Technology Updates

This post has nothing in particular to do with libraries, but as the problem I relate consumed a good part of my weekend and part of my Monday, I thought a share was in order, in case anybody else runs into a similar situation.

Be sure to compare BusinessWeek's special report, Eight Tech Trends for 2006 and Michael Stephens' Ten Techie Things for Librarians 2006 especially if you are planning to attend the California Library Association (CLA) conference in Sacramento.
Infopeople is sponsoring Michael as a master speaker at the CLA conference on Saturday, November 11 from 3:45 PM–5:00 PM.

A couple people have asked me about whether the children's games that were on the original Gates computers were still available somewhere...cheap. The answer is YES. They are available on your very own Gates computer. You can install the programs from your old Gates computers to your new replacement computer by following the instructors in this PDF file entitled How to Copy Children's Games from a Windows NT Gates Library Computer to a new Windows XP Computer .

Libraries that have or are contemplating audio tours will be interested in an article appearing on the front page of the Calendar section of today's L.A.Times. The article, For an art tour, press the # key, by Diane Haithman, describes the latest trend in museum audio tours, which is making the tour available via the visitor's cell phone.

Does your head spin when people talk about Web 2.0? I often find it more helpful to see examples rather than read explanations. If that appeals to you, take a look at Dion Hinchcliffe's The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006 blog entry. I don't promise your head will stop spinning, but you'll at least get some ideas of what is on the horizon and what forces are driving these new approaches.

Bookmarklets have been the topic of some coversation of late. Ever wondered what they are, and how you can use them? I have, and decided today to do some research on them. Here's a good basic explanation from Wikipedia. Even better, here's a handy dandy demontration in Flash on the implementation and use of the LibraryLookup Bookmarklet. Neat stuff!

Investigating the Biblioblogosphere from Cites & Insights 5, Number 10: September 2005, by Californian Walt Crawford.

What’s going on in the biblioblogosphere? I hate the term, but it’s convenient. Jon Garfunkel at Civilities (civilities.net) gave me the idea with his “Social Media Scorecard” and related posts—but this isn’t directly comparable to his evaluation of 25 “online political writers.” Instead, this is an informal study of a “top 50” library-people blogs, including some metrics.

If you're a Win XP user and you have ever looked at web pages on your monitor and wondered, "Am I going blind or do those fonts look fuzzy?" this post from Lori Ayre on Mentat may be helpful:

Follow these steps to amazingly clearer fonts everywhere including websites and even on Word documents:
1. Go to Control Panel
2. Select Display
3. Choose the Appearance tab
4. Click on Effects
5. Where it says "Choose following method to smooth edges of screen fonts", change Standard to Clear Type.

This brief and gentle introduction to some key concepts laid out in the IFLA-produced Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records paper should be read by any librarian wondering what all the "ferber" fuss is about. Scratch that. It should be read by any librarian period. It's time for us to admit our library catalogs are a mess from a user's perspective, and FRBR can provide at least a partial solution to the problems we face in fixing our systems.