Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Bloggers’ Favorite Books of 2005

Here’s a nice little list of books that bloggers were reading this year just in case you’re in need of last second gifts for the laz staff!

Wired magazine has a good story
(Cliff Notes From the Blog World, By Ryan Singel,
Wired, October 21, 2005)
on a useful new service that tracks
blogs and what’s being discussed.

• Memeorandum “Political Web,
  page A1″
• tech.memorandum “Tech Web,
  page A1″

The service “aims to be the automated newspaper of the online world”
and provides two distinct and separate views, one for politics and one for
technology. Each is updated every 5 minutes with the most relevant items
from thousands of news sites and weblogs. As the Wired story notes,
“in addition to automatically tracking the top stories of the day, it also
highlights the conversations between bloggers and mainstream media about
each topic.”

“If you read blogs, you know that there is this
conversation and that some articles are the talk of the day, and other
posts have important things to say about those,” Rivera said. “If you built
graphs in your mind of what the talk looks like, I think it looks like what
I’ve done. I get the sense (Memeorandum) is just a natural representation
of what is already going on.”

Rivera hopes the site will appeal to more than just the Ÿberconnected,
and could be useful as an entry point for those unfamiliar with blogs. To
that end, the site’s design, which features large headlines and stories in
declining order of importance, mimics that of an online newspaper.

ACRLog
ACRLog is the official blog of the Association of College & Research Libraries.

ACRLog is a blog that aims to discuss the issues of the day in the field of academic librarianship. It will strive to get you thinking about what you do, why you do it, and how it fits into this enterprise we call higher education. We are passionate about academic librarianship so we will call it the way we see it. You may not always agree with us - and when you do or donÕt - let us know - but if we get you thinking about the issues that impact on academic librarianship then we are doing our job.

6% of US Internet users read blogs, 2% use RSS.
IT Facts / ZDNet.com
Sept. 5, 2005.

Ok, here is the caveat to the headline. The study,
The State Of Consumer Technology Adoption
by Forrester Research, evidently only counts
“online consumers.” The summary of the report
is available for free but does not reveal much about its methodology except to note that it was a survey of
more than 68,000 households.

Other statistics from the summary:
Households with a laptop and home network watch three fewer hours of TV per week and read the paper an hour less per week than offline households do.

The University of Florida is doing some innovative things with audio and podcasting.
The UF News Desk has begun including audio files along with press releases in text (University of Florida News). The news site includes information on general campus news (announcements, appointments, awards) as well as stories about research at the University. All the information is in a blog with RSS feeds and the audio files are included in the RSS feeds making it very easy to hear the news using iTunes or other
podcast software Examples:

• Hurricane impact (MP3, 6.3 MB)
  The Bureau of Economic and Business Research, part of the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida, recently did a survey to measure the impact of the history-making 2004 hurricane season in Florida. Here UF News & Public Affairs associate director Frank Ahern interviews Bureau director Stan Smith about the survey.
• Blindness genes (MP3,4.6 MB)
  Many older Americans expect gradual vision loss over time. But thousands of young people each year face a more sudden loss of sight. One cause of hereditary blindness in boys and young men called retinoschisis causes the retina to split in half. Now University of Florida experts have cured the disease in mice with the [É]

In addition, the University of Florida Extension office has
a daily radio program on family issues, designed to help families improve their lives (Family Album Radio),
provides these as downloadable audio files, and will be providing a podcast of all their stories in the next month.

maps blog at UCSC

This UCSC Libraries’ Map Room blog “is used to create a
searchable historical record of difficult reference questions. It makes
a great training tool for persons learning to work with the map
collection. The Blog also provides the reference librarians at UCSC with
a better understanding of the kinds of questions that can be answered
using cartographic resources.”

The above description is from an announcement of an upcoming CLA Academic Section and CARL North Information and Technology Interest
Group workshop,
“Is there a Blog or RSS Feed in Your Future?”
For more information on the workshop…

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an interesting article:
NPR defining new Podcast strategy.
NPR has had an agreement with Audible.com, but didn’t renew their contract and will be announcing a new policy “for making NPR content downloadable and portable.”

A somewhat related story,
The Future Of Public Radio by
Doug Kaye, 8/10/05, has some interesting
ideas about high cost of production, low cost
of distribution, the “long-tail,” the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” and so forth. Sample:

If you haven’t read
that book [The Innovator's Dilemma] by Clay Christensen, you really should. As it applies in this
instance, the dilemma is that the established organizations can only
approach innovation on the basis of protecting their current way of
operating.

But the real problem is coming from the fact that listeners want
long-tail time-shifted content. They want to hear programs that are more
meaningful to them, and they want to listen at their convenience. The
entire broadcast-radio system, with its distribution, simply can’t
provide what the customers want.

Are libraries faced with an Innovator’s Dilemma? Libraries
don’t face the same market issues, but libraries do have to
have a service that, on average (read: “including long-tail contents
and services”) is worth funding. It is discouraging that
so much library-like innovation is happening outside libraries at places like
the Google library project and del.icio.us and the Internet Archive, but it is encouraging that libraries are
seeing the importance of digital preservation in a way they didn’t a few
years ago and that so much good digital preservation work is being done within the library community.

RSS4Lib: Innovative ways libraries use RSS

From the Ginn Library at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University comes this blog on
“Innovative ways libraries use RSS.”

ResearchChannel

ResearchChannel is a non-profit organization founded in 1996 by a consortium of leading research universities, institutions and corporate research centers dedicated to creating a widely accessible voice for research through video and Internet channels.

In addition to health and medical sciences, computer science and engineering, more than 30% of the content is in arts, humanities, and social sciences.
ResearchChannel has a video library of over 1300 full-length programs available for
webcast and searchable on-demand.

University Channel

The University Channel makes videos of academic lectures and events from all over the world available to the public. It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present research in a full-length, uncut format.

Already available: The Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement, The Pope and the Future of Religion and Politics, How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap? …and much more!