userslib.com

Congrats to SPO for their release of the Ithaka report (”University Publishing in a Digital Age”).

It uses CommentPress from the Institute for the Future of the Book - so readers can comment on each page and each paragraph.

I was excited when CommentPress was released and thrilled to see it being used by our friends at SPO.

Oh my. School will be starting next week. Ann Arbor is already crawling.

A couple of months ago I wrote a “Who are we dealing with” post to describe these new academic users/patrons in an attempt to better understand them. Beloit College also regularly publishes a rather extensive list of tidbits about our new first year students. And Jenny at the Shifted Librarian has just added some great and more techy examples.

Here are a few of the tidbits I came up with (link to full post):

• They were born in 1989
• They’ve (more or less) always known the internet, home computers and graphical user interfaces, and mobile phones.
• They were newborns when the first episode of The Simpsons aired, they were 3yrs old when the first episode of MTV’s The Real World aired
• They were 4yrs old when Schindler’s List won an Oscar for best picture, they were 10 when they saw their first Star Wars movie.
• They were newborns when the Berlin wall fell, 5yrs old during the OJ Simpson murder trial, and 12yrs old on Sept. 11, 2001

Here are a few of Jenny’s (link to her full post):

• They have always had to narrow down search results (rather than expand them).
• They have never started a search at an “advanced” screen.
• They store information and documents on keychains.
• They have always copied and pasted.
• “.” is pronounced “dot,” not “period.”

And now, a few from Berloit (link to full list):

• Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
• “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.
• Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
• Women’s studies majors have always been offered on campus.
• Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.

Are you ready?

Google just released a new feature for Google Maps that lets you easily add a map to your blog or website.

Below I’ve embedded the awesome map that David Fulmer made of all of the University of Michigan Libraries (it also uses images of the different libraries via flickr). Every library website’s contact page should use this!

View Larger Map

The SXSW (south by south west) Interactive Panel Picker was made live today. I’ve always loved that SXSW sessions are chosen by voting. There are some interesting ones to choose from and one particular one caught my eye:

Why Do We Need Libraries Anyway?

I’m definitely going to give this one 5 stars. Since it’s been proposed by Danielle Cunniff Plumer of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, I can image the answer will be “Lots of reasons!”

Facebook just released a interface specifically designed for the iphone. I don’t have an iphone, but I think it looks great in a regular browser and might start using instead of the default interface.

http://iphone.facebook.com/
(you must have a facebook account to view)

Library student extraordinaire Alexis Zirpoli made a great flickr set to show what books have to go through before they make it to the shelves.

I’d love to see this in other departments and other libraries.

Flickr set: Pre-Shelf Life of Library Materials

“Library materials waiting their turn to be sorted, unpacked, and processed.”

I’ve been using daily blog posting feature in del.icio.us which automatically posts the links I save to this blog. I mostly liked how this worked, but it doesn’t allow you to pick which links go to the blog and I found myself being more conservative about adding links to del.icio.us because I didn’t necessarily want some items to show up here. I know there are other ways to do this, but I think I’ll just go back the good old fashioned method of manually writing about things I find that are interesting.

update: I just added a sidebar that will show my recent additions to my del.icio.us account. So there’s that.

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  Tips for making interactive PDF prototypes
  (tags: usability UWG prototyping)

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• MoZeSKrieBeL: Links / categorie / Generators
  List of various image generators
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