WML Tech Updates

Vanderbilt Information Technology Services (ITS) has partnered with Joost to offer free TV via the internet. Joost is an innovative offering that will change the way you watch TV. You’ll have loads of interactive programming available on your computer for FREE!

You can watch it anywhere in the world with a broadband connection. It’s easy to use and interactive. It even has chat and instant messaging.

You’ll be able to watch hundreds of full-length shows from some of the world’s best-known channels, including lots of foreign language programming.

Joost is now available to the Vanderbilt Community in beta format. Take part in testing Joost and give your feedback on ways to make it even better. All you need to start is your invitation.

Windows XP or Vista with 500 MB free disc space or an Intel-based Macintosh is required, along with a broadband connection.

Access Joost support at http://www.joost.com/support/

Vanderbilt ITS does not provide Joost support.

For more information about Joost, see Joost FAQs and Knowledge Base.

Learn more about Joost at Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt ITS’s partnership with Joost is part of our effort to provide legal programming alternatives to Vanderbilt students.

Interested in a wiki but don’t know which one to choose? Take a look at this site: WikiMatrix. You can run through the Wiki Choice Wizard and it will ask you simple questions about what sort of features you are interested in, and what you intend to do with the wiki, to help you determine which type of wiki is best for you. There is also a Forum for discussion on all the various wikis listed, which is a pretty comprehensive list. But I can’t help but wonder if they really cover all of them, as I would assume there are wikis that are joining and leaving the playing field everyday.

And for all the true geeky wiki developers out there, WikiMatrix also has a Markup Comparison service that allows you to quickly see the syntax used by the the various wiki engines for a particular piece of markup.

Pretty nifty!

If you haven’t heard the news, is now being intergrated in a library’s catalog!

“We’re happy to announce that the Danbury Library in Danbury, Connecticut has become the first library in the world to put LibraryThing for Libraries on its live catalog. The Danbury Library—already breaking ground with an active blog and a MySpace page—continues to innovate and experiment. And we finally have something to show people!”

For more information on this amazing project (and for some nifty screen shots), view the whole article on Thingology, LibraryThing’s Ideas Blog.

I also want to encourage you to go straight to their catalog and play with it yourself! It’s very cool!

Congrats to Tim Spalding and his LibraryThing Team and to Kate Sheehan, Danbury’s Coordinator of Library Automation, for making this happen and being a role model for all the libraries who know their OPAC sucks and are positive that things can only improve.

Jenny Levine had a great post today on communicating with library users, whether in-person, on the phone, IM, texting, or just changing the status of your IM so people can easily tell whether or not you are available.

I talked with my colleague Cynthia just the other day about this, and how we both change our status in Trillian quite regularly. Unfortunately, only a couple other WML library staff use IM, and they use different clients like AIM, Yahoo, or MSN. Heck, even LITS set up an in-house client (Exodus) to test, but it’s never been announced or promoted to all the libraries for use, nor do they intend to advertise it. They say it’s up to the directors of the individual libraries to determine whether or not to implement it. So I guess if I am really adamant about using IM in WML, I need to make a convincing case to our director. We need to be on the same page internally before we even attempt to do IM reference interactions with library users. But wouldn’t it be cool if I could IM with any of my colleagues throughout the Heard Library system, many of whom I need to interact with regularly because of committees and project teams? And do you know anyone not in favor of reducing the amount of email we get?

I personally communicate with my colleagues in a number of ways. Some people only respond to email, but I have several colleagues throughout the Heard Library system that I communicate with via Facebook, IM via Exodus, IM via Trillian, and even SMS texting. And with some people, it’s just easier to call. But one thing Jenny said really hit me.

“…it’s important to do the cliche and “think outside of the box” of how we ourselves might view communication. Even when we do focus groups or informal surveys, it tends to be with library users, who might not be that different from us. Therefore, we might miss patterns like these that show a shift in how the outside world communicates.”

I think it is important that we keep in mind how other people communicate and want to be communicated with. I know some reference librarians that when they get an instant message, or even an email, they insist that the user come into the library because the librarian thinks it’s easier to explain how to find something or use a particular resource. But there are so many tools out there that can help the patron just as much as an in-person interaction. We could be doing screencasts, mini podcasts, creating interactive tutorials, adding the info to a wiki or a research guide. I am sure other people besides myself get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. But I think our users like having options on how they not only find information, but having options in how they interact with us as well.

The person who emailed a reference question to a librarian - she emailed because either it was inconvenient, she didn’t want to come into the library, or she didn’t want to talk to a person. Isn’t customer service about giving people the type of service they want, not what we want? Why do we present to our users so few options of interacting with us when the communications possibilities are almost endless and continually expanding?

Holy smokes! I read my feeds pretty regularly.  And each day I learn something new, and some days, I learn a whole heck of a lot!   I’m amazed at how fast many web technologies are radically growing, evolving, and improving the way we interact with the web and with one another. But this post (rather, the technology itself) just got my mind racing about the possibilities. Read on.

