Roy Tennant's Planet

Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we've learned. Bling Nation's payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account. Here's how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and "Bank" branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special "Bling Nation" credit card machines that will scan the chips.

Two new reports from ACRL serve to remind the academic library community that our future is increasingly one based on digital collections and a virtual presence. Both the Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025 and the 2010 Top Ten Trends in Academic Libraries point to the importance of paying attention to our external environment and the ways in which it could impact on our operations and services. The short-term view in the latter report makes multiple references to digitization projects and an increasingly electronic collection; that’s certainly what many of our user community members want us to offer. But the former report points to one scenario that may come to pass well before 2025, that should concern all of us who acknowledge our growing digital future.

Of the scenarios that the majority of the respondents thought were both possible and likely to happen sooner rather than later, the likelihood of disruptive cyberwar, cybercrime and cyberterrorism was among the top four. Any one of these different forms of cyber attack has the potential to cripple a largely digital academic library operation.

The same week the 2025 report was issued, MIT’s Technology Review for July/August 2010 featured an article on the dangers posed by cyber warfare:

Ingenious solutions are multiplying, but the attacks are multiplying faster still. And this year’s revelations of China-based attacks against corporate and political targets, including Google and the Dalai Lama, suggest that sophisticated electronic espionage is expanding as well. “What we’ve been seeing, over the last decade or so, is that Moore’s Law is working more for the bad guys than the good guys

So what does all of this mean for academic libraries? Clearly we are poorly positioned, as are our institutions, to have much impact on the growing possibilities for global cyberwar. Even Google, with all of its resources, was breached by cyberattacks from China. Russia lives under constant threat of cyberterrorism from its enemies. The United States is taking this so seriously that it just appointed a general who will focus entirely on preventing cyber attacks and developing a strategy for engaging in global cyber warfare.

So at best we need to be aware and alert, and add this new and challenging threat to those other ones in our disaster plans. What would we do without access to our digital resources? How would we communicate with our users and each other? How would we support both on campus and off-campus faculty and learners if there was an extended loss of connectivity, files, networks or other essentials of our digital age? Just as with all those disasters for which we prepare in our plans, be they fire, floods or worse, we all hope they never come to pass. But be prepared we must.

Finally, the threat of cyber war and terrorism should bring attention to the value academic libraries provide to their communities as stewards of the print institutional collection and experts in locating information in those collective assets. The challenge of balancing growing print collections and diminishing space already moves us toward growing our digital materials. There are many good reasons to maintain strong print collections, and the potential for a total network collapse should remind us that doing so is just one of our many important responsibilities.

At Velocity 2010, John Rauser presented four funny and powerful examples of cultural change, from a campaign at his office to get people to fill the coffee pot after taking the last cup, to an award winning advertising campaign. This talk explains how to "sneak past people's mental filters" and make things happen.

This past year the Curricular and Research Support group on campus piloted a program that we hoped would fit into our over-all goals of both improving the ways we support coursework and also making all of our jobs a little less reactive, a little more proactive, and therefore a little more sustainable given lots to do and reductions in all kinds of resources. We called them Production Meetings (a term borrowed from Hollywood), and the idea was that a full cast of academic support professionals would meet with a professor early on in the course-planning phase, several times before the professor taught the course, and then as needed while the course was underway. We’d work together to brainstorm ways of making potentially support-intensive assignments work smoothly while all the while keeping things focused on the learning goals of the course and of the assignment.

And in a lot of ways, these Production Meetings seem to have worked really well. I always try to talk very clearly with professors about the learning goals for their courses and assignments so that I can figure out the ratio of fish to fishing polls I should be handing out to students, and these meetings gave me much more nuanced views of the goals than I’m often able to glean in other settings. It also gave me a much bigger picture view of the course, so that I could recommend (in one case) reducing the library-related work quite a lot in order to leave time for the more pedagogically relevant work in the course.

One thing the Production Meetings didn’t do, though, was make me any less reactive. If you’ve ever taught a course, you know that the syllabus is never quite chiseled into stone. Due dates shift. Assignments adjust as you get to know your students. And so when these Production Meetings left me feeling like I had a timeline for my term’s work, with specific due dates for things like a research guide, individual meetings with students, and classes, it turns out they did me a disservice. With everyone feeling so much more “in the loop” than we really were, we forgot to check in with each other and keep each other apprised of changes. In my case, it ended up leaving me scrambling at the last minute over and over when I would otherwise have just been scrambling at the third-to-last minute.

Granted, it was a pilot program, and we all learned a lot from that experience. Next time we’ll have a much better sense of how and when to check in with each other. Next time there will be more expectation on the part of the professors that they can’t change their syllabi quite as much when 5 or 6 other units on campus are depending on the plan. Next time the 5 or 6 other units will know better than to think the syllabus is final.

But I wonder if being proactive is really the highest good in the first place. I advocated for it strongly for years, and I still think that advanced planning is better than no planning most of the time, and I still think that the more we can talk with professors about their learning goals in advance, the better. But a classroom is actually an inherently reactive place. Students react to new knowledge, each in their own way and at their own pace; professors react to students, modulating delivery and content to match their students’ needs.

There’s got to be a way to balance the delicious reactiveness of a classroom with some organizational proactiveness, of course. But for right now, I think I’ll practice privileging ways of making space for reactiveness.

Really interesting summary of the ALA Annual Conference panel presentation, Cataloging and Beyond: The Year of Cataloging Research (found at the American Libraries' ALA membership blog).

Who says that librarians can’t let their hair down and have some fun? The LITA happy hour on Friday at the Mixx Bar was a great example to the contrary. The bar area was filled with people networking, chatting, and generally having a good time.

I wasn’t sure what to expect since I had never been to a LITA event before and didn’t know anyone there. However, people all around were smiling and many people were quick to open their circle and let a new-comer join the conversation. I met Abigail Goben the Hedgehog Librarian wearing a hedgehog necklace, two new incoming LITA Board members, and many others.

It’s great to host a happy hour on the first night because it gives people the opportunity to meet people casually before the conference really begins. Also, have you heard that word-of-mouth is the best way to get out information about your organization’s events and services? The same applies to happy hour. I invited several people to the Mixx who hadn’t heard about the event but who were happy (for at least an hour) to join in the fun.

Some of the great tidbits of conversation topics I heard were:

• The awesomeness and efficiency of making group decisions online, rather than at long meetings with stacks of paper
• The importance of cross-training all staff members to break down those silo barriers
• The necessity (sometimes) of moving around the country to get the job you want – then having to tough it out in that location for a least a few years before looking for new jobs

The take away message? Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and have a good time with your fellow librarians/techies. After a long day of panels and discussions it’s nice to have a chance to “talk shop” over a pint of beer and see what new solutions and opportunities arise. And if you missed the LITA happy hour, maybe you can crash another division or round table get-together!

Joseph Dal Molin, one of founders of the WorldVistA project and a speaker in the health care track at the upcoming OSCON convention, recently spoke with me about the Department of Veterans Affairs' historic VistA system and its expansion as an open source effort.

Specific topics covered in the 31-minute audio interview include:

• How VistA evolved within a feedback loop.
• How organizations outside the Department of Veterans Affairs use VistA.
• How WorldVistA and other groups in the VistA community adapt the system to civilian needs and health care requirements.
• A look at some of the tools for developing with VistA.

Dal Molin also provided links to projects and resources touched upon in the interview:

• VistA
• WorldVistA
• Medsphere
• OVID

---

Joseph Dal Molin will be part of two health-related sessions at next month's OSCON convention (running July 19-23 in Portland, Ore.). Learn more about OSCON's new health track.

The real time web is a little complicated as a concept and has the potential to change the dynamics of the web forever. If you’re trying to understand and learn more, then this post is a great place to start:

Top 10 Presentations About the Real-Time Web

It is a series of 10 slideshare presentations (some have sound) which go through some of the issues and opportunities that institutions, businesses and people can exploit with the real time web.

Enjoy.

Stephen

We recently announced that Oregon is the first state to begin offering Google Apps to public schools. Today, Colorado and Iowa are joining the movement. Google Apps for Education will now be available to more than 3,000 schools across the two states.

These state-wide agreements enable schools and districts to benefit from centralized resources such as deployment support and training materials, paving the way for an easy transition to Google Apps—including Gmail, Docs, Sites, Calendar, Video and Groups—in their classrooms, immediately.

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter said it best: “I’m pleased to see the Statewide Internet Portal Authority (SIPA) continue its tradition of bringing innovative tools to members of the Colorado public. By leveraging the Internet, educators are able to bring new ways of learning to the classroom and connect with students in exciting and challenging ways.” And Brent Siegrist, Director of Iowa Area Education Agencies Services, reflects, “As a former teacher, I can see how these tools will engage students, make the classroom a more vibrant place and allow teachers to work together more collaboratively.”

Saving money is just one reason schools are moving to Apps. Educators and students from JeffCo Public Schools, the largest school district in Colorado with more than 85,000 students, have been using Google Apps to help students collaborate and learn by working together. Teachers in Colorado and Iowa praise the “anytime, anywhere” availability of Google Apps. They’re using the unique online collaboration tools to teach feedback and revision strategies to students, and are even starting to go paperless on a number of assignments.

This week we’re also introducing a set of training solutions for schools to start making the most of Google Apps. We’re also extending the promotion for Google Message Security to allow primary and secondary schools opt-in to the email filtering service free until the end of this year.

If you’d like to learn more, come meet the Google Apps Education Team and some of the teachers using Google Apps in Colorado today, Monday June 28, through Wednesday at the annual ISTE conference. Stop by booth #2536 and take a seat in our teaching theater to learn more about what Google Apps can do for your school. Executive Directory of SIPA John Conley will join us at our Google Block Party after the conference today. We hope you’ll join us to learn more about Colorado’s decision to move to Google Apps.

Posted by Jaime Casap, Google Apps Education Manager

On Sunday, I had the privilege of presenting about digital experiences with John Blyberg, Bobbi Newman, and Toby Greenwalt. The room was packed, there were great questions afterwards … and I think it went well!

Here are the slides for my portion of the talk (and here’s a link to Toby’s too).

Share:

Related Posts

• Inviting Comments
• Designing the Digital Experience Presentation
• IL2009: Experience Design Makeover
• Conversation is Experience
• Rethinking the 3rd Place

Complete video of this year’s Top Tech Trends is now available! This year’s trendsters include

~John Blyberg
~Lorcan Dempsey
~Jason Griffey
~Monique Sendze
~Cindi Trainor
~Joan Frye Williams

The session is moderated by Gregg Silvis, chair of the Top Tech Trends committee.

Watch below or visit ustream for the archived video.

This is just a great set of 38 slides from Edison Research’s just released “report on social network usage, based on polling data from phone calls to a representative sample of 1,753 Americans. The study compares the behavior and demographics of frequent users of social networks to those of the population at large.”

“Though social networking is rapidly becoming more common throughout the wider population, it is still most popular among the young; students are especially overrepresented. Women are bigger users than men. The biggest social networkers are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be big Internet users and early-adopters of new gadgets. But they still think the mobile phone is the technology that has had the biggest impact on their lives. In a somewhat off-topic result, Pandora is absolutely slaughtering the competition in online audio brand recognition.”

