Dust in the Wind

Time to dust away the cobwebs and get this place up and running again. Going forward, I'm going to focus on my current professional duties as a collection development librarian with a media/non-print focus, since there seem to be so few of us blogging. I will still occasionally blog about other issues and news concerning librarianship, especially technology.

I will probably be experimenting with the layout for the next few weeks as well.

Back to the grind!

Media Metrics

From Michael Geist, this LA Times article on Canadian indie-rockers Metric on how free online distribution encouraged sales of their new album:

For its first album in four years, electronic-tinged rock act Metric opted to go without the backing of a music label, a move that in the past would have been daring.

But the Canadian quartet's new release, "Fantasies," popped up in the middle of the U.S. pop chart last week. Metric accomplished that thanks in large measure to iTunes and a nonprofit Canadian arts funding entity.

The non-profit in question is FACTOR, the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent On Recordings. FACTOR was set up by a handful of major stakeholders in the Canadian music industry (primarily the indie scene) and manages the distribution of Department of Canadian Heritage funding in this regard. This makes Metric's story another good example of the effectiveness of government cultural spending.

Someone call the Olympic Committee!

There's a new sport on the horizon, and its athletes hail from the unlikely ranks of IT professionals. Its name is speedcabling:

A new "sport" based around unravelling the mass of wires that can typically be found beneath computer desks the world over is taking off in the western US.

Librarian 2.0 Manifesto

A video mash-up of the Librarian 2.0 Manifesto by Laura Cohen:



Some of the commentators at YouTube have wondered, condescendingly, what images from the counter-cultural festival Burning Man have to do with libraries. Well, they have a point, although Burning Man is a regular indulgence of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two Stanford academics behind Google. And you could make the argument that Google represents the leading edge of Web 2.0 (first dot-com and tech company to succeed in the wake of the dot-com crash), or that Google is the most widely-used information retrieval tool of choice in modern libraries.

However, I think the commentators have a point when they note that in all her points, Cohen does not once mention "reading".

Future of movies in libraries

Libraryman brings up a recent BBC article on Netflix:

US DVD rental firm Netflix is to release a set-top box which will let subscribers download movies and other programmes over the net.

Libraryman considers the implications for public libraries:

True, “Netflix has spent about $40m on the development of its streaming service during the past year.” and that of course surely does not include licensing and revenue related math for the studios, etc. True also that money talks, eh? Still, given the mission of the library (particularly Public Libraries) it seems worth noting that:

As an industry, within the larger library-centric institutions that could make important impacts:
-We are not researching this kind of content delivery in any truly significant way.
-We are not planning to, in the future, provide specific deliverables based around his kind of content delivery.
-We do not have organized, direct or significant relationships with the companies that own the largest collections of popular content and manage it’s distribution to approach them as a potential distribution channel.
-We do not have the legal and negotiation teams that would be required to get our patrons access to the content controlled by companies mentioned above.

Some of people in his comments have suggested OverDrive and similar services as the future of providing content for public libraries. I'm not entirely sure these services have a broad enough selection yet. But maybe we've set ourselves up to fail by placing such pre-eminence on circulation and database usage statistics as performance indicators. Right now at my workplace, there are dozens of students studying for their exams who are not checking out books or using our computers for anything. Are we not providing them a valueable, if perhaps unquantifiable, service?

Reading on a Dream

This library musical was supposedly a prank played on the other patrons, but I have a feeling it was at least partly staged (How do you place all those cameras otherwise?).

Still, cute gag.

Hand-eye coordination

This is a really neat concept--a visual display keyboard, on the same principles of the iPhone or iPod Touch:



Typing Mode



Video Mode

Only conceptual for now, but it's a step closer to making the "flexies" (flexible computer screens/keyboards/cellphones/PDAs) from Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice a reality.