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November 25, 2008
Order Your Library Workout Video Now!
Thanks to YouTube we can resurrect old videos and post them for other people's benefit, like this one. I'll bet you didn't know you were getting a workout at the library. Here's a "solution to the sedentary lifestyle of most librarians."
Posted by swortman at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2008
Images from Life Magazine Now Searchable with Google Image Search
Google announced last week that they are now hosting millions for old photos from Life magazine. Some images date back to the 1700s. I searched using the word library and got 200 images ranging from New York Public Library cira 1944 to The Library of Congress, 1941.
You can find pictures of John F. Kennedy with daughter Caroline, J.S. Bach or a group of images labeled Victorian Culture. Want to see what life was like for a "typical little girl" in 1946? Search the Google image interface at http://images.google.com with the search phrase " Suzy Creech source:life" and see a set of images from a Life story on this little girl's life back then.
Right now only about twenty percent of the entire Life archive of photos is available online but more will be loaded until the entire collection of 10 million images is scanned and uploaded. Note: Updated this by removing a random line I forgot to delete before posting this. 11/25/08
Posted by swortman at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2008
Government 2.0
Saturday, November 15 marked the first time the Democratic weekly address was offered as a YouTube video as well as via the traditional radio broadcast. President-elect Obama transitioning site, change.gov states that these weekly YouTube messages will continue through the tranistion period and will continue to be posted weekly once the president is inaugerated next year.
Posted by swortman at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2008
Drupal as CMS
Check out Meredith Farkas' article on using Drupal to manage library web content in this month's American Libraries (November 2008, page 36). It doesn't appear to be available online yet but should be available in both print and online soon at the library if you don't have a subscription.
Since University of Michigan is gearing up to switch to Drupal as the backbone for our library web site very soon this is a timely article. I have to say, although I went to our staff intruction on Drupal I know very little about it. I have been trying to do some quick reading recently to educate myself and this article helped to get me fired up.
Meredith Farkas provides several links to examples of other libraries using Drupal. Ann Arbor District Library was one of, if not the first user of Drupal as a content management system for their web site, http://www.aadl.org. Some other examples from this article include:
* Jackson District Library, Jackson, Michigan
* Darien Library, Darien, Connecticut
These are just a couple examples but there are a number of other libraries using Drupal for both internal staff intranet sites or for managing their entire sites. Drupal will make it easy to add and update web content for each library with little or no knowledge of HTML, CSS, Java, etc. Instead of relying on a few overworked web gurus our web pages will be a community effort, easy to update and dynamic.
Instead of using blogs from Wordpress, wikis from MediaWiki and forums from Simple Machines, none of which are now searchable from the library web site Drupal will give our library the ability to include any or all of this technology on our web pages and they will all be indexed and searchable because Drupal has their own blogs, wikis, and forums. For an example check out the number of blogs available on the Ann Arbor District Library site.
There will be a learning curve for everyone but I appreciate all the work currently being done and we should have a great, new web presence in the very near future to help students, faculty and staff at Michigan better navigate the ever changing information landscape.
For more information on Drupal as CMS you might also want to read Drupal in Libraries in Library Technology Reports 44:4, May/June 2008.
Posted by swortman at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)