New e-list for systems Librarians

A new elist for systems Librarians has been created by Renata Dyer from Information Services at The Treasury.

The eList is for Australian Library staff who are involved in library systems management and/or employing technology to support library services and products.

To subscribe to go to aliaLIBSYSTEMS.

Also a reminder that NSW RISG has set up an online forum for members which includes a section for tech heads to wax lyrical about their latest gadget/initiative/innovation/disaster!

Web directions south

Last week webdirections south was on.

Highlights included a session by Derek Featherstone talking about Accessibility beyond compliance (this covered how to really make your web site accessible for people with disabilities), Grant Young talking about Stratgies for social media /social networks highlighting thinking of people having conversations in networks, rather than of the medie which was fascilitating the conversations. He also reminded of the need to engage with people when they are talking, and that we have to think about how to be part of the conversations.

Jeffrey Veen, made data analysis fun, highlighting examples from John Snow, Charles Joseph Minard, Harry Beck and
Chris Jordan. Veen suggested finding a story in the data, using different visual clues within the data and removing everything which is not telling the story.

For interest have a look at Jeremy Keith's website (check out the customisation).

Another presentation to look at belongs to David Peterson talking about Semantic web for distributed social networks.

Check out the webdirections south website for the talks as they are added in (podcasts and slides).

Hakia

Hakia is a search engine in beta. It says that it is a semantic search engine which means that proximity counts. I would be interested to hear of others experience with Hakia - via comments.

Google Gadgets for Your Library Catalogue

I think that one of the central things that libraries need to focus on if they are to thrive into the future is to make it easy for people to discover library content without having to acutally visit the library. This is especially true for reference services as so much information is available on the web. I talked about this idea as part of the last Reference Seminar. The logic goes something like this...

Discovery happens elsewhere. Most people don't go to libraries as their first point of call for information. If we want people to discover our content then we need to make sure that we disclose that content to the environments that people actually use. These links point to two posts from Lorcan Dempsey's blog, where I first came across these ideas.

Over the last week or so I have been taking the first tentative steps toward trying to put those ideas into practice at my place of work. I've created a Google gadget for the Sutherland Shire Libraries Catalogue. Our customers can add a gadget to their personal Google page, blog or other web site that lets them search our collection and link to their library account. Here's a screen shot of the gadget on my iGoogle page and you can read more about it on our blog.

iGoogle Page with Catalogue Gadget
Originally uploaded by Sutherland Shire Libraries

It wasn't that difficult to do, however, if you want to give it a go you'll need to know a little bit of html. I started with this presentation from Ed Metz giving step by step instructions on how to go about it, combined with some reading from the Gadgets API and here we are.

I'm not sure whether any of our users will actually use it but it didn't take too much time to put together so I don't think it's wasted time.

It's in the Gadget directory but it's not showing up in a search yet (I'm hoping that it's just waiting for the next crawl) and I've written about it on our web site. What do you think? Any ideas for where else I could promote it?

Google Releases New Browser called Chrome

Google has entered the browser market with it's new offering, Chrome. It seems an obvious choice for Google and one might conclude that this is another part of Google's attack on Microsoft's dominance.

You may have noted that there has been quite a bit of online chatter regarding the Chrome Terms of Service. In particular there were concerns about Google's assertions over their rights to user content. Of greater interest to me, however, are the concerns regarding what information Google collects from people using Chrome. It seems to be that the issue is that Google stores all the information you enter into the Omnibox (Chrome has a single text box for addresses and search). To their credit Google has attempted to address these concerns. For me personally, I feel that as a user of several Google services including iGoogle, Reader, Blogger and more, Google already knows all about me. Knowing what I type into a search box is the least of my problems. You will have to make those descisions for yourself.

But what about the browser itself? I've tried it but for me it's not a replacement for Firefox yet. The long list of Firefox add-ons that extend the functionality of that browser make it a clear choice for me for now. I will be keeping an eye on it though.

I like the idea of the Omnibox. One place for users to enter both URLs and search terms. And it stands to reason that as they work on it Google services will become more integrated into the browser itself, which could be attractive given I use so many of their services. If it takes off and lots of add-ons become available I might be inclined to make the switch but it's a wait and see for me for now.

What about you? Have you used Chrome? What did you think?

Web 3.0 the next installment

Allan Cho has written a recent article about web 3.0. Following up from an earlier post by Ross, it seems that the programming will be very open, but some parts of web 3.0 will not be as open as web 2.0. It also sounds like people are still working on ways of meaningful ways of describing web 3.0.

Being there

Bill Thompson from the BBC writes about the importance of being there. Even with new technologies which make remote access to events easier, there is something different about being present. The online line and remote options really open up possibilities when it is not possible to be where a talk, presentation or seminar are. Time differences can be a bit tricky. All the online events I have been interested in lately seem to be at 2.00am my local time.