WML Tech Updates

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!

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.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has produced another cool report on Wikipedia usage.

There has been ongoing controversy about the reliability of articles on Wikipedia. Still, the Pew Internet Project survey shows that Wikipedia is far more popular among the well-educated than it is among those with lower levels of education. For instance, 50% of those with at least a college degree consult the site, compared with 22% of those with a high school diploma. And 46% of those age 18 and older who are current full- or part-time students have used Wikipedia, compared with 36% of the overall internet population.

 Take a look at these numbers!

I first saw this on Michael Stephens’ and his Tame the Web blog.  I agree that libraries probably need to be more involved and understand what Wikipedia is all about.  Knowing about how various technologies work is an important part to getting at the heart of what information literacy is all about.  How can you teach someone to use or not use Wikipedia if you don’t understand the process of creating an article within Wikipedia, or are aware of the measures they are taking to increase authority and reliability?

I am always telling my colleagues, some of whom are the more traditional reference librarians and bibliographers, and some of whom suffer from technophobia, that yes, information literacy is essential today, but so is technology literacy.  The more that I read, the more I think that you can’t separate technology literacy from information literacy.  They have become so interdependent.

Anyway, view the full report at the Pew site for more interesting information.

From Campus Technology:

Middlebury Bans Wikipedia as Academic Source

Vermont’s Middlebury College has banned the use of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an acceptable source of academic information for students at Vermont’s Middlebury College, United Press International reported.

The open-source, free encyclopedia lets anyone create and edit citations, which has resulted in the publication of incorrect information. Because of the errors, Middlebury’s history department recently instituted the ban. Because of errors, Middlebury’s history department instituted a policy that says, “Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source,” according to Vermont-based Burlington Free Press.

But writing in the Middlebury Campus student newspaper, undergrad Chandler Koglmeier said, “are you really arrogant enough to say that the opinions of the general public, albeit a general public who cares enough to get on Wikipedia and post about a specific topic, don’t matter? To me, this stinks of the beginnings of censorship.”

The Wikipedia Foundation supports the new policy, the Free Press said. In an e-mail to the newspaper, the foundation said it is an “ideal place to start” for students; “however, it is not an authoritative source.”

For more information, click here.

From: Campus Technology’s News Update

Faculty at MIT and the Wharton School of Business have invited “thousands of authors,” including scholars and business people, to participate in a project to write a collaborative online textbook on the topic of efforts to “successfully or unsuccessfully harness the power of ‘community.’”

The sponsors of the project, using the motto, “We Are Smarter Than Me,” says its premise is that “large groups of people can, and should, take responsibility for traditional business functions that are currently performed by companies, industries and experts.”

The project will use book Wiki technology to produce a “network book,” to be authored by thousands of individuals. This will allow “the book to benefit from the collective wisdom of the community.”

Organizers of the project say the book will be ready this summer. The “We” team includes Thomas Malone, a professor of management at MIT; Barry Libert, CEO of Shared Insights LLC; Jon Spector, vice dean and director of Wharton’s Aresty Institute of Executive Education: Tim Moore, founder of Wharton School Publishing; and Yoram Wind, a professor of marketing at Wharton.

For more information, click here.

Many of you have heard about blogs, wikis, rss feeds, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, etc. If you interact with me, you probably hear me throw these terms around quite often. And I bet most of you have been to Amazon.com before. All of these things are considered to be or influenced by “Web 2.0” technologies and are what younger generations (and some older generations too) are using on the web these days. Web 2.0 was coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, and refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services.

So what is Web 2.0 really?

“A core concept of Web 2.0 is that people are the content of sites. That is, a site is not populated with information for users to consume. Instead, services are provided to individual users for them to build networks of friends and other groups (professional,
recreational, etc.). The content of a site then, comprises user-provided information that attracts new members of an ever-expanding network.”

- Tim O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0″

Karen Schneider, a well-respected colleague in the library field, and founder of the Librarian’s Index to the Internet, has compiled a list of common terms associated with the 2.0 thing. I have added a few terms too.

Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - and in English, it means that a few technologies are working together to help develop interactive web applications. Most Web 2.0 technologies use Ajax

Biblioblogosphere (jocular): The world of library blogging

Blog: from web + log: an easily-updated web diary/journal

Blogosphere: the larger world of blogging

Chat: IM (instant messaging): interactive, real-time, text-based conversation

Comment: A user contribution to an entity

Folksonomy: ad-hoc taxonomies generated for online content (it’s sort of like metadata!)

Podcast (from iPod + cast): an RSS-distributed audio file, usually MP3

Post: an entry on a blog

Mashup: two or more services combined into a third

Radical trust: allowing users to drive/define services and content

Rating: an assessment, usually online, such as four stars for a book

Remix: mixing two or more pots of content to get a third

RSS: Really Simple Syndication - enables rapid republication, or syndication, of web content (text, video, audio, etc.)

Screencast: a digital recording/video of what’s happening on your screen, typically with audio - useful for providing visual directions on how to do something. These can be podcasted, which are called videocasts.

Splogging: spamming within a blog

Tag: a keyword or phrase used in a folksonomy

Tag cloud: a visual representation of part of a folksonomy

Vlog: video blog

Karen also has a WONDERFUL presentation online that discusses this Web 2.0 further, like why you need to know about this, how it is affecting libraries, and what libraries should be doing about it. Her presentation is basically a cookbook - something you can digest fairly easily and can work toward developing an end product, whether that’s a staff that is more knowledgeable, or is the building of new tools. It’s called the Library 2.0 Cookbook: A commonsense guide to those perplexing but intriguing new technologies you keep hearing about.

I suggest that you take a look at it in your free time. It’s not a boring PowerPoint presentation, but rather a visually appealing document full of data and interesting information, and it will certainly help demystify what Web 2.0 really is. And it will definitely get you thinking!

1. Recent Technology Trends - This is a list of trends, new technologies, and innovations that are affecting libraries internationally and on the minds of many librarians and technologists. Things are changing fast, and these are the hottest topics being discussed. This is merely an FYI.
   • Storage Blogs (It’s short for weblog, and is a public website where users post informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies. It’s updated frequently and normally reflects the views of the blog’s creator.)
   • RSS (This is short for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. It’s XML-based and is a commonly used protocol for the syndication and sharing of content, originally developed to facilitate the syndication of news articles, now widely used to share the contents of blogs.)
   • Citizen Journalists (Blogs and RSS Feeds are creating these “citizen journalists,” and this is a concern for authenticity for many people.)
   • Wikis (These are webpages that are editable by visitors to the website, as opposed to conventional websites which can only be changed by the webmaster. They are usually used for community or technical sites to allow for joint authoring and ownership.)
   • E-Books
   • OPACs
   • FRBR (That’s short for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. It uses an entity-relationship model of metadata for information objects, instead of the single flat record concept underlying current cataloging standards. People typically pronounce it “ferber.”)
   • Interface Design
   • WiFi
   • Broadband and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, which is basically telephone over the Internet)
   • Google Print, Google Scholar, and MetaSearching (like MetaLib)
   • Folksonomies
   • Digital Rights Management
2. Proxy Migration - All of the proxy migrations are done! Owen students and alumni will no longer have to authenticate with their VUnet ID/password, but only with their Owen ID/password. Jason Reusch, Jason Battles, and Rachel collaborated to make this work.
3. Electronic Resource Usage Statement splash page - The next step to improving the electronic resources in Rachel’s eyes is to work with the Information Services team to create a standard electronic resource usage statement that would be a page that users have to click through before entering a database about ethical usage of that database, and who has access privileges to that database. Rachel hasn’t talked to LITS about this possibility yet, nor has she really discussed it in detail with the IS team yet. But she believes that there is interest among librarians to have something like this!
4. Databases Update - Thomson ONE Banker is up and running. If you experience any problems with a popup window asking you about cookies, please disregard it at the moment. Dale Poulter is fixing it. Also, Multexnet will soon be Reuter’s Research on Demand. Dale ran across several problems and is still working with Reuter’s IT people to configure it correctly. It should be up by early next week at the latest.
5. New Computers - As you are probably aware, the new computers are in, and one is in Rachel’s office being configured. Danny will be taking the image Rachel helped set up and putting that image on all the public workstations. Danny and Rachel will hopefully be setting them up next week when he returns to work. Laura, Sylvia, Marie, and the scanning station at circulation all have new computers. These computers are awesome because they are easy to open to get to the guts of the computer, they each have a CD/DVD burner, USB plugs are on the front of the computer making it easy for people with portable flash drives to plug in, and microphone and headphone plugs are also on the front of the computer. They are also lightening speed! To give you an idea of how fast these things are changing:

