TechEssence.info

• IM for virtual reference.
• Social websites such as MySpace and how they can be used to reach out to users.
• Being innovative in using technology with little money and staff.

Bill Drew
drewwe@morrisville.edu
AIM: BillDrew4

Gaming - we are working with a generation of gamers; how does the gaming culture affect how these students use libraries and information?

Debby Emerson, Assistant Director
Rochester Regional Library Council

* podcasting
* screencasting
* how to get a handle on a large, complex website that could use some reorganization

Convergence - how do we combine finding and delivery of disparate media through search technologies? I see the web as the gateways to libraries. Let's leverage this even more than has been done so far. Delivery of digital objects should be simple and painless, whether that digital object is an eBook, journal article, video, or location of a physical item in the stacks.

eInk and eBook Readers - As eInk becomes a viable technology how will libraries adapt to delivering electronic books, or parts or books. DRM, standards, storage requirements, file formats, etc...

Sustainability - are the technologies we choose today the right solution leading into tomorrow? Are proprietary formats/programs/systems holding us back now, and will they deter innovation in the future?

Mike Zarro
mzarro@drexel.edu

I can tackle a few of these. Sample convergence technologies might include SRU/SRW, OAI-PMH, CoinS, and unAPI. I'm not super-up on what's been happening in ebook-land, but I will say that you're taking for granted something I'm still unclear on -- the economic viability of eink.

And I can definitely talk about sustainability. Thanks for some great suggestions!

I can definitely cover social software-y things like podcasting, screencasting, gaming, IM reference, social networking software, etc. since they're all topics in my forthcoming book. :) And I know there are plenty of other TechEssnence folks who have done large complex Web site redesigns and can speak to those issues.

I'd love to see a good white paper on FRBR that is written in plain English.

And I'd *love* to tackle the plain-English FRBR challenge!

Who are the vendors for On-line Public Access Catalogues? Who are the vendors for Databases? Are there websites that evaluate OPACs and commercial databases?

Wikis
Syndicating content via RSS

Kate Pitcher
SUNY Geneseo

well... I really don't know all that much about wikis... but I can try ;) lol!

How about tech advocacy?

It would be quite helpful to develop some canned arguments for why such-and-such technology is good for libraries, especially for those who work in environments where it can be difficult to get acceptance of innovation. It would be nice to walk into a meeting, propose a solution to a library problem using previously unutilized technology (in a particular institution), and have a set of talking points as to why one should go in that direction other than "Hey, AJAX is super-cool -- doncha know Google uses it? C'mon!" ;)

Granted, these talking points will vary per institution as each has its own set of values. So perhaps one could generalize my request as asking for some posts about how to translate tech innovation into the language of lower-tech librarians and administrators, putting it into the context of traditional library values.

-Mike

I'm interested in creative uses of podcasts for libraries. Many of our library patrons have a seemingly insatiable appetite for audio content. But for small libraries, getting a large collection of audio books is prohibitively expensive and many of our rural patrons are not MP3-ready. So, I'd like to learn more about:

- Are libraries creating their own original content podcasts that might be of interest outside their service area?
- Which available podcasts have been well received by library patrons? For example, there is a lot of good news programming available but that tends to have a very short shelf life.
- Are there copyright issues we need to be concerned about if we burn pocasts to audio CDs for distribution?

Suzanne Reymer
Montana State Library - Billings Office

I would like to second that recommendation. As a programmer-turned-librarian I am appalled at the state of library automation technology. For the most part it is archaic, overpriced, and inflexible. I would like to see some discussions related to this topic.

- Jesse

How do you break the cycle of "don't understand it because I never used it -- and I never use it because I don't understand it."

I think one of the major problems is that even the most useful technologies are "just hype" up until the point that it actually makes peoples' lives easier or shows some kind of dramatic service improvement. But it won't make people's lives easier if they don't use them or even try them. And they won't try them if they perceive these services as "just hype."

I think a bare-bones understanding of the change process -- how all things techy are confusing at first, how to engage others to learn more about technology through active tinkering and how it is essential that non-techies try, provide feedback and share user feedback with techies and others across the organization. No easy task for sure.