A Comprehensive Look At Who Uses Social Networks And How

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-comprehensive-look-at-who-uses-social-networks-and-how-2010-6#-9#ixzz0rcMmRnLc

Stephen

Posted by Diego Puppin, Engineer, and Brandon Badger, Product Manager

1. The Diary of Samuel Pepys -- a remarkable mashup of historical information and literature in modern technology to make the Pepys diaries an experience rather than an object. It includes historical weather, glosses, maps, even an encyclopedia. (prompted by Jon Udell)
2. The Tonido Plug Server -- one of many such wall-wart sized appliances. This caught my eye: CodeLathe, the folks behind Tonido, have developed a web interface and suite of applications. The larger goal is to get developers to build other applications for inclusion in Tonido’s own app store.
3. Wikileaks Fails "Due Diligence" Review -- interesting criticism of Wikileaks from Federation of American Scientists. “Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most-power without accountability-is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” (via Hacker News)
4. Yahoo Style Guide -- a paper book, but also a web site with lots of advice for those writing online.

(Cross-posted with the Google Enterprise Blog)

From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Geoff Greene join us here. Geoff is the Director of IT Support Services at Brown University, and here he shares an update on their campus-wide migration to Google Apps for Education for all students, staff and faculty. - Ed.

About a year ago we put our 6,000 undergraduate students on Google Apps. The results were phenomenal: people were happy, they were productive, they were excited...and then some people got jealous. Our faculty and staff members started coming to us asking “When do we get to go Google?” Turns out they also wanted access to the same tools to better connect and engage with students and with each other.

We thought about it for a bit and realized that they had a point. So we decided to bring the entire Brown University community together—faculty, staff, medical and grad students—with a common set of tools: Google Apps for Education. This summer, our Computing & Information Services team is in the process of migrating everyone to our new GoogleApps@Brown system. The positive experience our undergrads have had using the Apps suite helped our Provost David Kertzer decide that the change would bring significant benefits and cost savings to the university as a whole. In fact, we predict this change could save us somewhere around $1 million each year.

Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path. They knew these tools would work because they already used them in their non-school lives. We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.

The icing on the cake is that we signed a zero dollar contract for all these top-notch tools. But it’s not just about saving money—it’s also about investing in our university’s future. Google Apps helps us work better together, and we can feel the excitement building on campus as a result. Here’s a little glimpse:



Since some faculty and staff members aren’t as familiar with the new tools just yet, we also hosted a “roadshow” to spread the word and gear up training sessions tailored for each campus group or department. Our training efforts are robust (you can check it out at training.brown.edu) and we have Google Guides—enthusiastic staff and student volunteers—helping their peers with the transition. We feel confident that once people start using these tools together, they’ll never look back.

Posted by Geoff Greene, Brown University Computing & Information Services

Manic Monday was a mixed bag of treats, some tiring and waning with many memes and exclamations of ‘non posts’ or  reasons for skipping days. So today I will avail you with the five posts that inspired me most (and inspired me greatly at that!):

• Skinnibitch wrote a particularly thought provoking post on mentoring – managing to highlight way too much in such a short space  - the value of a mentor, how to practically and proactively find a mentor and career mapping.
• FromMelbin introduced a fascinating topic under in disguise (and one close to my own heart) of working with students to contribute design ideas for a future new library.  My first thought turns to services and infrastructure however in this case it is focusing on designing out crime.
• snail talks about the price gulf in books in Australia compared to alternatives online both in print and ebooks. I find this topic fascinating as I often lament the decline of the bookstore in my life, and even more so the decline of purchasing books from bookstores rather than searching for a cheaper (& usually a good 50% cheaper) copy online.
• I always love it when people get passionate about things…for a great inspiring dose of passion and some good photography tips take a read of Miss Sophic Mac and learn about her camera collection…and then read her story of why she became a librarian. If her passion hasn’t inspired you to do something…anything then I’m not sure what will.
• Another passionate post – this time from sallysetforth on the importance of accessibility with some staggering statistics on print disabilities and how little this issue is addressed. Read it, stop hyperventilating and then think about how you can start closing this gap in your library.

a Public Librarian reminded us again of the importance of gratitude and for me I am grateful for all those who have committed themselves to the task of #blogeverydayinjune and for the vast amounts of inspiration and ideas you have all added to the blogosphere, LibraryLand and the grand Interwebz universe

A novice climbed the mountain and asked the guru for advice. The guru said, "when I hire, I want to know you're a good developer. I am much more likely to hire you if I can see public commits in an open source repository. I love to hire open source developers and recommend you do it too."

The novice nodded and asked, "what about using open source software?". The guru replied, "we love open source software. It helps us to be nimble, and we can build out quickly without crippling license fees. Most importantly, we can change it to do what we need."

The novice thanked the guru and asked, "what about releasing open source software?". The guru said, "Feed back patches when you have to, so you don't have to maintain a parallel version, but don't release your tools as open source. You don't have time to spend fielding questions and lousy contributions from outside the company."

The novice frowned. "So you hire open source developers, you consume open source software, but you don't produce any yourself?" The guru nodded, sagely.

"But isn't that---". The guru hit him with a copy of "The Wealth of Nations", and the novice was enlightened.

Yahoo has released a style guide, The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and
Creating Content for the Digital World, in direct competition with the AP Styleguide.  It will be in stores (yes, in digital & physical formats) on July 6th.  In reviewing the Yahoo guide, it’s clear that it is more progressive, modern, and mindful of the internet technologies and web terms and their usage, for example website instead of Web site and email instead of e-mail.   I definitely agree with Yahoo more than AP, and I never thought I’d write that sentence!

The website for the book is a great web content resource in itself, including:

• Shaping your text for online reading (totally useful in briefly teaching library staff to write web content)
• How to write strong headlines/titles
• Search Engine Optimization basics (no snake oil here, just the real basics that apply to the major search engines)
• The Yahoo Word List (tech and communication specific words and their correct usage)

Peter Hirtle wrote a thoughtful post on the LibraryLaw Blog about whether or not libraries can legally lend out eBook readers.  While there’s no problem with the hardware, there are legal problems with the eBook software licenses as well as the individual eBook title licenses as well.  Those use licenses are not library-friendly and in fact preclude any kind of lending, sharing, or mass use such as you would find in a library.  If your library is lending out eBook readers, Hirtle suggests consulting with an attorney in detailed analysis of all three components: hardware, software, and eBook title.  The same goes for any other eMedia, such as eMusic, eMovies, or eAudioBooks.

Please be careful, libraries.  And please take this as a lesson why we need organized lobbying to eMedia companies and publishers to create library-friendly licenses, use policies, digital rights management, and formats so that libraries can continue to act as the great sharers and equalizers in their communities.

Internet Librarian registration is open! Register now for a great conference in Monterey, October 25-27!

As one of the conference organizers, I can tell you we’ll be doing some really interesting thing.  My two favorite items of the conference are the user-centered web design pre-conference I’m co-teaching with Aaron Schmidt and the Failure & Innovation panel I’m moderating.  The FAIL panel is going to be off the hook, including a number of speakers talking about the key lessons they learned the hard way through not succeeding.

If your library still is lucky enough to have training and travel money, shoot on down to Monterey and join us for a really great conference, as well as access to some of the most beautiful areas of the country along the Santa Cruz and Big Sur coastlines.

At Foo Camp 2010, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, gave a talk called "Alternatives to College." I was so excited by what he had to say that I wanted to be able to share it more widely -- after all, only two people came to his talk. So I recorded a video interview (after the jump) with him.

Sridhar's efforts at Zoho and their development center in Madras tell us something about how to develop a 21st century workforce by tapping into those who would not normally go to college. In short, his answer is not to prepare them for college but to prepare them to be productive in the workplace -- and to do that preparation in the workplace.

Sridhar has a Ph.D from Princeton, having gone there after obtaining a degree from an elite engineering school in India. Yet it was watching his youngest brother succeed at programming without a college degree that convinced him that others could follow that example. As he studied the best employees in his own company, he discovered that credentials were not as important as he once thought.

Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades and the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered ...

Over time, that led us to be bolder in our search for talent. We started to ask "What if the college degree itself is not really that useful? What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?" *

At Zoho, Sridhar created a program, which he called a "university" but it was nothing like a normal university. He began working with kids who had a high school education and who were unlikely to attend college for economic reasons. He didn't care if they had no previous computer experience. He didn't care that they didn't speak English.

Once in the program, the students were paid a stipend to attend each day. The program lasted 9-12 months and then the students entered a one-year apprenticeship program. After two years, the students were ready to be productive employees in an IT company. About 100 kids so far have been through the program.

The program offers concrete, hands-on instruction designed to follow how someone who was self-taught would learn. (The first teacher was himself a self-taught programmer.) They are expected to spend the bulk of the time learning on their own. The students are taught very little theory, avoiding computer science altogether. Instead students practice solving problems and doing real work. They learn programming, English (many only know Tamil), and math. None of the students really like math and they learn just enough. Sridhar made a comment that might shock educators and employers: "Math is the new Sanskrit, the new Latin." He believes we overestimate the value of math as a tool to assess a student's ability.

Sridhar believes that finding new sources of talent outside the university was important for his company to remain competitive. Now, they have employees who are passionate about their work. By discovering raw talent and developing it, and by having the same expectations of them as college-trained engineers, Zoho has created a fast-track to new opportunities for young people in India who would otherwise not have that opportunity.

With America's own problems of high unemployment and high dropout rates, not just in high school but also college, we could learn from what Zoho has done. I'd like to hear from you if you're interested in seeing what we can do in America to learn from this model and create fast-tracking opportunities for many more young people.

Here is the interview I recorded at FOO Camp with Sridhar Vembu.

*Link to blog post by Sridhar Vembu: "How We Recruit -- On Formal Credentials versus Experience-based Education."

Ever since we launched Google.cn, our search engine for mainland Chinese users, we have done our best to increase access to information while abiding by Chinese law. This has not always been an easy balance to strike, especially since our January announcement that we were no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn.

We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.

That’s a prospect dreaded by many of our Chinese users, who have been vocal about their desire to keep Google.cn alive. We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.

As a company we aspire to make information available to users everywhere, including China. It’s why we have worked so hard to keep Google.cn alive, as well as to continue our research and development work in China. This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law. We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

1. They Don’t Complain and They Die Quietly (Derek Powazek) -- In this hyper-modern age of real-time always-on location-based info-overload, perhaps a moment of true peace and quiet is the greatest gift one can receive.
2. The Slow Media Manifesto -- Slow Media inspire, continuously affect the users’ thoughts and actions and are still perceptible years later. Steven Levy ran a Slow Media session at Foo. (via Bruce Sterling)
3. The Dragon's DNA (The Economist) -- Beijing Genomics Institute putting more DNA-sequencing capacity into the top floor of a refurbished printing works than is available in the whole USA.
4. Scribd Coding Blog -- very interesting blog about the technology behind and inside Scribd. They process over 150M polygons a day, building web fonts from the fonts in PDF files, and tell you why it's not straightforward. I wish there were more of these genuinely interesting technology blogs from companies that do interesting things.

As mentioned earlier, I am working on a project using Wordpress 3 to replace our custom-made library website that has few features, little flexibility and is expensive to change.