   Computer Speed Memory
   Old desktops 1.29 GHz 256 MB of RAM
   Current laptops 1.6 GHz 512 MB of RAM
   New desktops 3.4 GHz 1.0 GB of RAM

6. Pay-for-Print - At this time, it is undetermined if Owen students will be paying for their printing or not. No matter what decision is made, public workstations will still have pay-for-print software on them to charge non-Owen patrons who enter the library. Deb or Rachel will let you know as soon as they hear something from Dean Bradford.
7. CDROM server databases and public workstation databases - This is referring to public workstation #9 (which has FARS, Proquest ABI Inform/Periodicals Ondisc, and Simmons Choices 3 accessible on it) and to the three databases all installed on the public workstations that aren’t accessible remotely (SDC Platinum 3.2, Datastream Advance 4.0, and the Lexis-Nexis Research Software 7.2). So, what about them? Well, recently, Deb, Rachel, and Jason Reusch met to discuss the possibility of putting these on an Owen server so as to make them more accessible. After some examination of the high cost involved in doing so, it was decided that it would be better to wait and see which of the databases are going to be coming out in Web form, and to investigate how other business libraries are dealing with these more complicated databases.
   In summary, Public Workstation #9 will remain, and the three databases will be on the new public workstations when they are deployed.
8. Java Client - LITS is STILL doing some beta testing on a new Java Client for our current and upcoming Sirsi products. It is coming soon, though!
9. Webcasts - On June 15, Rachel attended the webcast: Google’s Library Digitization Project: Reports from Michigan and Oxford. On July 21, Sylvia and Rachel attended the webcast: Narrowcasting 101: Using Blogs, Podcasts, and Videoblogs in Higher Education.
10. GIS Task Force - On Wednesday, June 22, Rachel and Rahn and the rest of the GIS Task Force presented Paul Gherman and other LMC members with a final report. It summarized the current use of GIS on VU’s campus, included an overview of what is being done with GIS at comparable institutions, and gave recommendations for the future of GIS at VU and within the library system. It was decided that the task force will continue on (possibly with additional new members) and further investigate what the Heard Library can do with the various GIS resources in existence, and proceed on to the next level.
11. Presentation - On July 14, 2005, Rachel was one of the presenters at the following Brown Bag Session. Her focus was on the importance and impact of RSS in libraries.

Wikis, Blogs, RSS, Etc.: New Tools for the New Library?
With the recent implementation of the Heard Library’s new strategic plan, we are all investigating ways to be more innovative. Fortunately, there are many new open source technologies that will help us improve communication, expand cross-library collaboration, and enable us to reach many of our goals. Come and learn more about these technologies, how they are currently being used in libraries, and how they could and are being implemented here at Vanderbilt. Join Rick Stringer-Hye, Suellen Stringer-Hye, Dale Poulter, and Rachel Vacek, who are leading this brown bag discussion based on what they discovered at the LITA National Forum earlier this year and other conferences that they have recently attended.

Have a good weekend, everyone! Thanks for your attention and time!