Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, called one of the “Father’s of the Internet” and most recently listed by PCWorld as one of the web’s 50 most influential people, believes that the internet and the web are still young yet “poised to become the greatest communication platform humanity has ever known.”

Hear the founder, curator, and voice of “LIVE from the NYPL,” Paul Holdengraber, interview Vint Cerf about digital publishing, preservation, and practices.

Vint Cerf by Charles Haynes, on Flickr

Internet Librarian 2009 opening keynote — Digital Publishing, Preservation, & Practices
Vint Cerf, VP & Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

Listen to the Keynote

Rewind photo by Dan Machold on Flickr.

B106 – Sneaking the Social Web Into Your Library & Going Beyond 23 Things

Bobbi L. Newman, Digital Branch Manager, Chattahoochee Valley Libraries
Erin Downey-Howerton, School Liaison, Johnson County Library
Lori Reed, Learning & Development Coordinator, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Managing Editor ALALearning.org

Have staff members run in the other direction any time you mention anything related to the social web? Hear how one library tricked staff into happily using blogs, Goodreads, Delicious, Flickr, and more. Learn how to get your staff started using social web tools as our speakers share tips, tricks, and just plain sneaky tactics to get staff to use (and enjoy!) these tools to create and contribute content. And if you have already done a Learning 2.0 project, given out your prizes, and created an appetite for learning, now what? Reed explores ideas to continue informal learning and leverage the momentum built by successful Learning 2.0 projects. Technology is here today, and library staff must stay current to stay relevant.

As suggested by Kathy Dempsey, author of The Accidental Library Marketer and one of the fine bloggers at The ‘M’ Word – Marketing Libraries blog, here is a collection of Wordles based on the final program for each of the Internet Librarian conferences from 1997 to 2009.

In the course of compiling this information I was struck, once again, by how far we have come. Currently the Internet Librarian and Computers in Libraries conference programs are published using XML and XLST so if we make a change to a session title or description or a speaker’s bio, its pushed out in the XML file and instantly the site s up to date everywhere that information is used. Going back in time for this information was like an archeological dig through the the history of web development all the way back to the days before CSS and to when ITI hand coded the entire program in plain HTML.

When it comes to working with data on the web, there were no “good old days” to look back on with fondness in my opinion.

As requested, here are the source files I used – minus the year seedings: ILWordleSourcefiles.zip

For a full size animation of the sort below, visit Internet Librarian Through the Years.

Year by Year

What are the top three things library webmasters can do to improve their websites?

Panelists at Internet Librarian 2009 were charged with answering this question in session A203, “Library Website Improvement Face-Off”, moderated by Darlene Fichter. The only rule was that the improvements had to be reasonably practical. Audience members acted as judges and voted for the best way to improve library websites.

Thinking bigger, panelists were also allowed to name one “fairy godmother” wish, free of any practical constraints whatsoever. Think “If I had unlimited time and an unlimited budget I’d …” The panelists didn’t know their colleagues’ suggestions in advance. The suggestions were great, so we wanted to share them with you. We’d also like to thank the esteemed panelists, Jeff Wisniewski, Aaron Schmidt, Amanda Etches-Johnson, and David Lee King, for their permission to publish their improvement tips here.

read the whole article at
CONTROL-SHIFT: Practical Website Improvement Face-Off.

Farewell!

IL 2009 is now history.  We learned a lot, enjoyed networking with our colleagues, and making new friends.  Be sure to mark your calendars now, while you are thinking about it, and plan to attend IL 2010.

Signing off on behalf of the entire Il 2009 blog team and all the other bloggers that were with us.  Thanks for reading our blog.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today, Ince.and IL 2009 Blog Coordinator

Second player must figure out whether Fast Flip, a Google product that uses touch screen on Android device, Microvision Laser Pico Projector, which is the size of mobile phone and can project onto any surface, or British Academic Mobile Library, a full mobile electronic library. The mobile library is the fake.

Now it’s on to the third player. A new ebook reader that lets you lend ebooks, solar energy light that damages tissue on contact, or Frankencamera that’s build on Linux. Light saber is fake. Barnes & Noble Nook is real but not yet released. You can lend books but only to one person and only for 14 days.

Fourth player must decide among swine flu detector, Bluetooth spy, virtual nurse. Harvard Health has swine flue app that tracks it but it doesn’t predict whether you have flue. BlueWare: Spyware is real and it tracks phone activity, listens to live calls, extract text messages, and much more. Keas gives health feedback by text messaging.

One more question. What will we be talking about next year? Megan: augmented reality on your phone. Barbara: Cats and invisibility. Voice activated. Show things visually. Joe: Twitter won’t be important. We’ll share best practices about meshing information content with user expectations.
@^@

Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology &
Resources for Information Professionals
Programme Director, Internet Librarian International
Chair, Search Engine Meeting
Program Director, WebSearch University

^@^

(L-R) Karen Coombs, Nicole Engard, Angela Boyd

Drupal is a popular open source content management system for websites that is being used for a wide variety of applications.  In the library world, it has been used for Intranets and even public websites.  Angela Boyd and Karen Coombs talked about some of their experiences with Drupal.

