Washington Libraries for the purpose of giving libraries, library staff, and library users ideas and tools to adapt to the current and upcoming fiscal crunch.

Included in the staff section of Hard Times are resources for Grants, learning opportunities, and advocacy, as well as a blog for ongoing additions and updates.

They have also created a page on WebJunction Washington containing resources that library staff can use to help patrons.  It was through this resource that I found a great four-page document called Shifting Gears : Rethinking Resources in Tough Times (pdf) created by Rose Chenowith, Library Development Consultant for the Alliance Library System in Illinois, who has worked with Reaching Forward South (my former place of conference).

This is a model for one way that libraries can get the word out and make a difference.  Ask yourself what you can do.  Check out what resources your area can provide.  WebJunction, your state library, your regional library systems, and various community organizations offer many resources that can make a difference for you, your library, and your library’s patrons.

found via LISNews