By Jason Clark | Welcome back to “Code Words.” In this column, we are going to look at bookmarklets - little snippets of Javascript that extend your web browser to do interesting and useful actions.
ALA TechSource Blog
By Daniel A. Freeman | American Libraries knows how essential it is to stay up to date on new developments in our industry. American Libraries Live, a free, streaming video broadcast that you can view from your home, library or on the go, is a new program that allows you to watch broadcasts about library issues and trends in real time and interact with our hosts via a live chat, giving you immediate answers to all of your pressing questions.
By Daniel A. Freeman | We just wrapped up the first part of our new webinar series Makerspaces: A New Wave of Library Service. Today, we heard from Maxine Bleiweis and Bill Derry from the Westport Public Library in Connecticut. Maxine and Bill gave us a fantastic presentation.
By Patrick Hogan | A week ago some 300 librarians gathered in Columbus, Ohio for the LITA National Forum, where the focus was on technology, despite the distraction of BeardCon.
By Daniel A. Freeman | Untitled Document We just wrapped up a fantastic workshop, David Lee King’s Building the Digital Branch. There was some fantastic discussion and some great information. Check out the slides below, as well as some handouts that David created for the presentation.
By Jason Griffey | September has become the keystone month in the US for technology announcements. This eventful month featured two major and one minor (but interesting!) announcement: Apple and the iPhone5, Amazon with their new set of Kindles, and Makerbot Industries with the announcement of the Replicator 2.
By Patrick Hogan | The Fountaindale Public Library in suburban Chicago will start work this week on a dramatic new facility for patrons’ digital media projects. Fountaindale is in a new building that opened in March 2011. The basement was left unfinished, leaving nearly 7,000 square feet open for new possibilities. Called Studio 300, the space will include: 6 sound recording studios, 2 video recording studios, 3 group collaboration rooms with integrated technology, dual monitor workstations, and videoconferencing equipment.
By Patrick Hogan | LITA hosts its National Forum in Columbus, Ohio, October 4-7. The Forum attracts the technologists: the people scripting or programming, configuring the APIs, managing the networks. What will they be talking about? A scan of program titles gives a glimpse of emerging priorities in library technology. The theme is New World of Data: Discover, Connect, Remix. I will be attending and writing a couple posts for ALA TechSource. What programs would you like to see me cover?
By Patrick Hogan | Below is an excerpt from David Lee King's Library Technology Reports (vol. 48, no. 6) Running the Digital Branch: Guidelines for Operating the Library Website. At Topeka Shawnee County Public Library, we track quite a few numbers and statistics each month, including social media numbers. Though we don’t report out on them, they are useful for internal tracking and growth. Some social media tools provide useful analytics. YouTube and Facebook, for example, both provide a monthly analytics section. Other tools, like Twitter or Flickr, don’t provide great ways to gather statistics. You can count statistics manually, or you can use a third-party tool. Here are a few options for metrics on Twitter activity.
By Daniel A. Freeman | We just wrapped up a fantastic workshop, A More Effective Social Media Presence: Strategic Planning and Project Management with Sarah Steiner and Cliff Landis. There was some fantastic discussion and some great information. Check out the slides below, as well as two handouts that Cliff and Sarah created for the presentation.