With the look of the blog, there are a few challenges:

1. I am not a designer, not do I want to be. I like colours to match and graphics to be harmonious, but I’m not your woman to achieve that.
2. I know that I want “search catalogue”, “search my details”, “contact us” and “opening hours” on each page, plus a top navigation menu. This is forced because I have to embed third party searches in frames and the pages they will be on will be too wide to keep sidebars.
3. I want the sidebars to be changeable by library staff. Part of the strategy to get our users using our subscription databases is to highlight a different one in the sidebar every so often.
4. The branding and design of the website is already contracted to a firm that is great with visual design, but has no experience with Wordpress Themes
5. Because we want control, we do not want to pay for a theme that charges again with each upgrade.
6. I want to launch the new Wordpress site a month or so before the new library opens, but want the look of the Wordpress to be very similar to that of the legacy site during the transition time. The new site for the new building will go live about a week before the doors open, so I wanted to be able to customise the site to suit the old and new design with very little farting around.

We looked at Polly Farrington’s list of library sites using Wordpress and liked the simple and clean lines of the Southfield Public Library . From looking at the page source, I could see that the theme was Thesis. It sounded familiar. I remembered Stephen Collins from Acid Labs tweeting as he set up his site using Thesis.

I particularly liked how different the two sites looked, demonstrating three features I was after – flexibility, lots of scope for customisation and looking pretty. If  you look at the user site showcase on the Thesis home site, you can see that they are very different from each other . Unfortunately there is also a (modest) license fee to use the theme .

BUT…

I really didn’t want to go down the path of a licensed product and wondered if there was anything similar out there. A bit of hunting about led me to Suffusion from Aquoid Themes by Sayotan Sinha .

The first attraction was the widget bar under the header so that I could put my consistent links (catalogue, borrower details, opening hours, contact) underneath the header and change them at will. Then I looked at the small Suffusion theme showcase and liked what I saw.

When I installed it I found that many, many features that were usually controlled by the theme’s CSS files, thus out of reach for mere mortals like me,  were tweakable from a “Settings for Suffusion” panel in the dashboard.

I could choose from seven different sidebars to place widgets. I could upload my header image and specify its size and whether it was inside or outside the wrapper. I could change the background colour for the blog or replace it with an image. I could place a logo on the header. There were templates for just one sidebar, no sidebar (usable when I had to embed a search frame), magazine style and many others. I could decide which pages appeared on the top navigation menu, how they displayed and whether the navigation bar was above or below the header. Link colours. Customisable. Visited link colour, Customisable. Favicon. Customisable. Inserting Analytics. Customisable.

There are many more features. Like the ability to add custom content types and custom taxonomies through the theme panel, so no need to edit the functions.php file by hand. As with many projects of love and collaboration, some obvious customisations are missing – like the ability to change the colour of the tabs in the menus , while some small things are customised to the nth degree – like the way the date is displayed. If you do know your CSS , there is a window where you can add your own CSS, which will then transfer when the theme is upgraded.

I think the company doing the graphic arts and branding for the new library were a little surprised by the limitations of the theme, but very much understood our desire to control the site for ourselves. They knew that with CSS they could control everything and make it look wonderful but , understandably, did not have time to learn exactly how to make the same changes through Suffusion. I really like the design they have come up with – not as beautiful as they could have done on their own; much, much better looking that I could have done and – most importantly – flexible enough for us to change, control and customise the site to suit our needs.

Post number 29 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge .

Here’s to Maurice Coleman for providing a virtual update from ALA, especially precious to those of us watching from afar…who knows how he found time to upload the more than 20 videos he captured at the WebJunction-sponsored Learning RoundTable Training Showcase, but thank you Maurice!

Here are some highlights in the video showcase:

• Emerging Leader Group M and Group N (including Angela, Natalie and Sonnet), both sponsored by LearnRT, talked about the Staff Day Success Wiki and Webinar Project.
• Tom Taylor from WJ-Kansas talked about their successful Ethics for Libraries project.
• And of course, WebJunction’s Betha Gutsche!

If you’re not a member of ALA’s Learning Roundtable, this set of videos will surely inspire you to get involved!

And we were pleased to hear that Betha’s session with Sandra Smith went well, all about Building with Competencies. Their slides and resource handout are now available on WebJunction.

Safe travels to all who will be traveling this week!

I’ve been following Sarah Houghton-Jan’s post and the related comments to ebooks and libraries. As well as David Lee King’s follow-up post. As someone who just bought and ereader this spring I can sympathize but I also want to point out why ebooks can be a GOOD happy experience for users.

I’ve posted about the fact I bought a Nook back in May and one reason for buying the Nook was that it DID work with Overdrive ebooks. My experience with it and Overdrive ebooks has been pretty darn good. Since May I’ve read dozen ebooks via Harris County Public Library’s Overdrive subscription. That’s at least $80 worth of reading if all those books are paperbacks. Its also a dozen books I don’t have to resell or find a home for if I’d purchased them. Once I figured out how to get the books on Nook it was really simple and I could place holds and load books from pretty much anywhere on either my desktop or laptop. My process is pretty simple. Find what I want (little clunky), either check it out or place a hold. Download to computer, put on Nook. When I’m done “return it” and check out the next thing. Its pretty easy. There are a couple places for improvement in the process.

1. I want to be able to perform the find and check out process natively from the Nook. No computer necessary. Mostly because I don’t want to have to have my computer with me to get new books. This is particularly important to me when I’m traveling for pleasure and don’t want to be tempted to do any work.
2. Better searching would be a an improvement. Sometimes the Overdrive searching is just dumb. It is not fault tolerant when it comes to how you put in author names. While the catalog has better searching, the limiting and browsing isn’t what I’d like it to be to find what I want. So I use the Overdrive site and deal with its searching quirks. As a result, I do lots of browsing for new stuff and I keep track of what the library has as an ebook that I want using the Overdrive wishlist and LibraryThing. (Side note an RSS feed of new ebooks in a particular genre would be awesome).

Even without these changes, I feel quite good about my ebook experience with Overdrive and the Nook as a device. Ebook experiences can be good ones. However, whether or not users have a good experience is often directly tied to the relationship between the content provide and the devices provider.

So in contrast, I found the Overdrive App for iPod and iPhone a complete waste of time. Mostly because it is ugly and I can’t figure out how to make it work. But even more so because I can’t get all the content available on the iPod. So while I can get some audio things, I can’t get books, or videos. Just didn’t really feel like it was worth my time. It isn’t Overdrive’s fault solely nor Apple’s. Instead its like oil and water, they don’t mix because IMHO, the parties are looking out for their own interests more than that of their consumers. The Overdrive Apple thing isn’t unique, Overdrive doesn’t work on Kindle and Kindle content doesn’t work on Nook.

Ultimately, in my mind this almost always comes down to DRM; and content providers and devices providers supporting different kinds of DRM and formats. People are either held hostage by the device they have to particular content suppliers or held hostage by the content provider they want to do business with to have a particular device. Libraries need electronic media formats that are device and content provider independent. Otherwise we, like users, will be forced to make imperfect choices.

And as Sarah points out, the situation doesn’t stop people from hacking content anyway. Just Google a little and you’ll find ways to strip the DRM from various things. I’m quite happy to pay but I want it to work right on the device of my choice. After all, we have three Macs, two PCs, 3 iPods, a iPod Touch, iPad, Nook and soon an Android phone at our house. So we definitely need device and platform independence.

The sad thing is that the user experience, could and should be a good one. It doesn’t need to be this hard or frustrating. To me that is the most frustrating thing.

To all the 30 posts in 30 days bloggers – whether you have done every day or not, whether you have read every post or not, whether you have commented on many posts – thanks so much for your energy and sharing.

To all the Libraries Interact bloggers who have faithfully managed to summarise each day – thanks for pointing out those posts that I should not miss and letting me feel connected even when I couldn’t manage to get to my feed reader.

I’m expressing my utter admiration because it being after midnight and my turn to summarise Sunday 27 June, I’m sitting here with 24 tabs open in my browser with every post made on Sunday . I have no hope of summarising them before I fall asleep…

I guess then, rather than admit defeat, I’ll ask a question… Now that we have the energy and connection from June…what now? Anyone have any ideas about a final theme for the last day of June? Some way we can mark the passing of an amazing group effort ( Let’s allow one day off per week, that’s 26 posts x 30 bloggers which makes …. 780 more posts in the Australian biblioblogosphere) … so…

How do we go out with a bang?

We want to offer our sincere thanks to everyone who attended yesterday's ALA TechSource Gadget Petting Zoo! The event was a major success, with dozens of people coming by the ALA Publishing booth to talk with some of our bloggers about the latest gadgets and what they can do for our libraries.

It's hard to say which gadget got the most attention. Of course we were expecting a ton of interest in the iPad and eReaders, and the interest was certainly there. But there was so much activity and discussion going on at the booth that it would be unfair to say that those devices dominated the conversation.

Using technology in the library is all about making things more accessible, and Tom Peters had a captive audience for his discussions on assitive devices for hearing-impaired and low-vision patrons, with many people seeking out his expertise in this specialized topic.

Cindi Trainor, our resident library photography expert, discussed the principles of getting great shots with a number of attendees, but she also had a chance to demo her iPad and talk about other topics as well.

And of course, library technology jack-of-all-trades Jason Griffey was there, discussing everything from eReaders to audio capture devices, always with an eye towards practical and cost-effective implementation in a library.

We're really thrilled with how this event turned out, and we're looking forward to expanding on it in the future! For more photos and videos from the Petting Zoo, check out these images and videos at Flickr. Additional video coming soon!

You may have already seen a few new posters or bookmarks at your library. Simple and color-saturated, if you're really dedicated you can download a desktop background and show your library support all on your own!

If you live in town and want to do some "guerilla marketing" on behalf of your library, you can print off the posters or ads, for example, and hang them in bus shelter stops, at coffee shops and other community gathering places. It's all free, fun and brings a breath of fresh air to promoting WorldCat in person.

Last Friday was a scramble for government security personnel and
independent privacy advocates, and should also have stood out to
anyone concerned with the growth of online commerce, civic action, and
social networking. The U.S. government's Office of Management and
Budget, which is the locus of President Obama's
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Transparency_and_Open_Government/">drive toward transparency and open government, popped out three major
initiatives that combine to potentially change the landscape for
online identity and privacy, not only within government but across the
Internet.

In this blog I'll summarize the impacts of all three documents, as
well as the next steps that I see necessary in these areas. The
documents (all distributed as PDFs, which is not the easiest format to
draw commentary) are:

A discussion draft of the
href="http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf">National Strategy
for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Comments can be viewed and
entered on a feedback
site.

An OMB Memorandum on
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-22.pdf">Guidance
for Online Use of Web Measurement and Customization Technologies.

An OMB Memorandum on
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-23.pdf">
Guidance for Agency Use of Third-Party Websites and Applications.

These documents are not long, but the complexity of the policy areas
they address ensure that no blog could cover everything of importance,
nor could a single commentator like me provide a well-rounded view.
I'll focus on the changes they make to policies that are known to
require change, with a "job well done" pat on the back. In
highlighting gaps and omissions, I'll deliberately swim around the
shoals that others have loudly pointed to already, focusing instead on
problems that I believe deserve more attention.

I'll also assume a good deal of background on the part of the reader,
figuring that if you've taken the time to read this post you have
absorbed the key issues in the privacy debates over the past few
decades, or can easily pick them up by rounding up the usual suspects:
Electronic Privacy Information Center,
Privacy
International,
href="http://www.eff.org/issues/privacy">Electronic Frontier
Foundation's privacy page, the
href="http://www.cdt.org/">Center for Democracy and Technology,
etc. (If anybody knows well-researched sites that adopt the opposite
philosophy, "Shop till you drop, post your videos to America's
Favorite Bloopers, and forget about privacy," please let me know.)