Angela described Project Drupal at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) library.  Their website had become outdated, to the point where it had become an embarassment, and it needed to become more visual.  They chose Drupal as a platform because it is free and a large local pool of programmers was available to them.  A series of deliberate steps, which Angela characterized as vital, was taken to plan for the new site:

• First, a visual site map of the existing site (which had over 15,000 pages) was developed.
• Pages were defined and broken down into categories.
• User opinions were collected through focus groups.
• A new interim site was produced.  It focused first on the navigation system and content levels.
• Staff was kept informed throughout the process and initial training began.
• A Web Content Committee and a Web Redesign Taskforce were formed to examine each page and decide whether it should be transferred to the Drupal system.  Many of the old pages had never been updated or were just collections of links and were discarded.
• Finally, an RFP for development of the new site was issued.

Karen Coombs described how the Intranet at the University of Houston (UH) was remodeled after it had become a hodgepodge.  Her development process was similar to Boyd’s; here are the functional requirements for the UH intranet:

• A flexible, adaptable system
• Content easily editable by all
• Current awareness capability
• Replace many of the existing tools (wikis, internal blogs, listservs, some file shares)
• Unify user authentication across the entire site
• Provide for the incorporation of external content

Karen said that it is critical to analyze current content on the site and the desired new content, and then create a group to oversee its implementation, which helps with buy-in.  Staff training is critical because Drupal is not the friendliest content management system.  The system may have bugs, and it is often necessary to choose between scaling back the development or working with it despite the bugs.  This decision is often difficult.  And it is important to spend time with the groups designing the pages.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today, and IL 2009 Blog Coordinator

Nicole Engard

Nicole Engard, author of Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data (published by ITI), reviewed the current state of the art and showed us some great examples of mashups, and even did a live demonstration to create one.  One of her favorite sites is ProgrammableWeb, which has lots of mashup examples.

Nicole’s reasons to use mashups in libraries include:

• Provide better service to patrons,
• Add value to catalogs and websites by making them “one-stop shops”,
• Taking library services to patrons where they are (Facebook pages, etc.), and
• They are a learning experience, and librarians should never stop learning.

Her favorite tool for creating mashups is Yahoo! Pipes (which is what she used for her demo) because it makes the job so easy; no programming is required.

Here are some great examples of mashups (not necessarily just for libraries):

• Bike Tours in California, which maps long (100 miles or more) bike rides on a Google Map.
• Trulia and Zillow for real estate and neighborhood data.
• HousingMaps, showing listings from Craig’s List on a Google Map.
• Reading  Radar which combines New York Times bestsellers with the corresponding Amazon data.

And for libraries, Nicole pointed to the sites listed in her book.  Its website is http://mashups.web2learning.net/.

If  you wanted to know more about mashups, this was the session to attend, and judging from the full room, this is a topic of interest to many people.  I’m looking forward to reading Nicole’s book!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today, and IL 2009 Blog Coordinator

The Connecting Through Lights, Cameras & Action session started with Allen County (Fort Wayne, Indiana) public library’s Sean Robinson showing a video he made, called Vade Mecum, about a woman becoming engrossed in a book by Amy Tan. It has a happy ending.

Next up is Michael Porter and David Lee King showing their Library 101 video. They’ve got a Facebook page for Library 101 that has 1800 fans from 17 different countries. Over 6000 images were submitted. They want this to be an example of what librarians can do with little effort and minor money. Pretty amazing rock video. Check out libraryman.com/library101 and davidleeking.com. Lyrics are on the libraryman site.

List of resources with 101 links. 101 resources and things to know(RTK). Asking for comments. Essays on library 101 from 23 people, asking people to add essays to the site. Community building exercise. The hashtag is #library101. Michael asks audience to tweet with that hashtag hoping to make it a trending topic. Now the audience is taking turns for their second of fame in front of the green screen as they “want u 2 know”. You’ll probably see some of this in the next video, Library 201.

Marydee Ojala, Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals

Peter noted that most librarians are reluctant to cut back on salaries, personnel, journals, etc., but a good option can be to cut back on subscriptions to indexing and abstracting services. “Make use of what you have and what is OPEN ACCESS.” He then announced that he would show how they could get free access to some 80 – 100 million articles.

Many databases from U.S. government agencies are available for free and offer a high percentage with abstracts, such as Agricola, ERIC, NTIS, PubMed, NCJRS, and others. No need to search these on expensive online services—go direct and save. Many associations, societies, and international organizations offer free abstracts, for some as the OA part of their fee-based digital archives. Some of the largest commercial publishers also offer huge OA subsets of bibliographic records and abstracts, including SpringerLink, Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, and many others.

Of the digital facilitators, HighWire Press is his personal favorite because of their free full-text articles. Others are MetaPress, Ingenta Connect, and Atypon. His facts, figures, and review comments were all quite compelling.

@^@

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, Information Today, Inc.
Editor, NewsBreaks

^@^