Does Twitter foster a false sense of closeness?

As I wrote here recently, I’ve joined the ranks of twitterers. Earlier today I was thinking about who I’m following. It breaks down into basically only 2 categories, which are not mutually exclusive: people I know well or reasonably well and care about personally (Yvonne, Scott, Paul, etc.), and people who I think are interesting enough to spend some time reading their tweets (Jessamyn West, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, etc.)… Read More

More Edible Books

Images from possibly my favorite event in a library, the Edible Book Festival, are up online for the 2008 festival!

Libraries of the Future

No, not the Licklider vision, but a new version from JISC. Through ‘Libraries of the Future’, JISC is hoping to explore these and many other questions, to open up – with partner organisations and librarians themselves – a debate about the future of the academic and research library. The theme will encompass a variety of activities – events, printed resources, interactive Web 2.0 services, podcast interviews, and so on –.. Read More

Better course evaluation questions

Here at Carolina, as I’m sure at every college & university, we have our standard end-of-semester course evaluation forms. There are the closed-ended questions that are students answer on a scantron bubble sheet, and open-ended questions answer freehand. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, we have a standard set of 3 additional open-ended questions that we’re all supposed to have the students answer. We all usually just write these on.. Read More

EB Widgets

‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ Is Now Free to Bloggers, from the Chronicle Wired Campus The Great EB has gone Web 2.0: first, they have a new blog. And second, they’ve developed a widget that enables access to a topically-defined set of resources from the EB. Unfortunately the widgets are by registration only, but it’s a start. I’ve registered for a widget, though I’m not sure I deserve one, as I’m hardly the.. Read More

More fun with calendars and task lists

I’m still futzing with Remember the Milk. I got to wondering today if there’s a way to sync RTM to Lightning, for which I installed the Thunderbird add-on when I was investigating new calendar apps, but never ended up using. Using my superhuman search skills, I was easily able to discover that yes, there is a way to do this. Unfortunately it’s only one-way, RTM > Lightning. But still, that’s.. Read More

Kicking the Microsoft habit, Part I: RTM

I’ve been trying to wean myself from all Microsoft products lately, by which I mean everything: the entire Office suite, and Outlook. The Windows OS too, though that will take longer to achieve: I’ve already decided that my next laptop will be a Mac. I have technology envy for the Air, though Yvonne has nixed that on the grounds that it’s apparently a chick magnet. This is the story of.. Read More

Interview with Duke Magazine

I just did an interview with Duke Magazine on the future of libraries, particularly how technology is changing librarianship. I have to give the writer credit, he said that he’d been reading the library literature for background. I was amused, but unsurprised, when he said that he was surprised at how much has been written in the past 10 years or so on how technology is changing librarianship. Anyway, I.. Read More

I’m a twit

Once again again, I come late to the party… Yvonne has shamed me into creating an account with Twitter, by accusing me of being a Luddite. My new tweety username: jpom. I have to admit I don’t really get it… I don’t care if the world knows my status on a minute-by-minute basis, or even an hourly or daily basis. And Paul‘s often quite hilarious tweets notwithstanding, I don’t really.. Read More

My very own wiki

Once again, I come late to the party, but once there I join in with abandon… I now have my own wiki! I’ve installed MediaWiki in my ibiblio space. I’ve been meaning to install MediaWiki for a while now, but I had no real reason to do it other than just wanting it, so I never bothered. But Paul and I have recently been discussing proposing a course on Library.. Read More