Why social networks don't protect privacy

I thought it useful to start with this fundamental dilemma because it
helps put other privacy efforts into context. Facebook, LinkedIn,
MySpace, and other such sites are not going to protect your privacy in
any foreseeable scenario.

The problem is not the evil temptations of advertising. Yes, the sites
would like to get to know you better and classify you into finer and
finer grids to improve the flow of advertising dollars, but take the
monetary incentive away and social networks would still reveal your
personal information. That's what makes social networking worthwhile.

Long before the Internet, people had private forums offline and online
to share ideas and socialize. The limitation of such forums -- which
still exist on Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, and other places -- is that
they don't benefit from the power of the small world effect. They
don't exploit any more than one degree of separation.

The genius of social networking is precisely the "Friends of Friends"
feature that privacy advocates decry. If you like dogs and you note on
Facebook that your friend Sue has joined the Lunchtime Dog Walkers
Club, you benefit in two ways: you've just learned of something you
and Sue have in common, and you may consider joining the Lunchtime Dog
Walkers Club yourself.

The whole reason to join social networks is to meet a friend of a
friend who cares just as much about the Special Olympics as you do, or
to find out that three of your friends attended the local rhythm 'n
blues bash you missed. If I know that you're following me on Twitter,
I have the option of following you. So if you don't want to learn
about these things -- or let other people know what you do -- stick to
Yahoo! Groups.

Now we can better assess the challenges facing the Senior Agency Official for Privacy at each agency who according to the Guidance for Agency Use of Third-Party Websites and Applications, must "examine the third party's privacy policy to evaluate the risks" and convey them to members of the public in a privacy impact assessment. Jane may sign up for an agency social network in order to keep up discreetly with changes in laws and regulations affecting an embarrassing lapse in her past, but no one may realize that all her friends will see a "Jane has joined the Initiative to Freeze Sex Offender Records Group!" message.

And suppose that the agency can suppress the message when Jane joins,
but that anybody who runs a search on the social network for "Sex
Offender" turns up the names of everyone who joined the group.

I'm guessing the memorandum will be helpful. It contains some
common-sense orders that every agency can follow, such as making sure
that every interaction it has with the public can be carried out in
alternative settings besides the social network, and letting the
public know whether it gives the social network any personally
identifiable information (PII). Once again, though, the notion of PII
is slippery. Researchers have demonstrated that the URLs and
query strings generated when you navigate a social network contain
lots of PII, so this might be associated with the activities you engage
in with the government agency even though the agency is totally
passive.

The authors of the memo seemed to have in mind tacitly that the Senior
Agency Official for Privacy has only limited access to the workings of
the social networks, because they instructed the agency to tell the
public what the agency itself does with information (for instance,
"any PII that is likely to become available to the agency through
public use of the third-party website or application") but not what
the third-party website does with information.

I also noticed one more sign of timidity in the memo on third-party
sites: "the agency should monitor any changes to the third party's
privacy policy and periodically reassess the risks." Why not declare
that any social networking site used by government must promise to
notify users of changes affecting privacy, preferably 30 days in
advance, and even put up a draft of the new policy for public comment
as the government itself does?

My sense is that the chief advantage of putting government agencies on
popular social network sites is to look cool, or perhaps more
charitably, to "be present" when the public seeks information. Because
fans of social networks call up their pages several times a day to
check everything from friends' clothing choices to the press releases
of the professional associations they've joined, how nice to offer
updates on government policies that interest them in the same place.

But a true social networking orientation that makes, say, the
Environmental Protection Agency a full participant in the waves of
commentary on a social network would be so daunting that it's not even
clear what the result would look like. ("Returned my old motor oil to
the dealer for disposal." "EPA likes this.")

Possibly, agencies could gain efficiencies by using third-party
applications on social networks -- and last Friday's memorandum explicitly
allowed that -- but I can't see how the agency could accurately assess
the privacy risks of the applications.

In short, I don't think serious public policy will be made on the same
sites where people rate their favorite salsa brands. Instead, the
social networking strategy will be a transitional contact mechanism
that will fall by the wayside when agencies can offer rich interactive
forums on their own. And that's where the draft strategy on identities
picks up where the memorandum on third-party sites leaves off.

A certificate-backed OpenID system

The vision presented in the identity strategy draft could easily take decades to realize. The goal, roughly speaking, is to improve on the welter of means currently employed to validate websites and web users, and to give the public enough confidence to make them comfortable conducting increasing amounts of business and civic affairs over the Internet. The principles are recognizably the ones behind OpenID, whose champions have been in protracted discussions with the OMB and other agencies working on identity.

Currently, the average web user relies on browser validation of
certificates -- or blasts right past it, given how many web
administrators fail to maintain their certificates -- while the server
requires either password authentication or OpenID to authenticate a
user. When OpenID is enabled, the server delegates user authentication
to a set of trusted sites (AOL, Google, etc.) where users create their
IDs.

The strategy document extends certificates to user authentication. In
a scenario presented by the draft to warm us toward the strategy, a
woman retrieves hospital test results from her cell phone. Both the
hospital and the cell phone offer PKI certificates and the hospital,
in addition, "obtained an Extended Validation Certificate for its
website to enable individuals to indicate that the website has not
been spoofed." That last dance turn is a little hard to follow. The
draft doesn't offer such details as who can give a hospital an
Extended Validation Certificate, and how it can protect against
malicious UNICODE-encoded domain names, man-in-the-middle attacks, or
garden-variety breaches of web security.

I can understand the strategy's reliance on PKI as the only social
structure available to back up assertions of identity. But this is the
wobbly leg of the table that holds up the OMB proposal. The document
should recognize the flaws of PKI, notably (but not limited to):

• The difficulty of revoking a certificate.
• Lapses by certificate authorities that let unauthorized people
  masquerade as legitimate sites.
• The lack of due care by browser manufacturers in approving certificate
  authorities for inclusion in browsers.

I don't need to go into detail, because plenty of warnings about PKI
have been issued by
href="http://www.schneier.com/paper-pki.html">Bruce Schneier and
others. A more tightly managed PKI system may emerge from the OMB
initiative and may mitigate the risks that have surfaced -- but only if
we acknowledge and face those risks. We should do so before we migrate
more and more of our social infrastructure to certificates, a scenario
I laid out in a short story, "
href="http://praxagora.com/andyo/fiction/validators/">Validators."

(Update, 10 PM: encouraged by a friend, I submitted a
href="http://bit.ly/d92jL1">comment about certificate authorities
to the draft's comment site.)

Why the OMB is taking on identity and privacy now

As mentioned earlier, the OMB has invested a lot of time and engaged in a huge amount of consultation in the development of its identity strategy. The result is breath-taking in its scope of proposed activity: setting standards, encouraging private companies to use the resulting technologies (and even providing financial incentives to do so), educating the public to their benefits, setting an example by deploying the technologies across the federal government, and working with other government bodies across the country and internationally.

Why expend all this sweat on a program that was being promoted by
various technorati and social networking sites up to now? The
government needs a comprehensive identity framework, clearly, and one
can make a strong argument that the identity framework needs the
government, too.

The government needs an identity framework to achieve a goal that
administrations and congress folk have expressed over many decades: to
bring intense consultation and debate about government activity beyond
the Beltway. The enormous participation that the administration
witnessed around such issues as the spending of stimulus money,
reported on
href="http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx">Recovery.gov,
showed that they can no longer depend on cabbing their insiders to a
meeting in the Senate Office Building on a Monday morning at nine.
They also need the local activist who can't afford a plane trip to DC
and has just four hours a week to spend on his concern.

Health care, the administration's most controversial undertaking and its area of biggest accomplishment, cries out for an identity system so that doctors can make referrals, exchange records, and report quality measures. The demands of a modern health care system on data exchange were recently laid out in two interviews on this site, one with Brian Behlendorf and another with Arien Malec, and that dependency extends to securely identifying health care providers. A PKI-backed, OpenID-like identity system drives the promise of better and cheaper health care.

But why not leave things to the tech community and the market? There
are several roles for government:

No computer technology is perfectly secure, so potential malefactors have to be convinced that they will suffer retribution from strong legal enforcement. Improving laws regarding identity and privacy will facilitate the adoption of useful technologies. At the same time, laws and regulations become unenforceable and are widely scorned if the
technology does not support them.

Mistakes will happen, so one of the most useful roles for government might be to lay out rules for liability, as mentioned in the draft.

Although fundamental standards are coming along nicely in the tech community, government support might be needed as standards touch more directly on the social impacts of identity systems. The large sites
in the tech space don't have the interests of ordinary users at
heart -- just look at all the controversies that Google and Facebook get
themselves into regularly. Other industries (notably health care) also
have a lot tied up in legacy practices and business models that could
distort the implementation of identity checking unless the government
plays a neutral role.

The government can lay out a model of graduated risk to guide people
to choosing the right level of security. Some types of transactions
can depend on an ID you get by providing an email address. Others
might require you to provide a credit card. And some may require you
to visit a notary. A formal hierarchy of risk can assure us we're
getting the security we need without going overboard.

With so much at stake, the OMB is actually acting with considerable
restraint. This doesn't come across to the hypersensitive
super-individualists whose most paranoid fears have been stoked by
right-wing cynics, and who post their high-strung dissents to the
comment site without
bothering to actually read the draft. I'm sure this blog will not
totally escape their distracting impracticalities either.

The OMB is not making a power grab for the Internet identity
infrastructure. On the other hand, they are asking those who have
responsibility for the infrastructure to join together and adopt more
stringent rules. The formality of the system the OMB is proposing,
with risk models, standards, and a bigger role for certificate
authorities (not to forget Extended Validation Certificates!) belies
the document's snuggly metaphor of an Identity Ecosystem.

Identity's relationship to security also puts the new initiative fully
in line with recent efforts to create a national cyber-security
strategy. The OMB's collaborative approach has nothing in common with
the control-and-command mentality of Sections 248, 249, and 250 in the

href="http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/?FuseAction=home.Cybersecurity">Protecting
Cyberspace bill just passed by a Senate Committee. But during the
current debate over that bill, we can't lose sight of the larger
context. The bill is just the response by one group of lawmakers to a
general drumbeat of concern over the need for governments to be
prepared for threats to a software stack that has taken on some roles
of a public utility.

Cookies and other fuzzy identifiers

Just as the identity system in the OMB draft -- should they succeed in pulling it off -- will replace the need for using social networking sites, its rigorous combination of identity and privacy protection will also replace the mushy combination that now exists with cookies and other information collected by websites. But current web practice demands the use of this information to let visitors stay signed in and customize their experience. The information also helps sites track user behavior so they can improve the sites (to discover, for instance, that a key document isn't being read because people can't find it).

So the second of Friday's documents,
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-22.pdf">Guidance
for Online Use of Web Measurement and Customization Technologies (PDF), is actually the most successful and clearly applicable in my opinion. It lays out fairly simple rules about collecting information
only for the purposes just mentioned, anonymizing it, and disposing of
it quickly.

Agencies are specifically prohibited from sharing the user data with
other agencies, an important constraint in an age where we've learned
of the intelligence agencies mining so much communication. (On the
other hand, my impression from other situations is that laws and
regulations always manage to create exceptions for law enforcement
that eviscerate the promises that personal information is safe from
snooping.)

