Information Center Connections

Technical Standards and You

Standards are part of our daily lives. They can be found at home, in our car, at work and in cyberspace.  We wouldn’t have email without standards.  Standards not only formally document technical criteria, methods, practices and practices, they allow companies and individuals to save money, accelerate projects and make better solutions.

Technical standards are up for review every five years which makes the revision process long and slow. Different organizations focus on reviewing, enhancing and proposing standards on different topics. In the library world, NISO, W3C, and Library of Congress are the standards organizations helping to define epublication, metadata, linked data, and CSS standards (to just name a few).

SLA has a Technical Standards Committee whose focus is to share standards activities from various organizations and provide educational opportunities about the standards, as well.  In the past, this committee has also voted on NISO standards on behalf of SLA. 

If you are interested in technical standards or tasked with implementing them in your organization, join the open SLA Technical Standards discussion list.  Subscription instructions are at the bottom of the committee's page. 

Look for educational opportunities about technical standards in the upcoming months. If you have suggestions for a specific technical standard you would like to learn more about or standards topics you think are important to information professionals, let us know by contacting any committee member.

The best intranets

Don't you love "best of" lists?  Top 10/25/101 lists?  From the writer's perspective, it's a concise and eye-catching way to communicate ideas.  From the reader's point of view, it's "I-can-scan-this-easily" time.

The 4 January issue of Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox lists the top ten intranets for 2011.  After the list, trends and common themes are explored.  Some findings:

• Better tools and greater investment in intranets (even in small companies)
• More and better mobile intranets...a captive, defined audience makes it easier to create highly-functional intranets
• Better management of knowledge on intranets through targeted repositories, encouragement of innovation, easy-to-use commenting tools, user rating systems, and customized content collections
• Task-centered information architecture aids usability
• Search capabilities are of utmost importance
• Page templates and content management systems are key to information organization and consistency

Where else can these ideas be applied?  Certainly for websites more generally.  And, we could all use better tools and greater investment in many aspects of our work. 

The full report is available from the Nielsen Norman Group.

What do you know about open source?

Specifically, what do you know about open source integrated library systems?

Before I attended a D.C. Chapter event on open source integrated ILS this week, I knew very little.  But the presentation by Patrick Jones from PTFS made things a lot clearer for me!

Open source software is created not for a profit, but to use it and share it.  It follows the GNU licensing model, which means, according to Jones, that you don't charge for the software and share back with the community any improvements or further developments.  What might be best of all is that there are none of the licensing restrictions that come with commercial software.  It doesn't matter how many seats or copies or locations....

The costs for open source relate to development--improvements, customization--not the software itself (which, remember, is FREE!).  Of course, what comes with that is technical support that is provided through communities, not from the software provider...unless you work with one of the companies that provide services for open source ILS.  The main providers are PTFS, LibLime (Koha only), and Equinox (Evergreen only).

There are several open source integrated library systems, but the main two (and the two that were focused on in the presentation) are Koha, which is Web-based and offers modules for cataloging, circulation, serials, acquisitions, an OPAC, and system admin, and Evergreen.  Evergreen has some local software and some Web-based parts, and does not have acquisitions or serials modules.

If you're interested in further reading on open source ILS, take a look at this paper by Richard W. Boss, updated in December 2008, which goes into detail about the ins and outs of open source software and includes some case studies.

Tips and tools from Computers in Libraries

Of course, there were waaay more resources shared at the recent Computers in Libraries conference than can be reported here, but I wanted to write about some of the interesting things I learned at the event, which took place March 30th-April 1st in Arlington, Virginia.

The first day's keynote was CIL regular Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  He reported on the results of the newly-released The Mobile Difference in his presentation "Friending Libraries:  Why Libraries Can Become Nodes in People's Social Networks."  Sixty-two percent of those who connect to the Internet (as of 2008) do so wirelessly, which just eight years ago was impossible.  In the information "ecosystem," the volume, variety, velocity, and access points of and for information have increased...and the relevance of information has also improved (along with our ability to find it), although we sometimes suffer from "continuous partial attention"...which means our capacity to focus has decreased.  So much to do (and read and see), so little time!  Lee described the characteristics of the ten groups identified by the survey results, from those who "lead the pack" as digital collaborators to those who are "tech indifferent," who don't even have cell phones or connectivity.  His point was that libraries need to determine who their audience/clients are and work within their universe(s) to meet their information needs.

The following tools are collected from the various presentations throughout the conference.  Be sure to check out the conference site or speakers' own blogs and sites for full presentations.  Explore and experiment...plenty of inspiration here!

Skype...Calls and video calls over the Internet

EngagedPatrons.org...free/lowcost services that help libraries connect with their patrons

Image generators (for your staff avatars, of course), like Generator Blog, Imagegenerator.org (I remember this from 23 Things), and ImageChef.

Google Webmaster Central, where you can find a variety of tools for improving site traffic

Use BoardTracker, BoardReader, and Omgili to find out what people are saying on discussion boards.

FireShot...a Firefox extension for screenshots

XnView converts all sorts of files to other formats

The Top Posts widget from PostRank lists your top blog posts on your blog

Screencast with Jing

Qapture and TweetDeck are just two of the many Twitter applications I heard about 

Brand new Hunch helps you make decisions after you answer a set of questions

Find out which usernames have already been taken with Checkusernames.com

Coordinate global meetings with the World Time Server

What blogs do you read?

I mean actually read?

I recently went through my Bloglines account and took a good look at what I was reading.  And *not* reading.  And what wasn't being updated.  It's so easy to collect feeds, then neglect them for a few favorites or the ones that are the most entertaining. 

Right now, I'm subscribed to 152 feeds.  Before the "deselection," the number was closer to 200.  I have over 2,100 unread messages...most are from feeds that I'm not reading regularly but have decided to hold on to because I know I *should*.  What pressure.

As part of the weeding process, I also reorganized the feeds.  I had some stragglers around, so I moved things to the proper folders (folders are imperative!) and then re-ordered the items in each folder.  I thought about why I read the blogs and which were the most important, and used those factors to organize. 

Take a few minutes (or a half an hour) to delete, organize, and subscribe.  What worked for you 6 months ago may not be helpful anymore.  If a feed hasn't been updated in a while, check the blog...there might be a new subscription or blog address.  Set a reminder for yourself to go through the feeds periodically.

What have I added in the past couple of months? 

iLibrarian...tips and 2.0 info from Ellyssa Kroski

LibGig...careers, workplace trends, and news

comScore...Internet information and stats

ContentBlogger...from Shore Communications' John Blossom, what you need to know about media and the information industry

Consumer Reports feeds...mix and match your interest areas

What did I delete?  I'll never tell....

Worth a click

Ding It's Up tells you (via text, Twitter, or email) when a site is back up (or when it goes down).

The Green Library blog.  There's even a Facebook group.

The SMR International site has many reports, white papers, and profiles on the various aspects of knowledge services. 

Did you know SLA has a presence (and plenty of activity) in Second Life?  Visit the SLA in Second Life blog to find out more.

Worth a click

It's happened to all of us many times...
When Technology Fails, a new Pew Internet report

LIFE + Google = searchable archive of photographs
(millions of them)

PrintWhatYouLike makes web pages print-friendly

Ozmo, a licensing service for user-generated content, from the CCC