Technology
- The 100 Best Products of 2008 from PC World
- The 100 top Web apps for 2008
- Shrink-O-Matic: Batch Image Resizer
- Compfight: The Perfect Flickr Image Search Tool
Work-Life Balance
Cool things other libraries are doing
Friday Link Round Up May 30, 2008
Green assessment May 28, 2008
My Emerging Leaders group has been charged with (among other things) designing an assessment instrument – specifically an email survey to be sent after conference. We strongly suspect that people would be more likely to fill out a short paper form right then and there, but there is a green initiative for this conference pushing us towards using something electronic.
Ideas we’re throwing around:
- Half slips of paper with the promise to recycle
- A combination – a longer emailed survey and a shorter paper slip with something like: “What was the best thing about ACRL 101?” and “What would you change for next time?”
- Instead of slips of paper there’s just a notebook hanging around for comments, or a white board or easel or something…
- Go with electronic – the extra responses aren’t worth the environmental impact
- Go with electronic – the response rate won’t actually vary much
I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks or has done in the past.
ETA – As a clarification: our survey is just for our little program (ACRL 101), not the whole conference so we would have handed you the paper survey as you walked in and asked you to fill it out before you leave, with the idea that people are more likely to bother filling it out in the moment and more likely to ignore an email invitation to a survey later, but there are a number of good arguments here and I’m all for source reduction, so I think I’m leaning towards “the extra responses aren’t worth the environmental impact.”
Friday Link Round Up May 9, 2008
Fun
- Videos from UPenn – Be sure to check out “This place is Hot!”
- Library Videos – a blog collecting library videos
Technology
- ClipX – a tiny clipboard history manager
- Squash – Fast, cross platform batch image resizer
- Simply Google – a one stop list of all Google tools
Cool things other libraries are doing
- Keyword Tweet Clouds
- Free2 – The Free2 campaign is a chance for us to invite more dialogue about how libraries can continue to grow, improve and help meet our communities’ most pressing challenges.
- Library of Congress – myLOC
- “Through myLOC.gov, the new personalized Web site of the Library of Congress, patrons can continue their exploration of the world’s largest collection of knowledge, culture and creativity. Visitors can bookmark areas of interest online and continue their exploration of the Library’s collections by connecting with digital content from their in-person visit. The site also features interactive versions of the same exhibition content physically at the Library, educational resources, information for visitors and a page where users can create their own virtual collection of Library objects.”
Meme: Passion Quilt May 8, 2008
I’ve been following the passion quilt meme in libraryland trying to decide between two different ideas. I’ve given up and am sharing both.
The first one I see has already been used once at Stephen’s Lighthouse. I just want to elaborate on it a little bit because it’s one that my dad sent me while I was in college and that has taken on a couple of different shades for me since then. Something I’ve picked up from psychology is that we often hate the most in others that which we don’t like about ourselves. So the next time you’re complaining about someone, see if there isn’t a little kernel in there that rings true about yourself. If there is, think about what you can do to address that. But even if there isn’t that kernel in a specific instance, the advice also feeds in to the idea of modeling good behavior and that one person can make a difference. I was afraid at first that I shouldn’t pick this one, that it was a little too Pollyanna, but then again, so am I. Sometimes it’s good to bring a little wide eyed good will into a situation.
The second one is from one of my personal heroes, Bill Nye (more on Nye below). I am so enthralled with the idea of the perpetual Beta. Not everything has to be perfect before it’s released. Collect feedback, refine. Learn from experimentation. Try things! And own them. When something fails, learn from that too. One of the best things about perpetual beta is the sense of ownership, that someone is there and listening and working. That’s something that’s missing from things that are released and done.
And in that vein… I’d like to see what Tim, Char, shinylib, and bluebrarian have to share. Not so much a tag as an inquiry…
The rules are simple:
- Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
- Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
- Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
- Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.
Then add it to the Flickr Pool too.
Stepping away from the passion quilt – another thing that bumped Bill Nye up on my personal hero list: I was helping a student who was doing a paper on whether or not addiction is a disease. She needed scholarly articles on both sides of the debate. She had plenty saying that it was, but wasn’t finding any for the other side. Oooo! I thought. Bill Nye the Science Guy did an Eyes of Nye on addiction (episode 3 – unfortunately I can’t directly link to it)! I told her I was pretty sure Nye said it did end up having a chemical effect on your decision making skills, so it wasn’t all about will power, plus if Nye was saying it he was probably representing the scientific mainstream, but let’s check out the show site and see what it has. On the site for that episode he had a section called the flip side where he mentioned an article from a Yale professor arguing the opposite viewpoint – including a link to the pdf! Go Nye!
Animoto May 6, 2008
Just playing with Animoto:
My mini review:
It’s definitely cute and adds a dash of pizazz to a slide show. It also has enormous time sink potential as you tweak the number of pictures, their order, the music and keep refreshing it until you like the effects it adds. It does allow you to embed your show when you’re done, but only with javascript, so sticking them in things like wordpress blogs won’t work unless you export them to YouTube (and lose some image quality) first.
ETA: This particular musical selection was not one of the choices – it’s from The Lovely Sparrows. Now I did not ask permission to use it, but I don’t think my boyfriend is going to say no, especially since I built his website for him 
Soapbox for equality May 5, 2008
Take a minute to read this article. We still have a lot of work to do.
Friday Link Round Up May 2, 2008
Technology
- Podcasting in Plain English (another great video from Common Craft)
- Top 100 Tools for learning (includes A Core Toolset for Learning 2008)
Customer Service
- Nordstrom Quality Customer Service
- Starbucks Ideas worth stealing (it’s not about providing coffee!)
Humor
