Please save the date for the next free webinar for Spectrum Scholars in the Technology Transforms Communities series:
Smartphones in Libraries: How to Take Charge of Delivering Mobile Services to Your Patrons
Wednesday, February 15th at Noon Central
Instructions for logging in will be sent in February, no pre-registration required
5 years ago Apple released the iPhone, dramatically changing the mobile technology landscape for the general public, and for library patrons. As the number of smartphone owners rises every year, libraries must increasingly deliver their services to mobile patrons. Participants in this webinar will receive an overview of the mobile landscape, focusing on the usage patterns of underserved populations. This session will provide a tutorial on helping you plan to implement mobile library services. All skill levels will be addressed, from adapting a mobile ILS plugin to writing your own mobile library app from scratch. Participants will also be given a list of model libraries providing mobile services. Presented by Stephen X. Flynn and Jamal L. Cromity. Stephen X. Flynn is a 2009 Spectrum Scholar and Emerging Technologies Librarian at the College of Wooster Andrews Library and Jamal L. Cromity is a 1998 Spectrum Scholar and UX Specialist of Platform Management at ProQuest Dialog.
About Technology Transforms Communities
The Office for Diversity, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has initiated a new project, “Technology Transforms Communities.” Through this project we plan to pilot enhancements to the Spectrum Scholarship Program that will better incorporate technology into Spectrum’s leadership development offerings. We seek to develop a cohort of Spectrum alumni and new scholars with sophisticated technological skills and experience in leading technology policy and decision-making to serve as information technology trainers and advocates in traditionally underserved communities. For the most part, we are relying on the expertise of our alumni community to develop our technology and advocacy training. Special thanks to Stephen X. Flynn–2009 Spectrum Scholar, Gates Millennium Scholar and Emerging Technologies Librarian at the College of Wooster–for serving as the Curriculum Coordinator for the Technology Transforms Communities initiative.
This month’s theme is "New generation experience." One powerful tool that the NextGen learners and workers are using to communicate is video. Videos are now easy to create and share, and the allow us to learn in a different way. One master of using videos is Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University.
This video was uploaded a year ago, yet many of us are just discovering it. Wesch writes:
This video explores the changes in the way we find, store,
create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a
conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with
people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness,
evaluate, and create information effectively.
Want to know something about how the NextGen people around you are using technology — or the new generation experience — view this video and any of the others by Michael Wesch.
The second and third options send new blog posts to you, so you do not have to remember to come and check the blog’s web site. For many people, having blog posts delivered to them has been the key to keeping up with "what’s new."
If you are using an RSS reader (often called a blog reader or aggregator), then you can add the this blog to your reader. Popular RSS readers include Bloglines and Google Reader, although there are many, many more (and many are free). Each will have a way to add or subscribe to a specific blog. Generally, they will ask for the blog’s URL or the URL for the blog’s feed (http://sla-divisions.typepad.com/sla_lmd/atom.xml).
There are many ways to receive the blog posts in email. One utility that I use (and it’s free) is FeedBlitz.com. If you look at the bottom of the page, you can see a place to type in this blog’s URL and subscribe to the feed. Notice that you can receive the feed in email as well as through some instant messenger (IM) services (headline & URL only).
Of course, you can experiment! Try subscribing to this blog in several ways and then decide which one really works for you. If you are unfamiliar with RSS readers, etc., that could be a great way of becoming familiar.
Tuesday I sat in on a workshop that David Rothman
did on RSS. What Dave kept emphasizing was that RSS could help these librarians do
current awareness for their users. Many database services have RSS as
do news services, etc. So a librarian could know what’s new before his
users do (e.g., medical staff). He even talked about receiving RSS
feeds in MS Outlook then using rules to redistribute the information to
users automatically!
As an information consultant, I have used RSS to track topics that are of interest to my clients. Historically, I had those RSS feeds come to me, then redistributed to my clients any specific articles they needed to see. This worked well especially for those clients that were already feeling overloaded with information.
Now that people are generally more familiar with RSS (blog) readers and sorting through information that is received automatically, using RSS to send information directly to our clients is definitely more acceptable. It gets the information to them faster and with less headaches on our part. And our skills of finding the correct resources and setting up the correct searches (and filters) are still used.
If you would like to read more from David’s session, go here.
Blogs exist as a way of sharing information and, for that information to be shared, the blogs have to be known. I suspect that many people in LMD have blogs, but who? Here’s a challenge…Add comments to this blog post with information on blogs written by OR contributed to by members of this division. (Let’s focus on non-SLA blogs.) I’ll start us off with three blogs/bloggers I know of:
Please save the date for the next free webinar for Spectrum Scholars in the Technology Transforms Communities series:
