Remember Clue? As in “Mrs. White in the billiard room with the lead pipe”? I thought you might. It seems that the venerable classic has been re-imagined, and guess what they’ve added? Text messaging. That’s right. In the new game, CLUE: Secrets & Spies, players text Hasbro and get a few clues sent to their phones throughout the game. Check out the trailer (yes – a board game trailer) below.
A couple of not-entirely-fleshed-out thoughts:
While texting is an optional piece, Hasbro obviously expects that most – if not all players – not only have texting capability/ability, but also an unlimited or at least generous texting plan. I know when I was a kid, we’d play game after game of this for hours. Without unlimited texting, no way my ma would get this for me now!
Board games like the old school Clue are of course interactive – to a point. We pretend to be in the world of our characters, wandering that mansion and looking for clues. But in this game, the game comes into and interacts with our actual world. The game contacts us the same way our moms might – by sending a message to us from… the Hasbro HQ, I suppose.
And as a happy coincidence, I’m re-reading a favorite sci-fi book, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. In the world Stephenson creates in this book, movies of the sort we know now are referred to as “passives” (because we don’t interact with them) and are about as culturally relevant to most of the world’s inhabitants as silent films are to us now. In the future world, most movies, shows, etc are ” ‘ractives” short for “interactives” where buying a ticket to the movie entitles you to play a part in the story.
My point I guess is about our changing expectations for information and entertainment and the seeming inevitability of a world in which sitting back and absorbing information is less common than working/playing with it and changing it. And of course the part that new, increasingly-mobile technologies will play in that.
What sort of examples of this shift from passive consumption to interaction are you seeing in your libraries? What technologies and tools do you see your patrons using to effect this shift?
Interesting sidenote: As I typed this, I got an email alerting me to the fact that Hasbro is sponsoring the 2009 National Gaming Day @Your Library. Coincidence? Hmm…
Looks like while a lot of us are still trying to get our heads around the evolution of the net referred to as “Web 2.0,” the world has moved on ahead of us and skipped all the way up to Web 4.0.
Thanks to Ray and Colleen at the Utah State Library for bringing this to my attention. It’s a great video that should serve as a wake up call for a lot of us!
Are any of you leveraging the power of social networks or the mobile web in your libraries? If so – or if you have questions about how – please let me know in the comments!
The Library of Congress proposes to discontinue the use of the word “cookery” in favor of “cooking” in most subject headings for cookbooks and such. “Cookbooks” is being proposed as both a topical subject heading as well as a genre heading; currently, it’s a cross-reference to “Cookery.”
The Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of LC’s Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate has posted a discussion paper with full details and is inviting public comment on their plans (not all of which are finalized).
An “enormous number of subject heading revisions” would be involved, for just about every library’s catalog, so if you have thoughts about the proposed changes, please send them to Libby Dechman at edec@loc.gov. The deadline for doing so is December 1, 2009.
When/if LC makes these changes, how will you go about flipping the subject headings in your catalog?
As I mentioned in my post here, the IDS Project in New York is working on a better way to inform both patrons and ILL staff about what options are available for obtaining a desired item. The Rethinking Resource Sharing initiative has readily identified the fact that patron need and library expectations around those needs. Many discussions about transforming ILL service revolve around the need to give our patrons more choices and thinking a bit differently about our traditional services. Some patrons might be willing to pony up a bit of cash for a quicker turn-around time or home delivery. Ready access to pricing information or items available in digital libraries like the Internet Archive can help those library staff members that want to establish purchase on demand workflows. The difficulty rests in getting all this information into one helpful place.
The Getting-It System Toolkit (GIST) seeks to pull together purchasing and borrowing information in one place for BOTH patrons and resource sharing staff.
GIST provides users and the library practical and thoughtful resolution of disparate information sources with key data, such as: uniqueness (for cooperative collection development strategies); free online sources (to reduce cost and/or catalog eBooks just-in-time); reviews and rankings (to add value to the request process); and purchasing options and prices (to give users and libraries options and streamline library work). GIST is flexible, so you can pick or choose which features to use or adapt. (–from the IDS Press Release)
GIST consists of a staff side that interacts with ILLiad and a patron request interface that allows users to view “Get-It” options from the library or from Amazon or Google as well as recommend the item for purchase. The staff side then allows you to route requests to purchasing or requesting queues. A lot of great thought and collaboration have been involved in this effort. The IDS project also wants to extend the reach of this tool by nurturing a community of GIST users who will make it better. Check out their presentations and blog.
GIST Home page:http://idsproject.org/Tools/GIST.aspx
I just listened to the recording of “Redesigning Technical Services Workflow” a NISO/OCLC co-sponsored session at ALA Annual last month. One of the presenters, Arlene Klair (Head of the Adaptive Cataloging/Database Management at the University of Maryland Libraries), noted something I’d never thought of: that the cost of returning a book that had been received on approval (they returned very few such items) was much more than the credit the Libraries received.
They consequently negotiated with their vendor, Blackwell, for a better discount in exchange for which they do not return items. Their approval plan became a purchase plan, after tweaking their profile.
It made me curious… how many folks have compared the cost of returning to the credit received from your vendor?
