Monthly Archives: March 2009

FreeLargePhotos

FreeLargePhotos.com is a website that matches its name.  It is a collection of photos greater than 4MP that are free for use with attribution, except for selling products or promoting businesses or organizations. If you are a photographer, note that … Continue reading

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Movers and Shakers 2009

Library Journal has announced the winners of the 2009 Movers & Shakers awards, and as usual, the recipients are fantastic and enthusiastic innovators who look for new ways for libraries to be better: The Alphabetical List (follow the links for … Continue reading

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It was twenty years ago today…

Sir Tim Berner-Lee started what is now known as the World Wide Web exactly twenty years ago. In this posted video from Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) 2009, he discusses how it started, where we are, and where we might be … Continue reading

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Hard Times

The Washington State Library has compiled a group of resources called Hard Times in Washington Libraries for the purpose of giving libraries, library staff, and library users ideas and tools to adapt to the current and upcoming fiscal crunch. Included … Continue reading

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Perfecting Imperfection

Web 2.0 : Perfecting Imperfection is, on one level, responding to a post by someone who attended an unconference about Drupal, calling it “by far the most human conference I’d ever been to.” On a deeper level, however, it is … Continue reading

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UCLA Acquires Huxley Library

The UCLA Library has acquired the library including many papers of Aldous Huxley, who died in 1963 (the same day as John F. Kennedy). As Island is one of my favorite reads, this gives me one reason to actually want … Continue reading

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A Heavenly Library in Austria

Jessamyn posted this link, in an effort to help identify the library.  I wasn’t the first to come up with the correct answer, but it was a treat to scan several pages of Google Images containing library frescos before finding … Continue reading

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Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person

Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person (an exaggerated tale) is a video designed to be a provocative look at the arguments for opening library/museum data to web 2.0 social uses The video isn’t so much exaggerated as much as … Continue reading

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New Plugins

I’ve added a couple of plugins to the Libology Blog to increase usability: Viper’s Video Quicktags – this is a great improvement over the way video is embedded in blog posts.  First, it is much easier than the other methods … Continue reading

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Touch Book

I don’t normally gush over new tech toys on this blog, but I suspect that we are about to witness a sea change in portable computing: The Touch Book is a netbook-but-more from a company called Always Innovating.  It reverses … Continue reading

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Readability

Readability is quite simply one of the easiest-to-use and effective usability aids I have seen in quite a while. Follow the link, set the controls for your most comfortable reading style, drag the “Readability” button to your bookmark toolbar, and … Continue reading

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Amazon and Contracts

Authors Guild:  Contracts Forced Amazon to Flip on Kindle is an article on CNet.com in which the Authors Guild asserts that Amazon turned off the Kindle’s Text-to-speech function (unless authorized by a book’s publisher) due to contractual obligations, not pressure … Continue reading

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MarcEdit 5.1 Update

Terry Reese has released an updated version of MarcEdit 5.1, and there are a few interesting additions: Improved support for Enterprise users (large organizations). Multiple Z39.50 querying capabilities. Tutorials hosted on YouTube. Improved UTF-8 loading (as in Faster). ‡biblios.net proof … Continue reading

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Confusing Assistance with Performance

Amazon.com has given in to the Publisher’s Guild on the issue of text-to-speech capabilities in the Kindle 2. In their press release, Amazon states up front that “Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative … Continue reading

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