Archive for the 'Librarians' category

Librarians, we have a manga…

Sep 08 2010 Published by under Books, Librarians, Present, Weird

A few days ago the manga Library Wars: Love & War came across my desk at work. And yes, librarians are the heroes and we are armed to the teeth.

The manga is based on the light novel series Toshokan Senso by Hiro Arikawa. The novels also gave rise to another manga, an internet radio series and an anime series.

What are we fighting for? Well, what have we always fought for?

In the near future, the federal government creates a committee to rid society of books it deems unsuitable. The libraries vow to protect their collections, and with the help of local governments, form a military group to defend themselves–the Library Forces!

Check it out, I’m sure you will enjoy it. Meanwhile, I’m off to brush up on my rappelling, just in case…

Update (Sept 9, 2010): A review of the manga by librarian LeAnn Suchy is available at Minnesota Reads. Thanks LeAnn for passing this along!

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DIY tech repairs with iFixit

Sep 07 2010 Published by under Information, Librarians, Makers, Technology

I’ve previously mentioned the importance of librarians having the skills to repair their own tech hardware and the Maker’s Bill of Right’s. Now we have the ability to better enact those rights, thanks to iFixit.

iFixit provides free repair manuals for a variety of technological devices, allows people to share their own experiences, provides access to the required tools, and encourages people to recycle.

How did iFixit start?

We started out fixing an old iBook together. There were no instructions on how to do it, so we started the way everyone does: the hard way. We tinkered. We fiddled. We broke some tabs and lost a few screws. But we fixed it!

We attempted to fix some other laptops but had trouble finding parts. So we bought a broken computer on eBay and stole parts from it. Then we decided to start selling the parts ourselves, and iFixit was born.

But that’s not the whole story. All of our customers still had to do things the hard way, just like we did. Easy-to-use repair instructions didn’t exist — yet.

So we wrote some instructions the first chance we got. And we posted them online, for free. For the first time, it was easy for someone with no technical background or experience to take apart a Mac. Our step-by-step instructions were enabling people to repair Macs they wouldn’t have been able to repair on their own.

We thought the instructions would be useful to our customers — and they were. But it turned out that they were useful to a lot of other people as well! We’ve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids. From New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff. They saved money, they kept their Macs out of landfills, and they did it completely by themselves.

So if you ever break the glass panel on that new iPad, now you know that you can fix it yourself.

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Google, don’t be evil

Sep 07 2010 Published by under Information, Internet, Librarians, Present

The organization Inside Google, launched by Consumer Watchdog, has had a version of their video Don’t be evil playing thirty-six times per day on a jumbotron in Times Square to gather support for a “do not track” legislation in Congress. This legislation would prevent companies like Google from gathering consumer’s personal data.

Read more about the reasoning behind the video and Google’s response at Inside Google.

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Social media rules of engagement

Jan 14 2010 Published by under Internet, Librarians, Social software

I just discovered an excellent post by Alisa Leonard-Hansen (Vice Chair, Communications at the DataPortability Project) on the importance of governance models in the creation of social media strategies.

The considerations for a social media governance model are numerous: brand identity/voice/tone, internal resources, staffing and stakeholders, work-flow adjustments, escalation policies, appropriate topics of conversation and language, identity/social equity “ownership” (who does brand social equity belong to? The employee Tweeting on behalf of a brand or the brand?), legal issues and rammifciations, industry regulations, content posting policies….well you get the point. While this may seem a bit of an arduous task, creating these governance models lay a crucial foundation, and are vital to any social media–ahem, digital– strategy and long term success (and they’re actually fun to create too, believe it or not).

Explaining to someone unfamiliar with social media how to deal with and distinguish between trolls and legitimate complaints and appropriate levels of response is difficult, as the internet is a realm with a sociology of its own distinct from our everyday experience. Alisa’s example of the Rules of Engagement visual for the US Air Force provides any librarian working on social media strategy a clear and succinct means to do this.

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Google Wave in education and libraries

Jan 11 2010 Published by under Librarians, Social software, Technology

Since the launch of Google Wave, there seems to be confusion about how best to use it. However, The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at attempts by colleges to engage with the technology in light of earlier predictions that it could replace course management software.

Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at Springfield, one of the first colleges to use Wave for online teaching since the preview version came out in September. For about two weeks in December, he joined his “Internet in American Life” course with a class on energy studies at the Institute of Technology at Sligo, in Ireland. They created a “wave” to discuss the impact of the Internet on energy sustainability.

But what if you merged a biology class and a philosophy class? You could have them evaluate a bioethics case study, suggests Mr. Schroeder, director of the university’s Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service. Or what about a class on Asian history? You could use Wave’s translation tool and hook up with a group of Chinese students.

What about libraries? Well, over at the UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog there is an analysis of how Google Wave has been received by librarians in the United Kingdom, where it seems that, like the rest of us, they intend to “wait and see”.

Overall, whilst interest in Wave was high, there was a degree of scepticism regarding how useful it is to librarians. Tellingly, some respondents felt that there are not enough extensions for Wave to make it useful to librarians yet and that nobody has actually found a valuable practical use for Wave in libraries at this point. One respondent went as far as to state that Wave has yet to be used for anything beyond time wasting. On the whole, respondents seemed happy to let Wave develop and let other people find uses for it before they approach it with any seriousness.

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