I think this video does a great job of showing how information and knowledge is all about context, and not encoding (all about use and not artifacts):
Very Cool Word Clouds
I’m a huge fans of tag clouds (ironically, not such a big fan of tags). I just found a great tool that allows you make very cool word clouds from blocks of texts, blogs and web pages:
From my Blog:
Great Video on Information Literacy
A great video on how undergraduates seek information in doing their work. It is from a study out of the iSchool at the University of Washington with Allison Head, Mike Eisenberg and David Nasatir (http://projectinfolit.org/). Pay particular attention to the role of Wikipedia, the notion of pre-search, and the comment about “I’ll go to some person for an answer … that is if they closer than my computer is”.
Librarian: Best Careers in 2009
Saw this on Gerry McKiernan’s post and thoguht I’d share too:
http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/best-careers/2008/12/11/best-careers-2009-librarian.htm
U.S. News & World Report says that librarianship is one of the best careers for 2009. I like the write up too:
“That effort to land a job will be well worth it if you’re well suited to the profession: love the idea of helping people dig up information, are committed to being objective—helping people gain multiple perspectives on issues—and will remain inspired by the awareness that librarians are among our society’s most empowering people.”
More Panoramas
I have set up another Blip.tv channel that I use to put one off videos and streaming screencasts I use for class. There isn’t really any rhyme or reason to them as a whole. I just did a piece on using Photoshop and cell phone cameras to make panoramas some or you might find interesting. At the very least you can see what my office looks like.
iPhone Panoramas
I saw a great link to a new iPhone application called PanoLab on Gizmodo. The app takes the lightweight camera on the iPhone and lets you turn out some very interesting looking panorama images (here’s mine):
Here is a link to a lot more on Flickr and a link to PanoLab. If you have an iPhone, I highly recommend it (and it’s free).
How to Make a Book in the 1940’s
This is so cool. It shows how to make a book (including manual typesetting) from about 60 years ago. Sometimes you forget just how far the production of information has come.
Printing a Book, Old School from Armin Vit on Vimeo.
Conversation Prism
Scott Nicholson pointed me to this graphic:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/2735401175/sizes/l/
It is from two folks working on social networks it appears in the public relations sphere (http://www.briansolis.com/2008/08/introducing-conversation-prism.html). What I like about it is that conversations are in the center (with learning), and then all the technology that enable them.
As I’ve said in my presentations, Wiki’s, Facebook, Blogs, and such are the current instantiation of a much larger phenomenon – the move to conversations. This image does a great job of showing that.
Reference Renaissance
I’m in Denver at the Reference Renaissance Conference (hopefully the first of many). They have great attendance with over 500 attendees. That’s right at the levels of VRD at its biggest (in Chicago). The conference started out with a great keynote. Hopefully the presentation will be available online, because it is well worth a listen. While a bit on the utopian social side, it is rich with ideas to think about (and books to read).
It is great to see the return of a national reference conference. I think these kinds of events are still important to create cohorts, and push ahead the field as a whole.
Good job BCR and everyone!
Bad Library Customer Service
If this seems familiar…you have a problem.