This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features a chat with several “young” (= under 40) library science practitioners on the state of the art (or science, as it were) of librarianship. I was extremely impressed at the group of people they chose to interview–many of them are people from whose work (blogs, projects, presentations, publications) [...]
Student computer labs still in demand — Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog, 10/8/2007. According to this blurb in the Wired Campus blog, around 80% of college students own laptops, yet 8 out of 11 institutions surveyed report that campus computer lab use has remained steady or increased. This certainly seems to be the [...]
We recently started using the plasma screen in our Learning Commons to display announcements from LC service providers. Right now, we’re doing it in a relatively low-tech way, using PowerPoint and manually loading a new show on the computer each week. Slightly more interesting is the fact that we’re uploading each week’s slideshow to Slideshare–a [...]
Here are some of the links for today’s workshop on blogs and wikis for student supervisors in the UMass Amherst Libraries. Examples of blogs being used as student workforce communication tools: UMass Amherst Information Desk UMass Amherst Learning Commons Example of a wiki as a clearinghouse of student library staff information: Access Services Student Operations [...]
Lately I’ve been thinking about how we could move towards being able to offer a single search box that can placed on the library homepage. Ideally, the box could also be easily dropped into disparate locations (subject search pages, WebCT, departmental research pages? personal websites? MySpace?) The box would search the libraries’ catalog, databases, and [...]
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Open Source New England Library Association Information Technology Section Tower Hill Botanic Garden, Boylston, MA June 6, 2007 Well, that was my first time live-blogging a conference, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. I frantically tried to transcribe as many of the speakers’ words [...]
Q: how do you keep OSS-powered systems, workstations secure? A: in general, Linux-based systems much more secure than Windows Q: Does DeepFreeze work with these? A: Most problems that DeepFreeze addresses are addressed throughout overall system of Userful system (Tyngsborough) Q: re: hosting costs for LibLime vs. commercial vendors A: typically 20-25% less than one [...]
Flavors of Open Source from Emacs to Ubuntu Wes Hamilton, WMRLS Founders of free software movement: Richard Stallman (GNU, FSF, GPLv2): felt that selling proprietary software was immoral Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel) [Amazingly complex Linux distro timeline chart...] http://distrowatch.com : currently, 350+ unique Linux distributions Overview of history/development of Linux distributions RedHat: most financially successful; [...]
Randy Robertshaw, Tyngsborough Public Library Running Linux Applications in a Public Library Discussion of OSS development cycle Innovators/early adopters, early majority, late majority…where are libraries? Key questions about OSS: 1.How mature is the solution? 2.Does your org have the skills? 3.Does the ROI meet your expectations? Maturity: How old is it? (Should be >2 years). [...]
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