March archive
March 27, 2006
I'm writing this post-conference, obviously. The lack of WiFi still
amazes me. But on to conference thoughts...
Friday was chock full of sessiony goodness. Too much goodness to possibly
cover it all. Lee Rainie (of Pew Internet
Project) gave a thought provoking key note on Millennials. I'm never much
on generational labels — probably my own Generation X anxieties — but
his analysis was excellent and useful. Rainie drew reasonable conclusions about
a generation that has grown up connected. Interesting, too, that his conclusions
were not the stereotypical short-attention-span conclusions I've heard in the past.
I attended most of the search engine-related talks.
Kevin Dames had the most to say in this area.
At least, he had something more to say than "here's how libraries can remain relevant in
the age of Google." (Yawn!)
Kevin's talk, "Is Google the Next Dialog?", explained Google from a technical
perspective (quite accurately, too) and from a social perspective. Kevin's
belief is that libraries should leverage the power of Google to free ourselves
from the hold of multi-million dollar database vendor contracts, and in return,
offer Google the librarian's expertise at categorizing, clustering, and
classifying results. Very interesting stuff, though I'm not sure I agree with that
last point.
Perhaps in connection with Google Scholar something like that is possible, but
I'm not sure the
average user wants clustered results, at least in Kevin's use of the term.
Social clustering might be interesting, though. I wonder what would
happen if a library implemented tagging through it's catalog. Users could mark
resources with a term that proves useful to them in addition to the usual LC subject
headings. Of course, you would need related social infrastructure in place, too.
This is were libraries should focus in my opinion: less on competing with search
engines and more on providing community. This is the whole point of [Web|Library] 2.0.
Make the library a commons, both virtually and in the real, and you won't be able to stop
users from talking, writing, IMing, and tagging the library.
March 23, 2006
Lorcan Dempsey spoke on building
services on the wealth of bibliographic data that libraries compile. Very
interesting stuff today. It was all so [web|library] 2.0. :-)
Lorcan gave a demo of a
web
service OCLC is offering for fetching an "audience level" indication
based on OCLC's holdings data. There's even a set of Greasemonkey scripts.
I was glad to see this kind of development being done for libraries.
March 23, 2006
First day here at Computers
in Libraries has come and gone. There was a web design and development
track, which was nice. Some useful information certainly, but most of
it seemed tailored towards Librarians who maintain web sites, rather than
for web professionals working in libraries.
The best presentations were by
David King and
Karen Coombs.
David gave a session on user experience design, drawing heavily on
the work of
Jesse James
Garrett and several marketing concepts. David gave a great overview
of current ideas in designing user experience and also made a nice case
for how (and why) these things should be applied in libraries.
This slant to his presentation got me thinking...
The trend now (probably due to perceived necessity) is for those of us
working in libraries to continually make the case for the uniqueness and
importance of libraries. The downside of this is that we begin to believe
that libraries are so unique that best practices
and modern trends in related fields (like web design, marketing, etc.) somehow
don't apply. I already heard a lot of, "So how can that work for a
library?"
March 20, 2006
There's a discussion on comp.lang.javascript on
what
people like or dislike about prototype. It's an interesting read with many valid points.
Most of the criticism of prototype is that it
is a big monolithic do-everything solve-every-problem approach to
scripting.
Whether or not this is a valid criticism, I'll leave for another time,
but I was struck by how everyone keeps
calling prototype a library throughout the thread. I got to thinking that
we throw around the terms library, toolkit, and framework fairly
interchangeably with regard to JavaScript. I think of prototype as a
framework, more than a library. Now do we really need frameworks? There's room
for debate there, too.
However, I'd like to see more real libraries being developed for
JavaScript. Something like Google's
AJAXSLT. (I really don't
mean to always bring up Google, but I'm spending lots of time there now.)
If AJAXSLT we're in JSAN you could test
for native browser XSLT support, and if not available, load XJAXSLT.
That's one example, at least, where a JavaScript library could prove
useful.
March 18, 2006
I'll be giving my "Google-Driven Web Development" tutorial at
LinuxWorld
Boston on Monday, April 3, at 1:00 PM. If you're attending LW Boston
drop in and say hi.
March 14, 2006
I use a lot of web-based applications,
Gmail and
Ta-da Lists being two of the most used.
I also use multiple Firefox
profiles for heavily used web apps. I started doing
this because my default Firefox profile is used for development, and I add a ton
of Firefox extensions. Using multiple profiles allows me to run a light Firefox
install on web apps, and I can customize extensions or browser settings just
for the web app.
I recently setup some desktop shortcuts (icons and all) for these instances of
Firefox.
First, I create shell scripts called gmail and tada.
#!/bin/bash
export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
/opt/firefox-1.5/firefox -P gmail https://gmail.google.com/ &
Firefox 1.5 requires the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE when running
multiple profiles. The "-P gmail" says to open with my gmail profile. You
can create the initial profile by running "firefox -P" from the command
line. Again, set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1. I also set MOZ_NO_REMOTE and call my
default profile explicitly from my desktop applications menu.
Once the scripts are in place and menu links are ready, all that's left to
do is to link to the script from the desktop and add the icon. In KDE, this is
just a matter of right-clicking on the desktop, selecting "Create New... Link
to Application", and filling in the form.
Feel free to reuse the icons, if you use the same apps as me, and want to
try something similar. Gmail icon.
Ta-da icon.
