By Patrick Hogan | A couple days ago, I gave in to pent-up desire and bought an iPad. Everyone has one, right? What’s loaded on yours? What apps do you offer your patrons? Any books that are too souped up for a Kindle?
ALA TechSource Blog
By Patrick Hogan | Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches, authors of User Experience (UX) Design for Libraries speak frequently on UX design. If you've heard them, you know they are passionate and emphatic about putting the user first. In the interview, they each describe their favorite project from the book.
By Daniel A. Freeman | We just wrapped up Meredith Farkas’ workshop Workshop How to Enhance Library Instruction through Mobile Devices. If you didn’t have a chance to attend, check out Meredith’s slides, posted below! How to Enhance Library Instruction with Mobile Devices
By Patrick Hogan | I attended LITA's Mobile Computing Interest Group meeting at ALA Annual Conference and heard two presentations about library projects with mobile technologies.
By Patrick Hogan | Joe Murphy author of Location-Aware Services and QR Codes for Libraries is passionate in his conviction that location awareness is a gateway to future innovation. "The ability to associate activities, whether social or institutional, with a layer of location has really proved to be a foundation for all the major mobile and social technology initiatives of the past year," he says.
By Sarah Ludwig | I am constantly struggling with the sense that I’m doing a lot of talking for nothing. I painstakingly teach kids how to use a database and they go straight back to Wikipedia as soon as I turn them loose. I show them how to use keywords and operators and they always fall back on their “ask Google a question” method.
By Daniel A. Freeman | We just finished our Annual Tech Wrap-Up! We had a great event, and want to thank our fantastic panelists and our sponsors! If you missed the event or want to experience it again, check out the archive here:
By Patrick Hogan | In this interview with Ellyssa Kroski, Michael Lascarides, author Next-Gen Library Redesign, notes that next-generation isn’t a checklist. “It’s about positioning yourself to exist in a world where the information landscape is constantly changing,” he says.
By Patrick Hogan | In light of OCLC's two huge linked data announcements, I thought that on this Thursday TECH SET podcast, we'd feature Ellyssa Kroski's interview with Robin Fay and Michael Sauers, co-authors of Semantic Web Technologies and Social Searching for Librarians. Below the SoundCloud embed are highlights from the interview.
By Jason Griffey | Once a year, Apple holds its World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the highlight of which for non-developers is the Monday keynote. In prior years, the keynote was the Steve Jobs show, where Steve got to be his most Steve-ish, taking digs at competitors and talking about how awesome things are and will be for Apple over the coming year. This year there is no Jobs, but there was an absolutely deluge of news from the keynote, hosted by CEO Tim Cook and starring the main players in Apple’s current corporate structure. Practically every news outlet in the world will have a summary of the news coming out of WWDC, so I’m going to focus on the things that I think are important to libraries. Apple had three main announcements: updates to their laptop line, which is their most popular type of computer sold; and what to expect in the two new operating systems launching this year, OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6.