Two articles of interest from last week’s Economist Technology Quarterly -
Watching the Web Grow Up - a surprisingly good overview of the Semantic Web, following a reality check for web 2.0:
“The painfully self-conscious “web 2.0″ movement […] represents the web’s adolescence”
Go with the flow - a fascinating article about how mobile phones can be used to track […]
Archive for the 'Library technology' Category
Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0, mobile web and GIS
Published by March 20th, 2007 in Library technology. 2 CommentsFOSS, experimenting and documentation
Published by January 10th, 2007 in Library technology, Open Source and rubyrails. 2 CommentsSomething I plan to do a lot this year is spend time experimenting: with FOSS, Ruby on Rails and repository/object management software. These are not things that I often have the opportunity to do at work. But since they interest me, and I think they’re important to keep up with, I’m happy to spend time […]
How many reference managers are there?
Published by November 8th, 2006 in Library technology and Research/Writing. 1 CommentThere’s a whole world beyond RefWorks and Endnote. This Lifehacker post provides suggestions for well over a dozen different reference managers.
As a BibDesk user myself, I often wonder whether we as librarians should be doing more to support reference managers, especially Zotero and some of the other free options out there that would be beneficial to those who […]
RFID, YouTube, and penguins
Published by November 1st, 2006 in Library technology and Travel. 3 CommentsWhen I got back from Japan in July, I planned to write about how the JR East train system in Tokyo has a RFID system that I thought was reasonable and worked well. You can buy a rechargeable Suica (Super urban intelligent card) and swipe it as you enter and exit stations, but you can […]
Broadband access, or lack of it
Published by August 9th, 2006 in General, Library technology and Australia. 3 CommentsOne of the more fiery segments of Chris Anderson’s presentation on his book The Long Tail at ALA was when several audience-members, during question time, refuted his assumption that the market would take care of access to telecommunications services, including broadband.
As if yet more proof was needed that the market doesn’t solve these problems, in […]
I bought a Nintendo DS Lite yesterday. It’s the first console I’ve owned since the original Game Boy and the mid-90s Sega MegaDrive.
Why, you ask? I’ve been thinking that I needed a fun outlet while I’m commuting to work each day (1.5 hours each way by public transport, I don’t drive). Usually I read […]
Portugal, on how I came to travel there
Published by June 7th, 2006 in Library technology, Conferences, Travel, Research/Writing and Open Access. 1 CommentAs I mentioned last week, a couple of weeks ago I travelled to the city of Porto in Portugal to attend the 27th Annual IATUL conference. This trip was made possible as I was awarded the first Tony Evans Travel Grant for young librarians, and also thanks to the very generous support of my employer. […]
I often have to demonstrate how to do something with computers, whether that’s showing someone how to change their print settings, paragraph formatting, right up to database searches and more complex tasks. Often I will show someone the steps, and then write them out for the person to remember. eg -
To change to double spacing […]
Announcing: LISauthor wiki
Published by April 10th, 2006 in General, Library technology, Research/Writing, Open Access and Australia. 3 CommentsHere’s hoping the ’sphere can cope with one more wiki: LISauthor. The LISauthor wiki is something that has resulted from a few projects I have been involved with over the past year and a half. It started as a personal project for me to conceptualise my thoughts on eScholarship, libraries/librarians as publishers, and connecting readers […]
A conference I could love
Published by March 9th, 2006 in Library technology and Conferences. 2 CommentsNow this sounds like the kind of conference I would dream of attending -
Next Generation Libraries – what does that mean for us? Mash-ups, tag clouds, ontologies, BitTorrent, Flickr, YouTube, e-learning, Gen Y…He Huarahi Whakamua we’ll take up the challenge to embrace all that Next Generation Libraries means for us!
LIANZA 2006, to be held […]
