Flash-Mob Cataloging Party — A few weeks ago, this announcement on the LibraryThing blog caught my attention. Many church and other small organizations use LibraryThing to catalog their libraries, but it can be difficult for a single volunteer to get the collection entered. So, according to the blog, “…we thought we’d try a ‘flash-mob’ cataloging party and see how fast we can enter an entire library into LibraryThing.” Lucky for me, this event was happening nearby, at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms. They put out the call for volunteers, and today about twenty of us gathered at the church and entered over 1,300 books into LibraryThing. [Click to continue…]
Animoto is a service that makes it simple to turn a group of photographs into a music video. You can upload your pictures from your computer or pull them in from another photo site like Flickr, choose some music from Animoto’s collection or upload your own, and then let Animoto create your video. It takes about ten minutes for your video to be ready, and if you don’t like the results, you can run it through again and get a remix. It’s free to make 30 second videos, and you can make longer ones for $3.00 each or $30.00 a year.
Animoto just added a new feature which will be great for libraries — the ability to superimpose text across your pictures. This makes it easy to take a group of pictures from the Children’s Room and have words like “Come to story hour” and “Get help with homework” float across the screen. It’s really easy to use, and the video you make can be uploaded to YouTube or posted to your blog or website.
Here’s a quick example, just a remix of one of my first test videos I made several months ago, remixed with a few words added. It’s really easy to make these, and just another way to show off your library pictures!
And you also might want to use this as a library program. Kids and teens (or anyone, actually) will also enjoy playing around with this their own photographs with Animoto.
Amazon’s Windowshop is a beautiful, visual interface for the exploration of new releases in books, music and DVDs. It’s an immersive experience — this may be one of the biggest buzzphrases of 2008. It stands on the shoulders of giants like Coverflow and CoolIris (formerly PicLens) and SearchMe, all my favorite things. I love the way you select titles of interest and instantly get multimedia content — book descriptions, movie trailers, music, and it’s easy (way too easy!) to click through and buy things.
CardCow continues to be one of my favorite websites. It’s an online postcard store, but they have such a huge collection that it’s a really interesting site to search or browse even if you’re not planning to buy any postcards. They keep all the images online even after the card is sold, and they scan both sides which is often helpful when you’re trying to date an image. (And some of those messages are pretty interesting as social history!)
There’s also a nice feature that makes it easy to add these images to your website. Just click on Add This Card to Your Web Page and you can get the right code for to copy and paste to add the small, medium or large version to your site. The image displays a subtle watermark and will be linked back to the CardCow website.
They have lots of vintage holiday images that would work well on library booklists, blog posts and other websites, like this Thanksgiving postcard:
Wish you had time to make your website more interactive? Try adding simple, fun polls! It only takes a few minutes to create your own polls using one of the free polling services.
The sample on this post was created using a free PollDaddy account — feel free to make a selection and click on Vote to try this out. You’ll be shown the results by percentage. In this case, I allow the user to choose “Other” and input their own answer. The names they add this way aren’t seen online, but I can see the full results on the PollDaddy website.
You can set options to try to limit users to a single vote by cookie or IP address, but either method might be problematic on library workstations. But there’s no statistical validity to this kind of polling anyway, so use it just for fun. These are especially popular on blogs and pages for kids and teens.
If your blog or website is running on WordPress, checkout PollDaddy’s WordPress plugin to make it even easier to add these to your site. But on any site, it’s pretty much just a matter of filling out a form and then copying and pasting a snippet of code to your post or page.
I like Polldaddy, but other sites are similar. If you pay for an account, you get more options, but you may find you can do everything you want with a free account.
Have fun!
Links
PollDaddy — Sign up for a free account and try this out
Read This! — This excellent book blog from the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers, Massachusetts, uses polls as an interactive feature in the sidebar.
In a Presidential election year, we all spend a lot of time looking at maps to try to make sense of the news. Newspapers and television programs show us poll results, campaign events and voting patterns on maps, and show us various scenarios.
But now that we have Google Maps, we can all play around with this kind of mapped data. How does the current CNN polling compare with the New York Times projections? What if Pennsylvania goes red and Ohio goes blue this year? You can play around with the possibilities on the map below just by choosing different data sources using the dropdown, and clicking on each state to cycle through red, blue and toss-up and looking at the effect on the electoral votes. If you want a historical perspective, you can use the dropdown to see the electoral map for every presidential election back to 1932.
Elections ‘08 Map Gallery — The Electoral Votes map is just one of the maps in Google’s Elections ‘08 Map Gallery. You’ll also find maps showing the Campaign Trail, videos of Obama and McCain’s campaign appearances, and more. These maps are a great example of three trends– they’re geographical, interactive and embeddable.