If you’re interested in the recording, it can be accessed at OCLC’s “presentations” site. Arlene was joined by Rick Anderson of the University of Utah, Renee Register of OCLC, and NISO’s Todd Carpenter.
My colleague Heather sent me a link to a very interesting article on taxonomy in the New York Times. Carol Kaesuk Yoon adapts this essay from her book “Naming Nature: the Clash Between Instinct and Science,” highlighting the modern demise of taxonomy as scientists rely on DNA analysis and the technology of the 21st century to categorize organisms. Yoon cites a body of anthropological research indicating that the compulsion to name the world’s flora and fauna is a distinctly human activity across numerous cultures, seemingly necessary to our internal modeling of the world and our understanding of our place within it.
It is the latter which suffers as taxonomy dies out. Yoon posits that we loose our connection to the natural world when we fail to name the plants and animals around us. Medical research seems to confirm this; Yoon notes that individuals suffering damage to a certain region of the temporal lobe are unable to recognize, identify, or name organisms, they are “… completely at sea… not [knowing] how to live in the world” and “unable to tell the carrot from the cat.” They have no difficulty with inanimate objects, oddly enough.
So categorizing, classifying, defining things around us is not just a librarian thing, but a human one.
At the ILL Conference in Colorado this past spring, the subject of cooperation between academic and public libraries arose. It was an academic librarian who voiced these concerns about the bias between library types to the praise of many public librarians. One of the values of conference of this kind is that it draws librarians from all types of libraries. I remember how fascinated I was at my first ILL conference when we went around the lunch table to introduce ourselves–what a diverse group of libraries we represented! Our work places us in a unique position in our institutions with knowledge of the “communities” outside our peer libraries and advocate for more lenient lending.
For those of us in the resource sharing world, this tension between library types may be more obvious than it would be to our colleagues in other library disciplines. It is not uncommon for academic libraries to have policies which limit or prohibit the loan of materials to public libraries. Public libraries are also known to limit lending of materials types to other libraries.
Those policies may need to change, however, in a world where institutions are starting to prioritize user needs. In an online environment where the world’s resources are readily discoverable, the needs of our users–whether they be acdemic, public or special library patrons–will be increasingly diverse. A single institution could not begin to meet these needs. It will take a strong community partnership to reach customer service goals of this magnitude, and that partnership will require policies that support sharing–no matter what the library type.
Have you considered how your library approaches the question of lending to those institutions that are “not like you?” Please share your stories.
If you need to quickly launch a basic website for a project at your library, or perhaps even just for yourself, but lack the web design skills to do it from scratch, check out this post at Read Write Web. Jolie O’Dell takes 4 web-based site creation tools for a test-drive with some pretty impressive results. The sites she checks out:
Each is has some unique strengths – Edicy is super quick; Zimplit is “dead simple” and offers great code-free skins; Wix allows you to create Flash-based sites; and Amplifeeder, Jolie writes, “creates sites that are the living end in terms of social media aggregation,” allowing you (or your library) to pull in the content you create across a slew of different social sites like flickr, twitter, etc!
I tend to recommend WordPress for this sort of thing, but all of these look like great – and free – options, too. And of course, for a small fee, each of these sites will allow you to publish to your own domain.
Have any of you used any of these or other online web creation tools? If so, let us know in the comments!
Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium and CogDogBlog recently had the displeasure of sitting through a painful webinar, and in that experience, I know he’s not alone. We’ve all struggled to keep focused, eyes open, while some faceless voice drones on about… who knows what. In fact, we probably don’t rightly recall because the delivery was so bad that the information just didn’t stick.
Lucky for us, Alan uses his experience as a cautionary tale to all of us who have to lead webinars, and he gives us a list of 5 things to do if you really want to run a lethal (as in bad) webinar. They are (with my commentary included):
“Make it hard to even get inside:
Nothing says “Welcome to my webinar!” quite like a majorly convulted and broken process for entering the virtual space.
“Don’t let your participants know who else is there”
Hiding the participant list doesn’t do anyone any good.
“Make it hard or impossible for the audience to communicate with each other”
While having this kind of control may appeal to the elementary teacher within, we need to recognize our audience is made up of adults, and we need to allow and even encourage the backchannel conversations that are often where a lot of learning takes place.
“Don’t greet the audience or make them feel welcome”
As a presenter in a live space, would you not make eye contact or interact with audience members before your talk began? I didn’t think so!
“Ignore your audience, make ‘em wait til you fill the hour with your voice, do not involve them at all.”
Talking heads are bad enough in person. They’re even worse when it’s a completely disembodied voice.
Need another screenshot tool? I know, I know. I talk about these things all the time, but this one’s unique in that it captures an entire webpage (not just one screen’s worth, but the whole thing!) without requiring any installs, accounts, or downloads. All you have to do is pre-pend the url of the page you want to capture with aviary.com/ and hit enter. So, for example, if you wanted to take a screenshot of this page – which is http://blogs.bcr.org/training, you’d enter into your address bar this: aviary.com/http://blogs.bcr.org/training and hit enter.
Try it now!
You’ll be taken to aviary.com and a newly snapped screenshot of this page will display. Even bettter? You can edit it before saving it to your desktop. If you sign up for a free account, you can even store your screencaptures online. Now that’s slick!
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