American Libraries

I wonder how much they had to pay for royalties on the Johnny Cash song?
Enjoy the video:100 years of American Libraries in just over 3 minutes: a rapid-fire history of the official American Library Association magazine.

URL: http://alfocus.ala.org/trackback/27

Photosynth Technology

Watch this video recently posted on Clipaday. The possibilities of the uses of this program are endless for education. Judy

Inaccessibility of Library Data

Karen Schneider's recent post to the ALA Tech Source blog "Out of the Secret Garden: The RDA/DC Initiative" is very insightful and passionate. She argues that our gazillions of library records cannot be integrated with cool web 2.0 tools because the data is not readable and it's our own fault because we insisted on keeping our old fashioned library-specific data based on our arcane cataloging rules.

I always thought that AACR2 rules were quite crazy but I also thought that they had evolved with careful thinking and a wondrous intellectual process that allowed library data to be shared across institutions. Our problem now as a library profession is that it is imperative to migrate our data to the 'Semantic Web' not only using natural language, but also using a format that can be read and used by software agents. (See Aaron Swartz' article for a better understanding of the Semantic Web.)

This is basically why Amazon.com is beating us at our own game. We desperately need our catalogers to understand and deal with this complex issue so that our library records do not become extinct.

Judy Gressel

New Words Added to Oxford English Dictionary

It's about time that the word "high-maintenance" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. So many friends and relatives are high-maintenance that their pictures should be added to the definition area. Maybe that's why they also added the word chill-pill.

My husband's favorite word "argh" has been added. I guess I shouldn't be surprised about the word "high-maintenance" when they finally just added the word "Internet"! Who are these people and what planet are they living on?

WorldCat for Sharing Lists of Books

Today I created a list in World Cat of Recommended Reads:
http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/gresselj/lists/5632
In order to set this up you have to create an account in WorldCat. It's very simple to search World Cat and then set up a variety of lists for citation lists, for subject bibliographies, for personal reading lists, etc. You can keep the list private or make it viewable by the public. You can also share your list with others, link it to your blog or webpage, or search other people's lists. Give it a spin. I think there could be useful ways to promote reading with librarian generated lists.

Judy Gressel

MySpace for Libraries

Two LIS grad students at Dominican are doing a study on libraries with
MySpace pages, and are inviting these librarians to become friends and
answer surveys. Check out the libraries that are already involved.
Library MySpace Study Bibliography
http://www.myspace.com/librarymyspacestudy

PowerPoint Bad for Learning?

I ran across this article about a study at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia). The basic gist of the study is that people can only retain so much information in short term memory and when we split our attention between two sets of the same information, one spoken and one visual, we are less likely to retain either.

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

I wonder if the problem isn't with PowerPoint itself but rather with the way that PowerPoint is used?