By Teresa Koltzenburg | There are a series of conversations going on in the marketplace. People are talking about things. People are talking about YOUR library online.... Somewhere.—Michael Stephens at the Chicago Public Library’s 2005 Scholars in Residence ConferenceAnd boy are they!
ALA TechSource Blog
By Tom Peters | December is almost here, which means that the calendar year as we know it is drawing to a close. This will unleash the urge—and the annual ritual of the popular press—to write reflective articles about the year just finishing and predictive articles about 2006. The top events in politics, the arts, athletics, and other areas will be rehashed and ranked. I predict that natural disasters will receive a lot more attention and ink than they have in the retrospectives of previous years.
By Jenny Levine | John Blyberg from the Ann Arbor District Library recently posted an ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights, a very thoughtful reflection that you should definitely click through to. As I was reading it, however, I was also reminded of another bill of rights I recently came across, The Social Customer Manifesto.
By Michael Stephens | Allow me to direct your attention to this white paper that Ken Chad and Paul Miller just posted at Talis: Do Libraries Matter? The Rise of Library 2.0 (available in PDF format).
By Tom Peters | Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported that Google and an unnamed publisher were having discussions about leasing access to e-books. The general idea is that users would pay approximately ten percent of the list price for the printed book to be able to read the e-book for one week. In other words, they're talking about a pay-per-circ digital lending library.
By Teresa Koltzenburg | RSS is the biggest opportunity we have had since the Web. I’m not kidding you—it’s that big, and if you don’t understand it, you need to. It’s critical that libraries understand RSS.—Jenny Levine, from the Chicago Public Library’s 2005 Scholars in Residence Conference
By Teresa Koltzenburg | Over at Stephen's Lighthouse, Stephen Abram points to a really useful and visual technology tool, a map that illustrates just how widespread the damage is to libraries that were in the paths of Katrina and Rita.
By Michael Stephens | “Libraries should be seizing every opportunity to challenge these perceptions, and to push their genuinely valuable content, services and expertise out to places where people might stand to benefit from them; places where a user would rarely consider drawing upon a library for support."—Paul Miller, from “Web 2.0: Building the New Library," Ariadne 45 (October 2005) (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/miller/)
By Jenny Levine | I realized that last month I promised to write about how many of the pieces of the social software movement came together this year, so here are some thoughts to help you survey the landscape.