A certain amount of fuzziness remains, an inevitability in a complex
world. Agencies have varying uses for data and varying relationships
with their visitors, so the memorandum leaves wiggle room and simply
requires the posting of the resulting policies. In theory, visitors
will have to check each site's policy to find out what the
site is doing with cookies and other PII. In practice, I think the
wiggle room is minimal and that the guidelines are relatively
inviolate, offering visitors a more pleasant experience without
compromising their privacy.

What's left? I'm still interested in the issues I raised a year ago
about the
href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/privacy-and-open-government-co.html">relation
of identity and anonymity to citizen participation in
government. Sometimes people need to relinquish anonymity in order
to be credible. The infrastructure that the OMB is talking about can
provide a range of levels of identification.

Related:

• OMB updates rules for cookies and privacy on U.S. government websites
• Putting Online Privacy in Perspective
• My contrarian stance on Facebook and privacy
• Can privacy, social media and business get along?

Get ready for what’s next in mobile

Mobile is hot and getting hotter. Some of the heat is coming from increasing adoption of smart devices that are ‘more than phone” and some is from amazing innovation in features, products, functions and integration.

“Nick Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner offers a list of 10 mobile technologies to watch in 2010 and 2011, including:

Bluetooth (3 and 4)
The Mobile Web
Mobile Widgets
Platform-Independent Mobile AD Tools
App Stores
Enhanced Location Awareness
Cellular Broadband
Touchscreens
M2M (Machine-to-Machine)
Device-Independent Security

For details on these technologies or to access the full report by Gartner, click here.”

Stephen

E-book Sales Statistics from BISG Survey

“E-book sales grew exponentially in the first quarter of 2010, jumping from just 1.5% of total US book sales in 2009 to 5% of the market in the first quarter of 2010, said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publishing services at R.R. Bowker, who presented the findings of Book Industry Study Group (BISG) research Wednesday during BookExpo America.

The BISG’s “Survey of Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading” consists of three surveys taken over the course of nine months. The most recent findings and their implications for the industry include:

- Thirty-seven percent of e-book buyers bought their first digital book within the last six months. Because so many consumers are only beginning to develop the habit of buying e-books, publishers have an opportunity to shape expectations about such things as pricing and the timing of digital releases.

- Among e-book buyers, 25 percent said they bought fewer print books than before. Fifteen percent said they buy no print books, and 9 percent said they wouldn’t buy a print book even if the title they wanted wasn’t available digitally. This shift means publishers will be forced to reduce print runs, resulting in higher per-copy costs.

- E-book purchases have been increasing among higher-income consumers, but not among those who are less affluent. To continue growing the market, publishers must find a way to make e-books accessible to those with lower incomes.

- Asked what they would do if the e-book version of their favorite author’s title was not available at the same time as the hardcover, 32 percent said they would wait to buy the ebook, and 21 percent said they’d buy the hardcover.

- When asked whether DRM would affect their decision to buy an e-book, 31 percent said yes, and 39 percent said maybe — an indication that publishers need to carefully weigh the trade-off between protecting their content and keeping their customers happy.”

A jump from 1.5% to 5% is a big jump but it’s still small numbers. As the study survey notes, there is stil time to influence the market adoption patterns. Will libraries be part of this matrix or will they be sidelined. This is one of the issues of our age, especially with the imminent introduction of Google Editions.

Stephen

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Speed is a common theme at Google—the notion of speed is baked into all of our products, from Google Chrome to web search. Often, we also simply develop features that help deliver answers fast. Whether by displaying the exact content you're looking for at the top of your search results page or by optimizing the way you search, many of these speed enhancements save you keystrokes—and time.

This week, we released two new features:

Sunrise and Sunset Search feature
Whether you're looking to find the best time for a morning jog or trying to plan that perfect moment for a wedding proposal, knowing exactly when the sun rises or sets can always be helpful. This week, we were happy to launch a Sunrise and Sunset feature for search. It gives the precise times of sunsets and sunrises for any location around the world. Unlike the weather, sunrises and sunsets are quite predictable, and as a result, we don't use a data source. Instead, we calculate sunrise and sunset times based on latitude, longitude and the current time. This calculation has been of interest to astronomers and mathematicians for millennia, so they’ve had time to get it just right. And for most locations, it’s accurate to within a single minute.


Example searches: [sunrise port jefferson ny] or [sunset cancun]

Google Search by Voice expanded to more languages
Google Search by Voice enables people to search the web faster than ever before—getting you answers with fewer keystrokes. This service was originally launched in English, and was offered in the U.S., U.K., India, Australia and New Zealand. We later introduced Japanese and Mandarin to expand the number of possible users. Just a week ago, we launched the service in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Given that local dialects are a factor in the performance of speech recognition, we first launched our service in the four countries most closely associated with these languages: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. This week we followed with Korean and the launch in Taiwan of Traditional Mandarin.



To get started with Google Search by Voice, visit the Google mobile page in your country's domain (for example, in France go to m.google.fr) and download the application for your phone’s operating system in your locale. You'll find this available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones. Ultimately, our goal is to bring Google Search by voice to speakers of all languages, so stay tuned for more announcements here.

We'll see you back here next week for more new announcements.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

I’m going to be on ABC Radio National’s Book Show this Wednesday 30 June talking about the future of public  libraries along with other guest, Ian McShane from Swinburne University.  I record at 8am, with the show being broadcast at 10:30am and repeated at 8pm that night.

Of course there is a future…let me show you it….

So…if you had just one thing that you think a group of educated people, passionate about books and reading, should know about our libraries and the future, what would it be ?

I skipped Saturday’s 30 posts in 30 days post because I was flat out…. and then in one of those “just have one more square of chocolate” moments on Sunday …. I skipped a post for that day too. It felt really, really good not to feel like I *had* to say something when I had nothing to say… aaaah. This challenge has been a great way to get back into a blogging rhythm, and I have loved reading everyone’s posts, but gee I’m going to enjoy being a bit quieter.

Post 28 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

It was great fun at 8 am on a Sunday morning to speak today at the ALA PR Forum As promised, here are my slides:

Stephen

This conversation on identi.ca has prompted me to publish the rough notes I had prepared for a proposed discussion on making the Android operating system experience more free-as-in-freedom at the Google I/O 2010 Conference Bootcamp "unconference". Unfortunately, my proposal was not one of the top vote-getters (it missed the cut by two votes), so we didn't get to have the discussion there, even though I'm sure we would have had an interesting discussion. But perhaps there's something worthwhile in the roughly formed thoughts that follow...

Making Android more "Free as in Freedom"

What do I mean?

• Not "zero cost", but:
  • Free to run for any purpose
  • Free to study the source (a critical means of learning how to build better applications)
  • Free to redistribute verbatim copies
  • Free to modify the source and redistribute the modified version
• Android the operating system may be FaiF, but Android the distribution is not

We have opportunities to win interesting development investments on Android over proprietary platforms; see the Wockets - open source effort to create very low cost motion measurement devices for hobbyists, researchers, and developers interesting in creating software and devices that measure or respond to movement that is developing with Windows Mobile first, and Android second. It's a shame to see an "open" research project being built on a closed base, but there might be some clues in these researchers' rationale that suggest ways that the freedom of Android could be improved.

• Drivers (camera, GPS, etc) bundled as binary blobs are a problem for auditing, bug fixing, innovating
• Current phones get applications delivered out of the box:
  • that sometimes suck (GTalk - no way of changing the Google account it uses)
  • that you won't use and don't want (Facebook!)
  • that you might not trust (this is your phone, +++)
  • that you can't legally redistribute (Market?)
  • that you can't remove (my precious space!) without installing a new firmware image
• Can be hard to determine what apps are even free software; we might need to combine these multiple, partially overlapping, sometimes contradictory sources:
  • Replicant wiki
  • Koumbit wiki
  • AppBrain
  and the Android Market and SlideMe Market don't enable filtering by license
• Opportunities abound for new Free-as-in-Freedom applications to gain a significant foothold:
  • No Skype = space for LinPhone / SipDroid to move in (given a quality contact mechanism)
  • No good multi-protocol IM client (libpurple via NDK?)
  • Boost the Replicant project
• It's in our best interests as Android users and developers to have a free platform - we developers can build on each others work to create a better user experience, rather than starting from scratch every time in our own jealously protected niches.

Join us Sunday, June 27, 2010 for the Top Technology Trends panel. The session will be live-blogged by TTT committee members; the live blog will also capture any messages posted to twitter with the hashtag #ttt10.

LITA Top Tech Trends 2010

Watch the video

This morning I was on a panel of librarians talking about ‘Smart Reference Technologies for Tough Times.’ I get to go last, so that means I will be writing about the previous speakers before giving my talk about Ubuntu and OpenOffice.

First up was Chad Boeninger. Chad talked us about giving our work a voice. Chad works with 1800 undergrads and 90 full-time grad students — when he first started doing what he does he had a full head of hair. Chad read a paragraph from Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. In this paragraph it talks about sending emails versus blog posts – when you write an email you only share with one (or a select few) person – but if you put your answers to your questions on the web, then you have the ability to reach more people, your answers have a longer shelf life and you become a resource to many.

The fact is that it is easier to cancel a subscription than it is to re-hire a business librarian – the real power in our libraries are the people. An example Chad gave us was a reference question he got about using Netflix. Instead of replying via chat or email he did a short video and post it to his blog so that he can point the person there and so that others can learn from it – this also means that he has provided a more valuable answer than just telling someone what to do. When looking at the stats for the views to his video, he found that after the students’ projects were due, people were still watching so it’s most likely not his students – instead it’s others on the web. To share this video, Chad also used Blip.tv versus YouTube. He showed us some pretty awesome stats and features of Blip that I didn’t know about – something I might have to consider for my next set of screencasts. The stats provided by a tool like Blip allow you to measure your success and show your value to others.

The other cool feature of Blip is that you can use it to distribute your videos to other outlets with one upload – I’m so switching right now!!

Don’t like the idea of doing a video? You don’t have to – in some cases, Chad just writes a blog post and can point people to that. Why? Because he had 2 students ask him the same question and so he figured there would be more. By writing his blog post he made it so that when students go to Google to search for the topic they find his blog post as the second hit!! They recognize the URL and the name associated with the blog and know they have found a trusted resource. Coming back to shelf life, with all of the social sharing tools out there links to your posts or videos are spread wider than you’d ever imagine because people share the link on Facebook and Twitter.

You don’t have to be perfect either, the idea is to be yourself and provide valuable resources to your patrons.

All this costs very little. Chad uses a Flip camera ($129) to record himself – some of you might even have a web cam in your computer already that you can use. He then uses free software to merge the video of himself with the screencast part of things. In the end it takes him a lot less time to do the video than it would to try and explain where people need to click in writing.

Next up Diane Kresh. Her talk was titled ‘Arlington 2.0.’ She works in Arlington County which is the smallest self governing municipality in the US. Even with that her audience is highly educated and very multi-lingual. Because she is competing for funding with other pubic services like police and fire it’s hard to convince people that the library is important. So this means that the librarians need to connect with the users where they are.

They decided to host ‘Camp Tech’ where they (the librarians) learned about various web technologies. They had camp counselors and activities and projects that had to be completed. It’s kind of like 23 Things, but done in a shorter time period with experts around to help you. They learned about wikis, IM, photo and video sharing and social networking sites. Because of this training, they were able to start a virtual reference desk using IM and logged into all of the accounts using Trillian 3.0. To make this work, they have a designated machine at the desk for IM only and then the staff watches that (it makes a noise when a message comes through).