What Joy said, plus

• incorporating new technologies into web sites--for instance, let's say you wanted to overhaul your web site and and run it all on blogging software, as some places have done? or if you just wanted to incorporate some RSS feeds into your site, either from content you create or content you pull from elsewhere? I'd love to read more nuts-and-bolts stuff about such projects.
• on a similar theme: getting the most out of new features in electronic databases. For instance, I know that EBSCO has just added RSS feeds. I'd like to hear practical examples of how one might use these or demonstrate their usefulness to your users. (Again, I'm especially interested in nitty-gritty nuts and bolt stuff--and I admit that I haven't played with them at all myself yet--but I'm interested to know how one goes back and forth between the result of an RSS feed (which presumably you can get in your aggregator, just like anything else) and a proprietary database, which tends to require some kind of login).

I would like to see review of technologies that can help librarians gather, describe, and publish research help for users. I'm at a four-year liberal arts college, and each of the librarians maintain rather lengthy online research guides for each major. Are there ways to make these more user-friendly? Is there a way to harness user-input to make them even more user-friendly while still having some control over content? What if this could help us gather and describe lists of blogs that are useful to our students, or data sets, or other less traditional library "holdings"?

I'm also interested in learning more about online catalogs that do more than OPACs currently do. What we have now seems to be a transitional step between paper cards and something else. I want to know what that "something else" might be or look like or do.

Note to self: Scout Portal Toolkit.

I'm deferring all the OPAC stuff to Andrew Pace. All I do is complain about the ruddy things; Andrew actually makes better ones get built.

This is mostly for academic:

Definitely portals. Funny how they're making a comeback after the personalisation craze of the mid-90s.

Where is federated searching going? With more databases exposing their results to Google how can we use this to build better academic search engines? What is the new Z39.50?

Improving citation searches: what is the role of libraries in bringing together ISI Web of Science, CiteSeer, Google Scholar citation results etc so that following who cited who and in what context becomes easier and more complete?

i'd love for you to write about whether there's a place in public libraries for creative content made by people in the neighborhood?

also, what are the ramifications of electronic book readers (i.e sony's new reader) on the future of public libraries?

are there ways that libraries can be designed to better meet the needs of persons with ADHD?

in what year will public libraries be open 24/7?

should libraries be content producing or publishing entities?

why should libraries involve themselves (or not involve themselves) in tech support for people who are on the other side of the digital divide?

how often should members of the public regale library staff with homebaked goodies?

in what ways should public libraries involve the public in library policies and management -- without driving library staff crazy?

I'd like to see recommendations on what types of programming skills librarians need. I'm an older "new" librarian and every librarian I ask gives me a different answer (Perl, php, Java). It's confusing if you're starting from scratch.

what is OPML?

broadcasting rss feeds into a website, blog, or course management software (which would be one thing to do with EBSCO alerts)

anything related to metadata, but I always wonder if knowing about metadata would make me a better librarian even if I'm neither a cataloger nor a repository rat

One of the biggest behemoths we offer to our patrons is our OPAC. Yet, we seem to spend very little time utitlizing outside technologies to improve their functionality and usability.

NCSUs catalog and the WPopac are excellent exceptions, but we should be able to go further. They have broken the barrier - now where's the mad rush into this unfettered territory?

For example, why not allow users to tag our items on our systems - and not tag it using del.icio.us. That way, when a user performed a truly "advanced keyword search" they could search all the library-provided terms, but also ones provided by their peers. Heaven forbid that perhaps even catalogers could use this to describe books using common phrases rather than what LCSH, MeSH, and Dublin Core recommend.

Also, how else can we involve patrons in determining what services they want and how they want them? Instead of rolling out all these new bells (blogs?), whistles (wikis?), and pony shows (podcasts?) for what we think they want, lets focus our efforts on what they tell us they actually want. That way, we won't appear as awkward and silly as our dear sweet older relative who tries to interact with us as our friends do...but from her generational perspective.

A perfect example of this is the question you just asked of your readers...what do we want to know about? Next thing you know, you'll be asking if we want it in wiki, blog, podcast, or rss format. Who knows what options will develop from opening yourselves up to these random comments. Its an exciting prospect.

I absolutely think that librarians learning about metadata is useful for non-catalogers and non-repository rats. Sounds like a TechEssence blog post for the near future...

I hear about AJAX all the time but know nothing about it. I'd be interested in hearing about what it is, and more specifically what it can do.

I'd like to know more about text and text encoding. It seems so simple but I've never seen any serious discussion of it.

Where to start? What do we need to do to be able to serve patrons who use our computers or websites in languages other than english?. Is text encoding a server-side or client-side technology? What kind of functionality or capability should we demand from *all* library vendors?

Wow, that's a big and complicated topic -- but it's right up my alley, and I'll do my best to address it.