By Marshall Breeding | This column appears in the March 2011 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter.
ALA TechSource Blog
By Daniel A. Freeman | Cody Hanson is a guy who knows his way around the mobile web. In his new issue of Library Technology Reports, which will hit the ALA Store and our MetaPress site next week, his introduction talks about his ongoing fascination with mobile devices, which started when these devices had just become available to the public:
By Kate Sheehan | Field trips in New England often revolve around hardship. And candy. As an elementary school student, I learned to make candles like the colonists did when they weren't busy starving to death or learning about corn. As a high school student, I watched a blacksmith (who would not break character to give us directions) sweat and work on a horseshoe for what felt like an eternity to my 16-year-old self.
By Tom Peters | As far as I can tell, Barnes & Noble started it all when, as they were preparing to launch their Nook device and service in late 2009 and wanted to differentiate it from Amazon’s existing Kindle service, they decided to allow one legitimate lending of a Nook ebook (the etext, not the device) for a two week period. Some librarians I spoke with about this Nook lending option scoffed at it. One opportunity to lend an ebook over the life of your ownership does not seem like much. I even joked about how this could cause interpersonal distress.&n
By Daniel A. Freeman | We're really excited to announce another ALA TechSource Workshop, Gadgets in the Library: A Practical Guide to Personal Electronics for Librarians with our very own Jason Griffey.
By Andromeda Yelton | The cost to build digital infrastructure for the national archives could hit $1.4 billion. I've been fascinated by this story. 1.4 billion? What on earth are they archiving, and on what scale? How does a project originally contracted at $317 million in 2005 end up projected to be finished at $1.4 billion in 2017? [pdf; see page 21]
By Jason Griffey | One of the most exciting new realms in personal technology is the emergence of affordable 3D fabrication or printing technologies (or, my personal favorite nickname for the tech: fabbing). If you aren’t familiar with 3D printing, it’s the use of a hardware device to go directly from a computer file to 3 dimensional object, skipping any molding/carving/modeling or other sorts of manufacturing.
By Michelle Boule | Anyone who works with teens, has a teen in the household, or pays attention to communication trends knows one thing for certain: young people do not use email.
By Daniel A. Freeman | In the library world, there aren't a lot of topics hotter than the mobile web, and in February and March, ALA TechSource will be here to provide you with some guidance on this topic from one of the most knowledgable people in the field, Cody Hanson. Later this month, we'll publish Cody's issue of Library Technology Reports, "Libraries and Mobile Services", and on Wednesday, March 9th, Cody will lead the ALA TechSource Workshop "Making Mobile Services Work for Your Library."
By Daniel A. Freeman | For people in the library systems world, it's no secret that Web Scale Discovery Systems are a big deal. As Jason Vaughan explains in the new issue of Library Technology Reports, " These services are capable of searching quickly and seamlessly across a vast range of local and remote content and providing relevancy-ranked results in the type of intuitive interface that today’s information seekers expect."