The chat service was for the adults, but the area they put the most attention was on the teens. They created a teen portal and they use that as their blog. They post events, videos, polls and book lists on this site. While they have the blog as the center of their teen portal, they do use blogs in other ways throughout the library. Why blogs? Cause they’re free, easy to update, you can tag the entries, it’s searchable, users can bookmark and subscribe to it, you can embed video and the teens can comment – and comments lead to conversations!

In addition to librarians creating content, they allow the student volunteers to record videos of book talks and create lots of other content for the site – that way it’s teens talking to teens. They also use this content to hook back into other services like Facebook and YouTube to reach users where they are. This content sharing is then self-referencing so all these pages link back to the library site.

Technorati Tags: ala10, ala2010

At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is “Resource Description and Access” — the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you can look at it, too, during an open trial access period that runs through the end of August by signing up for it.) What really struck in me the demonstration, though, was that the site is as much a subscription to access the content of the RDA standard as it is a subscription to a delivery service with functions and features that go beyond the text of the standard itself. The text of the standard will be available in printed form, but one cannot get an electronic copy of the standard itself. This strikes me as sort of weird, so this blog post talks through that weirdness feeling.

I’m trying to think of another example of a standard that inseparable from a delivery system for the standard, and I can’t think of any. Now granted, that the RDA Toolkit website has some very nice features for interlinking between documents, for creating local “workflows” and “mappings” for local activities, and creating group subscription-specific links to local documents. But this decision to only allow electronic access to the standard through this subscription service that requires an annual fee feels uncomfortable. Like I don’t really have access to the standard. Like it was a decision to limit competition for other delivery mechanisms to make sure a rather lucrative ongoing income through the RDA Toolkit website.

Also weird is the answer to the question “How does the site calculate the number of concurrent users?“. The notion of “concurrent users” is pretty hard in the web space because in the normal mode of operation there isn’t an ongoing connection between a user’s browser and the content server. There is a connection to deliver the HTML, associated graphics and other page content when a user initially asks for the page. But while the user is reading the page there is no ongoing connection between browser and server. I would expect to see mention in this section of “a concurrent user is counted for five minutes from when the browser last accesses the server” but that isn’t there.

Has anyone else thought about this, or is it getting discussed elsewhere? I may write more here as I have a chance to think about it and talk with others about it.

Update: Monday, June 28th

CC:DA Meeting with Ron Murray's FRBR Paper Tool documents spread out on the floor

As it happens, I was at the CC:DA meeting on Monday morning to see Ron Murray’s talk on network structures of FRBR entities, and right afterwards was an update on the RDA Toolkit site by Don Chatham, Associate Executive Director at ALA Publishing Services. I got to ask the question about electronic access to the standard, and it seems to be something they are considering. He said they designed the interface to be optimized for the ruleset, but they might consider an e-book format. I pressed about getting access to the raw document to create other derivatives. The canonical file is in XML format with a very complicated structure, and they use that to create the derivatives (the preprints that have been released over the past year or so, RDA Toolkit site, and the planned print version). They have been so busy getting the RDA Toolkit site up that they have not considered other modes of distribution (including the newly announced print version) until recently. It also isn’t clear what the licensing terms would be for the electronic version.

Some other interesting facts. There have been 2,200 requests for trial access. (I wish they wouldn’t call it “open access” because that phrase has other connotations, but what can you do…) About 2/3rds of the trial access requests were for institutional accounts. 53% came from the United States; 11% from Australia; 10% from Canada; 4% from the U.K. Creating these trial access accounts has been a manual process, and there is a backlog at the moment. (I signed up for trial access on Saturday and I haven’t heard back yet — probably because all the people who would act on that request are here at ALA.)

There was discussion about the update process for the standard. They are taking a very deliberate approach to start with — thinking that even minor typographical changes might have major conceptual impacts — so they won’t make any changes without JSC approval. On the service side, there are plans to enhance the site with multiple translations and more user configurable options. There is also the print version, but no date or pricing information has been set. (The cost of the print version will probably be in the $150 range.) They are also preparing help guides and mechanisms for deep linking into the RDA Toolkit site and for advanced searching.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

RDA-as-Service Only

I found this blog post excellent reading. I’ve lived through many of the so-called eras of information. I was an early ‘online’ denizen and lived through CD-ROM, the Internet, networks, intranets, the Web, Web 2.0, new media, and more. Nothing disappeared, it just became so, well normal. We stopped noticing it because it became so usual and ordinary. And libraries adapted, albeit differentially, to every shift.

Social Media Era Set to Peak in 2012

“If the above chart is to be believed, social media overtook web 2.0 in popularity at the end of 2009.”

So, we’ll be watching for the next waves. It’s not over yet and we’ll have tons of great new things to play with, learn and evaluate. The reasons we use them won’t change though – community, learning, knowledge creation, creative expression, entertainment, interaction and more – it’s all so human.

And when humans are involved, libraries and librarians have nothing to fear and everything to be excited about.

Stephen

On a global basis Facebook is making more inroads.

Facebook Continues To Take Over World

It’s interesting that Facebook is worldwide but still needs to crack the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, India, China). There are certainly still blocs and the potential for competition. It’s certainly debatable that we need competition as these social networks evolve. Check out the next post predicting the end of the social network era.

Stephen

With day 26, the troops are becoming tired. This was reflected in an absence of posts from quite a few of the #blogeverydayofjune cohort. But of those of us who did post:

• Tony knitted a new vest
• Fiona contemplated the genesis of the phrase ‘bun-toting’ – or at least, how it came to be the title for her blog
• A blogging, twittering, librarian mum shared some sage advice
• Ruth wondered how we can bring fun into our workplaces, and took an evidence based approach to finding out!
• Mal did the obligatory iPhone home screen post
• Jenelle posted about a good deed done
• snail gave us a run down of what his job entails and reflected its upsides and downsides

As we hit the home stretch – the last three days of #blogeverydayofjune – inspire us with your suggestions for post topics. I’m fairly sure we could all do with some inspiration right about now!

Glenn Fleishman recently posted on software that disables bits of the computer to make us more productive and to minimize distractions. Programs like Freedom, Isolator, RescueTime, LeechBlock, Turn Off the Lights and others were mentioned, with more coverage going to Freedom, a tool that blocks distractions. Freedom users can choose to disable Internet access and/or local network access. Users claim that software like Freedom makes them more productive by blocking tempting distractions.

I'm not opposed to using technologies to support us in reclaiming our attention. But I prefer passive, ambient, non-invasive technologies over parental ones. Consider the Toyota Prius. The Prius doesn't stop in the middle of a highway and say, "Listen to me, Mr. Irresponsible Driver, you're using too much gas and this car isn't going to move another inch until you commit to fix that." Instead, a display engages us in a playful way and our body implicitly learns to shift to use less gas.

Glenn was kind enough to call me for a comment as he prepared his post. We talked about email apnea, continuous partial attention, and how, while software that locks out distractions is a great first step, our ultimate opportunity is to evolve our relationship with personal technologies.

Personal technologies today are prosthetics for our minds.

In our current relationship with technology, we bring our bodies, but our minds rule. "Don't stop now, you're on a roll. Yes, pick up that phone call, you can still answer these six emails. Follow Twitter while working on PowerPoint, why not?" Our minds push, demand, coax, and cajole. "No break yet, we're not done. No dinner until this draft is done." Our tyrannical minds conspire with enabling technologies and our bodies do their best to hang on for the wild ride.

With technologies like Freedom, we re-assign the role of tyrant to the technology. The technology dictates to the mind. The mind dictates to the body. Meanwhile, the body that senses and feels, that turns out to offer more wisdom than the finest mind could even imagine, is ignored.

At the heart of compromised attention is compromised breathing. Breathing and attention are commutative. Athletes, dancers, and musicians are among those who don't have email apnea. Optimal breathing contributes to regulating our autonomic nervous system and it's in this regulated state that our cognition and memory, social and emotional intelligence, and even innovative thinking can be fueled.

Our opportunity is to create personal technologies that are prosthetics for our beings. Conscious Computing. It's post-productivity, post-communication era computing. Personal technologies that enhance our lives.

Thirty years ago, personal computing technologies created a revolution in personal productivity, supporting a value on self-expression, output and efficiency. The personal communications technology era that followed the era of personal productivity amplified accessibility and responsiveness. Personal technologies have served us well as prosthetics for the mind, in service of thinking and doing.

Scientists, like Antonion Damasio, Daniel Siegel, and Daniel Goleman, are showing us that aspects of our intelligence come from sensing and feeling and that our bodies offer a kind of wisdom.

Here at #Foo10, Sara Winge has just pointed out that, for the first time she can remember, people are sitting in sessions, taking notes on notepads, laptops closed. Laptops are out of sight. It feels different. That's another option. We can use technology to help enable Conscious Computing, or we can find it on our own, through attending to how we feel.

How do we usher in an era of Conscious Computing? What tools, technologies, and techniques will it take for personal technologies to become prosthetics of our full human potential?

We tend to have a very record-based view of bibliographic systems. Searches in a resource result in lists of record-based displays for items. All fields may not be indexed. This means that the data works less hard than it might, given the variety of ways in which it could be leveraged to tell us more about the body of literature a resource relates to.

The introduction of facets changed this a little. In Worldcat Identities we are interested in bringing together a view of parties who create or are the subject of works.

My colleagues have now worked with the Worldcat.org team to provide a view of Worldcat by genre.

For some more details see the project page.

The project applies principles of the FRBR model to aggregate author and title information and statistical association techniques to generate related subject headings (e.g., topics, characters, people, places, and organizations). The initial set of profiles is based on genre terms selected from the Guidelines On Subject Access To Individual Works Of Fiction, Drama, Etc. (GSAFD), 2nd edition. Genre definitions are adapted from scope notes in GSAFD, and the Library of Congress authority file and Moving Image Genre-Form Guide. More genre/form profiles will be added over time. [Worldcat genres]

Corey Harper seems to have started a collection of statements taken out of context, some of which I’ll share here:

“If it’s not fish it has to be linked data” –Jennifer Bowen

“I’m too far underground to know where I am” –Jon Phipps

When I used the word “curmudgeon” in my previous post, I had an apparently uncommon definition in mind: unflinching truth teller. I’ve actually taken minute pleasure in thinking of myself that way ever since, in the not-so-long ago I asked my new boss what my new role on the team would be and, knowing me, he said “curmudgeon?”. I had to hunt a bit to find a definition that wasn’t the Andy Rooney-esque “crusty, ill-tempered, old man”, but I kind of liked this one:

…Nature, having failed to equip them with a servicable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit.

Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can’t compromise their standards and can’t manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse.

Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor.

- JON WINOKUR

Get your t-shirts at the rally or register for one in the exhibit hall at the ALA booth. We’d like to see a sea of red t-shirts saying “Vote for Libraries” on Capitol Hill on Tuesday!

Gale Supports ALA Rally on Capitol Hill

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich., June 25 /PRNewswire/ — Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is proud to support the American Library Association as its members hold a rally for libraries on June 29, 2010, at 11:00 a.m. ET, on the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C.

“Gale is proud to continue our library advocacy mission and support this important event,” said Tina Creguer, Gale’s vice president of marketing communications. “Many of our staff plan on attending the rally, and Gale is providing the ‘Vote For Libraries’ t-shirts being distributed onsite. We encourage everyone at the conference — librarians and vendors alike — to make their voices heard and join us at the Capitol on Tuesday, the final day of the ALA Annual Conference.”

