Gaming & Libraries: Intersection of Services
by Jenny Levine
Jenny’s blog is always a good read and the upcoming Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium sounds like a lot of fun. It’s a good time to be a librarian. 🙂
LibraryChange.com
Saw over at Michael Casey’s blog that his and Laura Savastinuk’s book has a website.
Companion website to Library 2.0, the book – LibraryChange
Social Libraries: The Books
Two of these aren’t published yet and at the moment my book budget is zero so I can only dream. But here’s the list.
Library 2.0: A Guide to Participatory Library Service
Michael E. Casey and Laura C. Savastinuk – not yet published, Information Today, Inc. (May 21, 2007)
Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change
Walt Crawford
Library 2.0 and Beyond: Innovative Technologies and Tomorrow’s User
Nancy Courtney (Editor) – not yet published, Libraries Unlimited (June 30, 2007)
Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication, and Community Online
Meredith G. Farkas
More on Social Libraries
Today appears to be Social Libraries Friday here at Library Monk. It may signal the beginning of a trend, you’ll just have to wait until next Friday to find out. 🙂
First we have 23 Things from the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, which is described as:
23 Things (or small exercises) that you can do on the web to explore and expand your knowledge of the Internet and Web 2.0.
Most of these I’ve already done or know about, but it’s a nice intro to things 2.0.
Then there is Five Weeks to a Social Library which is a course I wish I had known about while it was going on. But the content is still there, looks like there’s lots of good info to peruse.
We’ve been blogging at UTK Libraries for a while now. Recently (along with the rest of UTK) we’ve been experimenting with podcasting , although it’s called Volcasting here, naturally.
There has been some talk of the library doing something with Second Life, but nothing concrete at this point. You might find me on Second Life as Librarymonk Merlin, but I don’t get the time to hang out there much.
Library Social Networks on Ning
I’ve had a Ning account for about a year, but I really hadn’t used it much. Well recently Ning seems to have gained popularity, at least among library folks.
ALA now has a Ning site, and Bill Drew has started a Library 2.0 site on Ning. There is also a Librarian Bloggers site. It will be interesting to see where these sites ago.
P.S. I was going to leave my last post up a bit longer, but for once I actually had something to write about.
Work and a post worth keeping at the top
Well work on new UTK templates has kept me from blogging much lately. But I still read blogs, Walt at Random among them.
So when he posted today about Kathy Sierra of the blog “Creating Passionate Users” receiving death threats and canceling speaking engagements, I had to go to her blog and read her latest post.
This is sad, sick and disturbing. So taking a cue from Walt and Robert Scoble I’m leaving this post up a while, which lately isn’t a big deal. I’ve dealt with a few nuts out here in blog land but this is just above and beyond.
Houston, we have templates…
Yep the templates I talked about a bit ago are out. Actually they were released Friday afternoon. Creative Services has a nice site up for them, and this template roll-out is a lot more pleasant and well received than the one in 2003.
Once again, Darren has a post about the design of the templates.
Happy Birthday Lisa!
So a shout out to my daughter Lisa who turns one year old today. Well technically she turns one at 11:57 pm.
So Happy Birthday baby girl! 🙂
Templates, web design, and work
When I started my job at Hodges, I knew 95% of the designs I came up would have to fit in the UT template which is ugly, brown/beige, and table based, with minimal CSS. When the templates appeared in 2003, Matt Grayson and I were working on a new site design for SIS, so we were forced into the design, but we still used CSS.
Fast forward to 2006 and I was once again making a CSS version of the templates. The SIS site had evolved to the point where I couldn’t use that as a base anymore, it was too integrated with Drupal now. Neither Matt or I had any of the pre Drupal code saved anywhere, so I was starting from scratch and dealing with new bugs and browser issues. I was almost done when I heard about a new design/templates coming soon.
New templates were supposed to arrive in October sometime, and the new design for utk.edu was supposed to debut January 1. Units could roll out designs based on the new templates on or after that date. But the templates never came and January has come and gone.
Well this week the new design for utk.edu appeared and it looks good. Much better than the old design. I’m really glad that even with the delays, they took the time to get it right this time and got some feedback from other UT web folks along the way.
The lead designer for the new look, Darren Hughes, has a nice blog entry about the design process. My hat is off to you Darren, I can only hope you’re well paid for all your headaches.
While the templates based on the new look aren’t quite ready yet, hopefully they will be soon. Then I can let loose with some work I’ve been waiting on for quite a while.
Bible Quiz
Ok. So I read a lot and I looked up a few 🙂 And I cheated a bit on the order of the books, I found a list. Hey, I’m a librarian, if I don’t know I’m going to look it up.
You know the Bible 100%!
Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!