This comic strip made me laugh out loud (click it to enlarge)

It strikes a little too close to home. With all the time I spend searching the tubes for fun new toys, I tend to miss out on some of the bigger picture tidbits. It ’s incredibly hard to keep up on all of it. So, for my own professional edification – and yours! –  here are my attempts to make sense of the references in the cartoon:

• American Idol Finale is tonight (who knew?), with Kris Allen and Adam Lambert squaring off. Apparently, they both feel pretty good about it.
• Google Book Settlement: everyone is confused. Ars Technica does a pretty solid job of summing it up, though. The best I can figure, the settlement that allows The Google to scan and sell out of print books makes libraries (and many others) nervous, and so ARL and others have voiced their concern to the court, highlighting “Two areas that the agreement is largely silent on [which] are traditional concerns of libraries, namely public access to information and user privacy.” Maybe? My esteemed colleague Heather Clark points out that this is a heckuva lot more complicated than what I’ve written here, of course, so click through the links above and read on. Here’s hoping HC pipes in on the comments to make it a little clearer.
• OCLC: A November 2008 policy change caused a bit of a kerfuffle, voiced by one librarian here.  The Thingology Blog at LibraryThing described the November hubbub thusly: “… it looked like OCLC was going to succeed in locking down the world’s library data, converting a wonderful sharing and coordination tool into an unbreakable data monopoly.” Apparently, the ruckus made by librarians has prompted OCLC to hold off on implementation of the new policy until further review. If that’s not enough, OCLC also recently announced they’re planning to add circulation, acquisition, and other modules to Worldcat.org – effectively offering you a web-based ILS. Which might have something to do with the whole afforementioned kerfuffle.  And… er, my esteemed colleague Linda Gonzalez points out that this is a heckuva lot more complicated than what I’ve written here, of course, so click through and read on. And maybe we’ll hear from LG in the comments.
• CommonCraft: If you don’t know it, go check it out! These guys create fabulous 2-3 minute videos explaining sometimes complicated concepts in an entertaining and easy to understand way.  My favorites: RSS in Plain English,  Zombies in Plain English, and Wikis in Plain English.
• 2007: The year that was.
• Twitter: In Plain English. Essentially, a micro-blogging tool that people just can’t love enough.
• Flickr Labs: Unless I missed something huge in 2007 (entirely possible) this is probably a reference to bighugelabs.com’s flickr toys where you can just play, play, play with your photos!
• Animoto: Cool slideshows made easy.
• Wordle: Take any chunk of text, and make a word cloud out of it! Like so… 

And with that, I’m exhausted. Does anyone out there have any updates on the OCLC or Google Books stuff? Now that I’ve learned this much, I might as well keep up with it!

(hat tip to Kieran at the John C. Fremont PL for the cartoon!)

Tags: american idol, animoto, commoncraft, Google, google books, oclc, shelf check, wordle, worldcat

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Cataloging, Technology, resource sharing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.