The bus service Gale has long provided for conference attendees at ALA will extend to that morning. There will be bus service from the convention center to Union Station, (walking distance to the Capitol) and back, running from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

More than one thousand librarians from across the country are expected to join together for this event. The rally is open to the public and will feature speakers including best-selling young adult author Lauren Myracle, U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers (MI-3), U.S. Rep. Grijalva (AZ-7), Sen. Jack Reed (RI), and ALA President Camila Alire.

Those attending are also encouraged to meet with their legislators to share with them the importance of libraries. “As communities face economic difficulties, the local library is more valuable than ever – with tangible services that support the community,” said Creguer. “We want legislators to know that a down economy is not the time to cut library funding. Support is more critical now than ever before. In addition to providing books, computers and other information resources that support students and families, services have expanded to include assistance with employment searches, creating resumes, teaching how to apply for a job online and so much more.”

For more information about the event, go to www.ala.org/lad.

About Cengage Learning and Gale

Cengage Learning is a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, serves the world’s information and education needs through its vast and dynamic content pools, which are used by students and consumers in their libraries, schools and on the Internet. It is best known for the accuracy, breadth and convenience of its data, addressing all types of information needs – from homework help to health questions to business profiles – in a variety of formats. For more information, visit www.cengage.com or www.gale.com

Media Contact:
Linda Busse, MLS
Director, Corporate Communications
Gale, part of Cengage Learning
linda.busse@cengage.com

Stephen

Goodreader is by far the best interface and app for handling different filetypes on the iPad…PDFs, doc files, images, etc. But this morning at the ALA Annual conference I discovered one really scary security issue with it. By default, Goodreader doesn’t require authentication or any warning to connect via Bonjour, and it allows you to browse AND DOWNLOAD any files that are so shared. Sitting in the Conference Center lobby, I was able to connect to two different iPads, view and grab files arbitrarilly, and push files TO the iPads as well.

This is INCREDIBLY SCARY. In the first 2 minutes, I saw files that had credit card information, passwords, bank account information, and more.

If you are using Goodreader and are connected to any public wifi point, make sure that you have gone into Settings, Other Settings, and make sure that Ask Permission Before Connecting is ON.

This seems like an opportunity to enhance and improve service in libraries (and for some libraries to make revenue):

HP introduces printers with e-mail addresses, cloud access

“Hewlett-Packard has announced a new line of printers designed to work directly with smartphones and cloud services without the need for a computer intermediary. The printers are designed to take print jobs that are e-mailed to them or uploaded to a cloud service they can access. HP hopes the increased accessibility will encourage the use of printouts, as files can increasingly be carried on a single pocket device.

The new range of printers have Web access, either wired or wireless, removing the need for a print server or connection to a computer. They have touchscreens and e-mail addresses, and can print documents that are e-mailed to them from any source, as well as items from Web services like Google Docs. Users can schedule print jobs on the printers and set up regular print runs of their documents, like weekly menus or itineraries.

HP is also lining up a Web incarnation of the print service called ePrint Center, where consumers and companies can upload files, such as coloring book sheets or birthday card templates. Customers would be able to purchase the rights to print the files and send them to the printer without having to download anything—or even use a computer, if they have a smartphone.

Aside from home use, HP hopes that the printers may be set up for public use, as in airports or hotels, so long as someone is around to change the ink cartridges and fill the paper tray. How payments for files and printing materials would be distributed between HP, suppliers, and printer owners is unclear.

The printers range from $99 to $299, and the least expensive wireless version costs $199. They will be available to consumers sometime this month and will be offered to small businesses in the fall.”

Further reading
• Hewlett-Packard press release (hp.com)”

It is becoming more and more necessary to adapt to a different printing environment. I often see fancy printing facilities in airport lounges and in hotels where I stay where I can print from my room or anywhere in the hotel. It seems that this might go beyond boarding passes and offer services for anything we receive on our portable devices to be turned into a print copy quickly. Anyway, I can see this kind of printer showing up in a lot of places (Starbucks?) and setting expectations of other service points. It even gets past the issue of iPads that don’t print so well.

Stephen

I thought this report from the Pew that shows that adults are just as likely as teens to text while driving and more likely than teens to talk on their cell phones while driving:

Adults and Cel Phone Distractions

One in four (27%) American adults say they have texted while driving, the same proportion as the number of driving age teens (26%) who say they have texted while driving.

“Fully 61% of adults say they have talked on their cell phones while they were behind the wheel. That is considerably greater than the number of 16- and 17-year-olds (43%) who have talked on their cells while driving. In addition, 49% of adults say they have been passengers in a car when the driver was sending or reading text messages on their cell phone. Overall, 44% of adults say they have been passengers of drivers who used the cell phone in a way that put themselves or others in danger.

Beyond driving, one in six (17%) cell-toting adults say they have been so distracted while talking or texting that they have physically bumped into another person or an object. That amounts to 14% of all American adults who have been so engrossed in talking, texting or otherwise using their cell phones that they bumped into something or someone.”

OK, that last bit is in the OMG department, “17% of cell phone owners have physically bumped into another person or an object while they were texting or talking on their cell phone,” Jeez! Then again, someone almost hit me this week at the corner while I crossed with the light and they chatted on their cel while turning the corner.

Again, people blame kids when they’re just reflecting the adult behaviours they see.

Stephen

Over the past academic year I’ve worked on a research project with a colleague to study the ways that students do their scholarly work, similar to the project at the University of Rochester a few years ago. We finished with data collection for this year and are spending the summer analyzing our results. We’ve gotten an additional grant and plan to collect data at a few more sites next year; ultimately we’ll produce a comprehensive analysis of all of our data. But in the short term, we’d like to share our preliminary results and analysis from this year’s research.

Here’s my dilemma: the fastest and most efficient way to disseminate our results is to share them on the website we’ve set up for the project. When I was an archaeologist we wrote up an interim report after each field season and a final report when the project was complete, and I’m thinking along these lines. However, I’m also a junior faculty member on the road to tenure, and the currency of the realm is, of course, the peer-reviewed journal article.

A peer-reviewed article will take considerably more time to be published, up to a year or even longer, especially if our submission isn’t accepted on the first try (as seems true for most article manuscripts). I’m a strong advocate of open access publishing, and it just seems wrong to keep our data to ourselves for all that time. But I do value the peer review process, and while I hope that posting a report on our website would generate comments, there’s no guarantee.

Ideally I’d like to write both a preliminary report, to be posted online by the end of the summer, and a scholarly article, submitted around the same time and (hopefully) published sometime next year. I’m not sure that we have time for both, though. While the summer months are slower in the library, we’re still open, and there are classes and reference desk shifts to staff and programs to plan for next year. So we are probably going to have to focus our energies on just one publication.

As I’ve been thinking on this recently there’s been lots of other news in the world of academic publishing. The University of California proposed a possible faculty boycott of the Nature Publishing Group. And an unusual scholarly publishing project came out of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University: Hacking the Academy, a book that gathered all of its submissions in just one week. I can’t help but think that we’re in an odd scholarly communication moment right now, stuck between old and new worlds of knowledge dissemination, and I’m not always sure how to chart my course.

Friday again featured a number of memes.  Morgan asked 20 questions on day 20 so I thought I would ask you a few more:

1. Who said don’t be afraid to change direction when she reflected on why she became a librarian?
2. Who described her life according to They Might Be Giants and The Cure?
3. Whose son passed a milestone getting his P-plates?
4. Who is an RSS evangelist?
5. Who is participating in the 10,000 steps challenge?
6. Which school librarian watched students dance for joy?
7. Which blogger answers her own question about why she became a librarian?
8. Who quotes Lord Byron?
9. Whose blog featured a couple of furry friends?
10. Who spend a lovely day on her own in Daylesford?

Only four days to go. Keep them coming people.

With the group round of the World Cup coming to a close and the round of 16 under way, it’s the perfect time to see what’s piqued searchers’ interest since our pre-tournament search trends kick-off.

Understandably, searches for [world cup standings] climbed steadily during the first week of play as fans around the globe watched the various teams jockey within their groups to qualify for the next round. Upsets in the group round have been particularly effective at driving increased search volume. Switzerland’s win over Spain on June 16 (one of the tournament’s earliest upsets) drove its share of search traffic, and New Zealand’s unexpectedly good performance against Italy, the 2006 tournament champion, inspired people to look for information about the “All Whites” (the Kiwi team’s nickname). Until England’s keeper let in a “soft” goal in the game against the U.S., [striker] was a more popular term than [fullback], [goalkeeper] or [midfielder]—but since then, searches for [goalkeeper] have largely outpaced the other positions. Searches for [england keeper] and [rob green] also spiked on the day of that game.

One of the rising—and controversial—stars of the World Cup’s initial days was the ubiquitous vuvuzela, which, at its peak on June 15, nearly overtook searches for [waka waka], the official song of the 2010 World Cup sung by Shakira. Viewers—and listeners—around the world searched for information about the South African horn, although after the initial spike it seems people have become accustomed to this unofficial match soundtrack, or perhaps purchased their own (listen for the German fans in the round of 16!).

But the vuvuzela is certainly not the only aspect of this year’s World Cup under scrutiny. Controversies have cropped up throughout the tournament, and a rise in search volume was never far behind. Interest in the much-debated 2010 World Cup ball, or [jabulani], has remained high throughout the first two weeks, and searches for [world cup referees] reflect the growing awareness that an official’s decision can make or break the fate of a team. Search volume for this topic peaked on June 18, the day a potentially tie-breaking U.S. goal against Slovenia was disallowed by a controversial offsides call. Searches for [offsides] also spiked on June 18, as well as on June 11 following an offsides call during the opening game between Mexico and South Africa, and June 23 after a call in the U.S. game against Algeria. Among English-speaking countries, most of these searches came from the U.S., a country relatively less familiar with “the beautiful game.”

Participating teams and individual players have also done their part to spark controversy. The French team has been in the spotlight for a variety of reasons: qualification for the tournament in a win over Ireland credited to a Thierry Henry handball, refusal to train after Nicolas Anelka was sent home for insulting the team’s coach (searches for [anelka] spiked following his departure), and their eventual elimination from the tournament. In another newsworthy twist, searches for Algerian player Rafik Saifi have skyrocketed in the last days after his altercation with an Algerian journalist.

As the stakes climb even higher in the elimination rounds, we’re all on the look-out for more exciting (and controversial) moments and emerging stars. So stay tuned—we’ll be back with more search trends as the World Cup action continues.

Posted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog team

In his latest podcast for Infopeople, Michael Cart looks at past and recent winners of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. The award is sponsored by Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association. This year’s Printz winner was Going Bovine by Lidda Bray.

moving libraries forward one blog entry at a time

Today I participated in a Linked Data Unconference at ALA 2010 in Washington DC, which was remarkably successful. Organized by Corey Harper from NYU and ably moderated by Karen Coyle, about 50 of us held two sets of three hour-long, highly engaging breakout discussions with reports back to the larger group. I participated in a discussion of some of the practical difficulties encountered trying to implement Application Profiles in a far from perfect Linked Data environment (I strongly recommended creating a local mirror of inadequately expressed in RDFS/OWL, but otherwise useful, data models) and a discussion of scholarly Linked Data use cases and data reuse (we looked hard at VIVO and VIAF and discussed metering data usage). It was fun! I was surprised.

