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!)

I’m a huge proponent of Google Docs, Google’s suite of productivity tools similar to Microsoft’s Office Suite. In fact, just yesterday I turned one of my library school profs on to it when he groused via email about not being able to access a .DOCX file from someone else’s computer while traveling!

Aside from being platform agnostic (Mac? Windows? Linux? Google doesn’t care!), Google Docs are super-shareable. Here at BCR, the training department uses a Google Spreadsheet to track our team’s coming and goings and what we may need when we’re on the road.  With a team of trainers always on the go and a handful of folks who try to keep on top of what we’re up to, this can be a huge chore.  Having the team share and collaboratively edit one web-based document – instead of having several versions existing in various lo0cations –  saves us a lot of headaches! 

But Sarah Willeford at the MaintainIT blog points out another benefit aside from the hassle-saving: it can also save you money! She writes:

I have found that using Google Docs to collaborate has helped to reduce the number of meetings needed by a group, thus cutting down on travel and time away from your library or office. 

Of course, it’s also free, which is more than we can say about Microsoft Office! Check out Sarah’s post for a little more info on this fantastic tool that you should be using.

Any of you out there using Google Docs in your libraries  as a way to share information with your patrons or with your coworkers? Share how you’re using it by leaving a comment below!

Greetings from the Beehive State! This morning, I’ll be teaching “Beyond Googling” at the Utah State Library. We’ll be exploring a handful of the tools that Google offers besides the well-loved and oft-used Google Search.  Some of the things we’ll be hitting are iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Books, and Google Scholar.

If you were at the training, please use the comments below to share any questions, aha! moments, etc that hit you after the training was over.

If you weren’t there, what are your favorite Google tools, and how are you using them professionally?

The proposed settlement between Google and content creators over copyright issues regarding the Google Book Search project is bound to have repercussions in many areas beyond the digitization projects of libraries. Library and copyright bloggers have made many comments already (see). I think for many this settlement sees hopes of being saved by a Fair Use Cowboy.

My main thoughts have been in regard to resource sharing. If such access via subscription becomes viable (i.e. affordable) we could see the need for print sharing dwindle dramatically. The force of our efforts will again turn to the ability for linking search to delivery seamlessly. I can see ILL management systems adding linking mechanisms to the requesting systems so that we can direct patrons directly to digitized items in the same way that we do with OpenURL and full-text article databases. Definitely time to be creative and flexible.