On the Library Garden blog, there was a post about a new widget called YackPack that works like a walkie-talkie. You can talk to individuals or groups of people.

This fun widget allows you to very easily put voice on any type of Web page, with no configuration or registration to do, no software to download, no money to spend—just one “push-to-talk” button widget embedded on your site and you have a web walkie-talkie for live voice chat from any Web page.

The folks at Library Garden also talked about other technologies too, but the potential for having a talk button on a library website (and maybe on every research guide, database details page, help page, etc.) is amazing!  Users could be using Meebo where they can just IM a librarian without having to download, install, or have an IM client at all.   But with YackPack, they could just talk to a librarian.  Here’s a little video that they had linked off their page.  The video shows you how to add the little widget to a wiki.  They use PBwiki in this example, but you can plop it on any type of webpage.  How cool is that?

Voice chat… the next big thing?

They do talk about other technologies in this post, and overall, this is an excellent blog to be reading regularly if you aren’t already doing so.  They always have engaging, fun content that will keep you coming back for more.

I was catching up on reading my feeds tonight and I came across David Lee King’s notes from the opening session at Computers in Libraries (which is a cool conference that I would LOVE to go to - maybe next year). Anyway, the opening session was presented by Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. I’ve heard him speak before about Pew surveys results, and the results are always so interesting. But this opening session had a library focus, which was nice. Apparently, Rainie talked about six hallmarks of the web 2.0 world that matter to libraries.

1. the internet has become the computer
2. content creation
3. even more internet users are accessing the content created by others
4. many are sharing what they know and feel online and that is building conversations
5. tens of thousands are contributing in online … ???
6. customizing their online experiences thanks to web 2.0 tools

See all the details and explanations on David’s blog, which always has insightful information.

Librarians and the whole Learning 2.0 concept have made it into WIRED online. Also, Helene Blowers, Michael Stephens, and Michael Casey, some of my Library 2.0 heroes, are highlighted in the article. Below are some excerpts. Read the whole article here:   Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks

When the IT director at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes — a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0, developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

Although her original goals for Learning 2.0 were touchy-feely “E’s” — exposing staff to new tools, encouraging play, empowering individuals, expanding the knowledge toolbox, eliminating fear — the effects were both practical and financial.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,’” said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

I just saw Darlene Fichter’s SirsiDynix Institute presentation: Mashups: A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That. It was wonderful! Darlene is the Head of the Indigenous Studies Portal and Coordinator of Data Library Services at the University of Saskatchewan Library and obviously has lots of experience playing with and building some mashups. She also has a cool Blog.

Prior to the presentation, I was walking across campus and between my office and the classroom where the webcast was being shone, I got asked by 2 different people who were also headed to the webcast what a mashup is. This tells me that many of my colleagues aren’t aware of the trends in social networking and the proliferation of new tools being used by, and sometimes even being created by, librarians. Only 8 people in our library system showed up for the webcast, so I hope that this post will help inform those that were unable to attend.

What is a mashup anyway? It’s a web application that uses content from more than one source to create a new service. Mashups can be created by expert programmers as well as people with fewer technology skills. Mashups have a lot of potential for self-service to the end user. Also, mashups can usually be done online and can be integrated into one’s browser, although some require something to be installed client-side.

The Mashup Ecosystem, or things needed in order to create a mashup:

• open data
• open set of services
• small pieces loosely joined
• you

A little background: The term mashup originally goes back to the musical genre of songs that consist entirely of parts of other songs - you might take the vocals from one song and overlay them on the melody of another.

Today, most mashups are based around maps, and in particular, Google Maps.

Darlene went on to talk about several examples of mashups, some of which I have highlighted here:

• Newsmaps
• Book Carousel
• Flickr and Flickr Toys
  
• HousingMaps - combines Craigslist and Google Maps API
• Placeopedia
• Frappr
• Superglu
• Blogging Librarians
• http://www.frappr.com/mashups
• LivePlasma - uses Amazon API
• Programmable Web

Typology of the Mashup (Dion Hinchcliffe)

Where to start? There are some mashups that you can create where all you have to do is “point, click, and publish.” Some, you can “clone” by looking at the source code of a mashup that you like and making adjustments to suite your needs. And some, you will just need to do some heavy programming (or find a friend who is a programmer).

You need to:

1. Get an idea.
2. Sign up at the developer’s site (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc.) to get a developer token/code.
3. Read the fine print about any possible usage restrictions.

More examples (many of which would definitely need a programmer):

• Lib-web-cats (Marshall Breeding’s worldwide directory of library catalogs, mashed up with Google Maps)
• Communitywalk
• Yourgmap
• Mapbuilder
• Yahoo Pipes - very powerful, and you can easily clone other people’s pipes.
• Dapper
• Teqlo
• QEDwiki
• Google Maps Mania

Want more info? Look at the archive of Darlene’s presentation at the SirsiDynix Institute where you can view the presentation, view additional handouts, listen to her speak, etc. It’s all there.