A Bloy and his Blog

Since early 2008, my library has been providing reference help though instant messaging. We set up IM accounts with a number of services, and connect to them all through the IM client, Pidgin. We also installed a MeeboMe widget on our ask a librarian page, so people can ask us a question without having an IM account. This is actually where the majority of our IM questions are coming from.

Recently though, because of some network connectivity issues, the Meebo widget has been displaying our status as being offline, even though the librarians were logged into IM. Not good.

To remedy the situation, I installed an AIM WIMZI widget on our site instead. The library already had an account through AIM, so this was an easy fix. The AIM widget also comes with a number of additional benefits.

read the rest of: I.M. Reference using the AIM widget

Monday I was FINALLY hooked up with phone service at my house, and yesterday my DSL modem arrived!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

That was 19 days I went without having internet access at home. I don’t think I’ve gone more than a week without some kind of online access since my days of connecting to computer bulletin board systems on my Atari 800XL computer. And talk about broadband, that was with a state-of-the-art, 300 baud modem. Yes, I am old.

Being without home internet access for so long made me realize how much it’s a part of my everyday activities: reading the online news in the morning with a cup of coffee, using it to find phone numbers, getting a quick map, listening to new music streams, and just keeping up with friends and family. I almost felt like I had lost one of my senses.

Crafting the User-Centered Library
presented by Cliff Landis

Why use emerging tech?

• It’s not enough to shove your bad services (such as our crappy OPACs) into new things.
• Don’t do it because everyone else is.
• For outreach.
• We don’t need things designed FOR the user, we need things designed BY the user.

Planning – it takes too long. Too man hoops to jump through, eventually good ideas can just fade away.

The committee approach – can take any good idea and destroy it. Exploits the negative aspects. To many times people ask “what if…” Cliff then showed us a funny YouTube video, Association Professionals Through the Ages, that illustrates how good ideas can be destroyed in such a manner.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: day three

2.0 Learning and 1.8 Users: Bridging the Gap
presented by Rudy Leon (SUNY Potsdam) and Colleen Harris (Univ. of Tennessee, Chattanooga)

The speakers began this session by talking about myths of the millenial generation.

• They are skilled online searchers
• Are at ease with new gadgets
• Are always connected
• Are effective multitaskers

But as recent news reports and studies have shown, these are not true. Millennials do use the technology, but in a simplified way. In general they are unaware of how powerful the tools they are using can be.

read the rest of: Internet Librarian: day two

I came across this list of obsolete skills. Reading it just makes me feel old. Some of the more ancient skills I possess:

• Adjusting a television’s vertical and horizontal holds
• Adjusting the levels for recording to audio tape
• Balancing the tone-arm on a turntable
• Changing the C120 film cartridge in an Instamatic camera (yes, I had one)
• Editing audio tape with a razor blade and splicing block (video tape too!)
• Entering “freeware” programs from a magazine
• Gopher (in the early days of the internet)
• Loading data from a cassette tape (my first computer, an Atari 800 had a tape drive)
• Punching a hole in the shell of a single-sided 5.25″ floppy disc to make it double-sided (I even owned a special hole-punch for this)
• Rewinding an audio cassette using a Bic pen
• Ripping the little holes off the sides of the computer paper
• Setting a baud rate, parity and stop-bits
• Setting up a modem using AT commands
• Switching to high beams by stomping a button on the floor
• Using a flash cube (on my Instamatic camera, of course)

All now useless bits of information, just taking up brain cells…

A Barracuda Networks study, based on an analysis of more than 1 billion daily e-mail messages sent to its more than 50,000 customers worldwide, found that 90-95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 was spam.

Wow. I knew it was bad, but not THAT bad.

And in case anyone doesn’t know how email spam got its name…

Monty Python: Spam sketch

Many years ago, I had a film single lens reflex camera. SLRs are great for their flexibility, allowing you to change lenses, add filters, and manually adjust settings. For a while now, I’ve been wishing for some of that flexibility in a digital camera, and have been thinking about buying a digital SLR. Early last month, a local camera store was having a sale on the Nikon D40 — a deal I couldn’t pass up.

read the rest of: The Nikon D40