Afterwards a few of us had a fine lunch together, discussing the nuts and bolts of RDA and the future of cataloging, a lively and fascinating discussion in the best possible sense of ‘lively’ and ‘fascinating’. It strikes me in retrospect that we formed a kind of curmudgeon’s table — Diane Hillmann, Corey Harper, Eric Hellman, Ed Summers, Karen Coyle, and me. All of us sharing strong opinions, agreeing and disagreeing whole-heartedly and with considerable good humor and affection. A table of warm and engaged people, knowing that it’s too late to save the world, maybe too late to save cataloging, but it would still be really interesting to try. It was great fun. I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

Earlier today, the United States federal government significantly updated its online cookie policy to allow government agencies to use third-party websites and applications. The two memoranda on the use of cookies and web analytics, embedded after the jump, balance provisions that will enable government agencies to use social media, video sharing and discussion platforms with guidance on privacy safeguards for individual citizens.

"I can finally use persistent cookies on our websites! Couldn't use Google Analytics before today's guidance," tweeted Neil Bonner, manager of applications development at the Transportation Security Administration.

The updated government cookie policy, with its privacy provisions, are directly tied to issues of customization and e-services on government portals. The ability to provide better online experiences on government websites is a theme federal CIO Vivek Kundra has emphasized since his appointment. The updated guidance recognizes the immense changes that have occurred online since policies governing analytics and cookies on government websites were issued a decade ago, including the explosion in government use of third-party websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

"President Obama has made it a touchstone of his administration to open government and make it more transparent than it ever has been before," said Michael Fitzpatrick, associate administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. "Over the last year, we've been involved in a collaborative effort with the public for how the government should harness new technologies. We needed to put down rules of the road so that agencies can be confident they're doing it in the right way."

The way the government has traditionally communicated with the public is through the Federal Register, said Fitzpatrick. And as those who have looked at that entity's release of bulk XML and GovPulse.us are aware, the Federal Register itself is innovating and repackaging the way it provides that information.

"Agencies more and more are looking for ways to communicate with the public in the regulatory realm using social media, chartrooms, webcasts, webinars and virtual town halls," said Fitzpatrick. "It's our belief that agencies will reach a much broader segment of the american public than the existing federal Register Model."

Fitzpatrick says the new guidance will supplement that existing model: "[This memo] will break it open so that it can be accessed by millions and millions of American citizens who have grown up communicating with each other in very different ways than the government models over the last 40 or 50 years."

Given the support for the use of the social media platforms that have exploded in popularity over the past five years, the updated policies are likely to improve the federal government's ability to interact and engage with citizens online, deliver e-services and provide information. The new guidance may also begin to close the significant IT gap between the public and private sectors that OMB Director Peter Orzag has recently described.

There are inevitable trade-offs in government gathering citizen information in order to deliver more e-services. Kundra has repeatedly referred to improving .gov websites to reflect the experience that people have come to expect from visiting Amazon.com and other e-tailers. In 2010, smarter websites that remember what you liked, what you clicked, what you bought, and what you browsed are the standard.

Although many citizens have acclimated to that tradeoff commercially, the trend of web giants like Google and Yahoo offering consumer dashboards that provide data collection has accelerated in recent months, in part due to the concerns of privacy advocates and inquiries by federal regulators. It remains to be seen if citizens will be as comfortable about the use of cookies on .gov websites as they have been on .com sites, even if cookie use is necessary to deliver better service, like the renewal of licensing or other documents.

The updated guidance also makes clear to agencies that they must make e-services and information that are available on third-party services available on their .gov websites as well. Specifically, the memo states that:

Agencies should also provide individuals with alternatives to third-party websites and applications. People should be able to obtain comparable information and services through an agency's official website or other official means. For example, members of the public should be able to learn about the agency's activities and to communicate with the agency without having to join a third-party social media website. In addition, if an agency uses a third-party service to solicit feedback, the agency should provide an alternative government email address where users can also send feedback.

Citizens that visit .gov websites over the next year, in other words, should expect to find the same information that they'd see on an agency Facebook page, along with an email address to contact the relevant officials.

New online privacy guidance

While the new policy allows the use of cookies, its also requires government agencies to take specific steps to protect privacy when using third-party websites and applications. According to the FAQ releases by OMB, these include:

• Examining the third party's privacy policies to evaluate the risks and determine whether the website or application is appropriate for the agency's use. The third party's policies should be monitored for changes and the risks should be periodically reassessed.
• Performing a Privacy Impact Assessment to evaluate the privacy implications, to identify appropriate safeguards, and to ensure that such safeguards are in place. Generally, these assessments should be posted on the agency's website.
• Updating the agency's privacy policy to inform the public about its practices with respect to any personally identifiable information that will be available to the agency. The privacy policy should be centrally located on the agency's website.
• To the extent practicable, providing a privacy Nnotice on the specific website or application that the agency is using. The notice should give people an opportunity to understand the agency's practices before engaging with the agency.

OMB guidance for agency use of third-party websites and applications

"The central goal is to respect and safeguard the privacy of the American public while also increasing the Federal Government's ability to serve the public by improving and modernizing its activities online," wrote Orzag. "Any use of such technologies must be respectful of privacy, open, and transparent, and solely for the purposes of improving the Federal Government's services and activities online."

OMB guidance for online use of web measurement and customization technologies

The memorandum on the use of Web measurement and customization technologies establishes new procedures and provides updated guidance and requirements for agency use of Web measurement and customization technologies. Almost exactly a decade ago, on June 22, 2000, OMB issued memorandum M-00-13, which was then updated by memorandum M-03-22. These memoranda prohibited the use of technologies, including persistent cookies, that allow website publishers to measure traffic and customize user experience unless a government agency head approved the use of such technologies "due to a compelling need."

That restriction effectively led to a ban on Web analytics on .gov websites, despite widespread public acceptance of their use on commercial .com websites. That deprived government webmasters of the ability to customize user experiences or measure the success of campaigns or redesigns. As government websites implement the new OMB policy, both government agencies and citizens consuming their pages should benefit from the change.

Audio of the press call on the new government cookie policy is available at FierceMarkets.com.

I had hoped to write more about my teaching experience while it was happening, but as go so many good intentions, I couldn’t quite manage it. Part of this is because I forget, in between my ‘normal’ 5 year cycles of teaching, how much time it takes to do at all, much less do well. As a result, I really haven’t blogged at all since the end of March, when I started on my latest teaching adventure, and I’m sure a lot of people thought I’d dropped off a cliff. Well, I did, sort of, but it wasn’t really a bad experience.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was very happy about the support supplied by the UW iSchool—a group very experienced in helping virtual teachers and students have the best experience possible. This, and the high caliber of the students, made the experience overall the best one I’ve had. There were parts of it I really enjoyed, primarily the discussions with the students, their willingness to start new discussions and read widely about the topics at hand, and their ability to think about issues that they’d not really encountered before. Their interest, curiosity and enthusiasm kept me willing to work through my screencast software problems (“Oh yes, this is a known bug, we expect it to be fixed in subsequent releases.”). There were the inevitable problems keeping up the grading on their assignments—my weekends evaporated in the face of piles of writing I needed to read then supply feedback about.

But, I realized again that I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner (odd as that analogy may seem to anyone who knows me or has seen me in front of a room). I still think I’m better at the one shot workshop than the semester or quarter course of 10-15 weeks. Not that I’d never do it again (never say never), but it’s hard work, and not well paid, so I’d have to give it some thought before jumping in again. And I’m thinking about a new workshop I’d like to develop, and when I do, I might see who’d be interested in hosting it.

~ Australia and New Zealand Researchers Now Able to Find Information on Current Issues Relevant to Their Countries ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — June 25, 2010 — Researchers and students looking for information on current social and political issues relating to Australia and New Zealand now have a resource available to them that is dedicated to these needs. EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) has released Australia and New Zealand Points of View Reference Centre™. This new resource is designed to assist researchers in understanding the full scope of a wide range of controversial subjects and features a series of full-text essays representing opposing viewpoints on a variety of important issues.

The resources in Australia and New Zealand Points of View Reference Centre are designed to provide additional information about a debate topic; allowing researchers to build their arguments using the most current material available and back it up with information gleaned from high-quality resources. The goal is to provide the basis from which students can realize and develop persuasive arguments and essays, better understand controversial issues and develop analytical thinking skills.

The database provides 100 topics each with an overview (objective background/description), point (argument) and counterpoint (opposing argument). For every topic, Australia and New Zealand Points of View Reference Centre offers a Guide to Critical Analysis, which helps the reader evaluate the controversial topics and enhances their ability to read critically, develop their own perspective on the issues & write or debate an effective argument on the topic.

Australia and New Zealand Points of View Reference Centre contains a balance of materials from all viewpoints, including 400 main essays, leading political magazines from all sides of the political spectrum, newspapers, radio & T.V. news transcripts, primary source documents and reference books.

Topics in Australia and New Zealand Points of View Reference Centre include:

• Climate Change
• Renewable Energy
• Gay Marriage
• Abortion
• Animal Experimentation
• Green Consumerism
• Freedom of Speech
• Nuclear Energy
• Population Growth
• Worldwide Oil Supplies
• Cloning
• Stem Cell Research
• Services for Indigenous Peoples
• Globalization

EBSCO also offers, Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre™ , a database specifically designed for researchers from Australia and New Zealand.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of over 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search™, Business Source®, CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Literary Reference Center™, MasterFILE™, NoveList®, SocINDEX™ and SPORTDiscus™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database™, EconLit, INSPEC®, MEDLINE®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index™, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world.

EBSCO is the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™ a core collection of locally-indexed metadata creating a unified index of an institution’s resources within a single, customizable search point providing everything the researcher needs in one place—fast, simple access to the library’s full text content, deeper indexing and more full-text searching of more journals and magazines than and other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
###
For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Manager
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com

~ Textile Resource with Data from 1970 to Present Available via EBSCOhost® ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — June 25, 2010 — World Textiles™, a database providing information on developments and innovations in the textile industry, is now available from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO). World Textiles, formerly from Elsevier, contains data from 1970 to the present. The database provides researchers with international coverage of scientific, trade, technical and economic publications. Selection of content in World Textiles utilizes a unique classification scheme designed to adapt coverage to current research trends.

World Textiles is a comprehensive source of information for anyone involved in textiles since it
covers a broad range of topics including plant development, computer control, manufacturing and finishing processes, commercial development, performance of textile products and environmental concerns. World Textiles is also a source of American, British and European patents and international standards information.

World Textiles provides current coverage of more than 200 international journals and provides archival coverage of several hundred additional journal titles, books and reports. More than 370,000 records are available from 1970 onwards with an additional 12,500+ new citations and abstracts added annually.

Accessing World Textiles via the EBSCOhost® platform provides users with a customizable interface, a variety of search options and the ability to link to full-text articles. EBSCOhost offers a clean look and feel, for a technologically sophisticated, yet familiar search experience. Built-in flexibility provides users with the ability to customize their searches and brings an intuitive approach to searching online databases.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search™, Business Source®, CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Literary Reference Center™, MasterFILE™, NoveList®, SocINDEX™ and SPORTDiscus™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database™, EconLit, Inspec®, MEDLINE®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index™, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. EBSCO is the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™ a core collection of locally-indexed metadata creating a unified index of an institution’s resources within a single, customizable search point providing everything the researcher needs in one place—fast, simple access to the library’s full text content, deeper indexing and more full-text searching of more journals and magazines than and other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.

EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

###
For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Manager
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com