userslib.com

The University of Michigan Library just released our very own home-grown tagging tools. Now users can tag library web pages, catalog records, image collections, and some of the Scholarly Publishing Office’s electronic journals. More access systems will add tagging eventually. Any tag or user can be subscribed to using RSS. Since launch earlier this week, 291 things have been tagged. It will be interesting to see how this project will evolve. Seems like this has a lot of potential for solving the problem of too many silos.

How cool is that?

More about MTagger

Going to South by South West interactive (SXSWi) in a couple of weeks? Are you a librarian or work in a library or just think library people are cool?

Let’s meet up! We’re currently working on finding a time and place to get together… for now, join the SxSW Library Workers facebook group.

I just finally got around to reading the Horizon Report.

In true 2.0 “practice what you preach” fashion - it’s available in a variety of formats!

• Read it & comment on it via the comment press version
• Video of the report presentation
• Read the study’s wiki
• Good old fashioned PDF

Harper Collins Publishers just released a free book viewer.

“Try before you buy”

[Link to HC portal | found via Mashable]

I just found this fantastic information graphic from Business Week that demonstrates what people are doing online and is broken down by age range. I particularly like the categories used: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, Inactives.

Looking at the Youth (18-21) column, social networking is the top activity for this group with 70% participating. I think this definitely supports the argument for “being where our patrons are.” At the very least, that we should be aware of where they are and think about how it informs their use of the web.

As an obsessive RSS & Delicious user, I find it somewhat difficult to believe that there’s relatively little activity going on in the “Collectors” category. Maybe these technologies just fit a niche need (the need to share links, need to have a central bookmark collection, the need to read way too many blogs).

Link to source of graphic | found via Smashing Magazine

On Monday, February 4, technology writer Steven Levy & Paul Courant, Dean of the University of Michigan Library spoke about the future of the book.

The podcast is now available: http://www.lib.umich.edu/podcasts/Levy020408.mp3

On Friday we (University of Michigan Library) celebrated a major milestone in our digitization project. Together with Google, we’ve just hit 1 Million Digitized Books!

Read what our University Librarian Paul Courant has to say about it.

I helped put together a few visual projects to describe what “1 million” means and to highlight some of the people behind it all. I also took some photos of some of the materials and tools that these people use to make the million happen.

http://www.lib.umich.edu/news/millionth.html