Living Room Candidate — If you’ve had enough of the 2008 election, how about looking to the past? The Living Room Candidate website is a beautifully-designed online exhibit from the Museum of the Moving Image, showcasing presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to 2008. You can explore by year and read a short article about each candidate’s television strategy, or browse by type of commercial (biographical, fear, real people, etc.) or by issue (corruption, taxes, war, etc.)
But the amazing thing here is that you don’t just read about the commercials, you can watch them online and draw your own conclusions about how fair, accurate and effective they were. These primary sources are invaluable for media studies and political history.
Some of these are quite entertaining, too. I love the contrast between two 1952 commercials, Eisenhower’s cartoon “Ike for President” and Stevenson’s torchy “I Love the Gov.” commercial. [Click to continue…]
Anita Silvey’s article about the Newbery Awards in School Library Journal asks
“Are children, librarians, and other book lovers still rushing to read the latest Newbery winners? Or has the most prestigious award in children’s literature lost some of its luster?”
The issue isn’t new. Back when I was a Children’s Librarian, I remember a kid who came in looking for something to read for a book report who loudly declared, “Don’t give me any of those books with that gold thing on the cover!” And he added that those books provide a disappointing reading experience — that’s a paraphrase. A few other kids jumped in with their agreement, citing a number of truly awful books they had been forced to read by teachers, all because of “those gold things!” It made me want to rip the gold seals off all my Newberys. One girl said, “Some of the books with the silver thing are OK, though,” which made me feel better. I thought it was interesting how aware the kids were of these seals of approval, and how free they felt to express their own dissenting opinions.
Has the Newbery Lost Its Way? “Snubbed by kids, disappointing to librarians, the recent winners have few fans”
Anita Silvey — School Library Journal, 10/1/2008
The Newton Free Library does a great job with their Flickr account, with lots of interesting photographs. Some show off the art and architecture of the library building, including one of my favorites, this picture of Eeyore from the sculpture Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh and the Hunny Pot, by Nancy Schon, and there are many photographs of library programs and exhibits.
But the thing I admire most about Newton’s use of Flickr is that they don’t just use it for special events, but as a way to visually represent all of the library’s services and activities. This includes many behind-the-scenes pictures of the delivery service, overflowing bookdrops, library staff and volunteers.
One great example of the kind of thing that Newton does so well is this set, which invites you to…
“follow the path of a book at the Newton Free Library - from a personal recommendation or good review, through ordering and processing till it arrives on the shelf for you to check out.”
This is a great example of the “show me, don’t tell me” approach, and something that I’m sure is useful for training new staff and volunteers as well as helping Trustees, Friends and members of the community understand a little more about how the library works.
Flickr just introduced a new, improved version of their slideshow, with many new features including the ability to include video as well as photographs. But the most important new feature is that Flickr slideshows are now easier to share, and can easily be embedded in blogs and webpages, like this:
You can make slideshows from your own photographs, of course — this is a great way to post a set of pictures from a library event on your website. But you can also make slideshows from groups or even search results, and link to them or embed them on your website. Be sure to play around with the options!
There are a lot of third-party tools around that build different kinds of slideshows with Flickr photographs, but there’s nothing easier than using the new, improved slideshow built right into the system!
SearchMe — This new search engine has one truly beautiful feature — the highly visual way that it presents search results. As you can see in these screenshots, search results are displayed as a stack of images which you can scroll through horizontally. You can click on the arrows to move through the search results one at a time, or the scrollbar to move through quickly.
This is the search engine equivalent of Cover Flow on the Apple iPod and iPhone, and for many visually-oriented people this is both a fun and functional display. The display of search results is an interesting and active area of development, with many contenders looking to improve on the utilitarian, text-based Google display. Search engines like Truveo and Cuil have taken a multiple-column, concise grid approach to getting more information on the results screen, and SearchMe is taking the opposite approach with this highly visual, three-dimensional display.
There are many interesting features here, including the ability to save and share your own “stacks” but you’ll learn more about trying it out yourself rather than reading about it. Be sure to try all types of searches, including Images and Video, and to explore some of the featured news links on the main page. I thought the current New York Times Bestsellers presented as a stack of Amazon pages was especially interesting.
I love YouTube, and have found some amazing things on there, but there’s whole world of video online beyond what you’ll ever find on YouTube. I used to use Google’s Video Search , but was never particularly impressed with the results. I knew there had to be something better…
And then I found Truveo, a video search engine that makes it easy to find all kinds of video content from around the web. A Truveo search on Puffins, for example, finds videos from professional media organizations like National Geographic, the BBC and NECN, as well as social sites like YouTube and Vimeo — the best of both worlds.
Truveo is a great reference resource, a way to find relevant video on all kinds of topics. For example, someone interested in information about the journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, might be very interested in the Malcolm Gladwell videos found in a quick Truveo search, which includes videos from sources as diverse as Business Week and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, as well as podcasts from the New York and Pop!Tech, and speeches from Fora.tv.
It’s not just the quality of the search results that make Truveo so useful, it’s also the way those results are displayed in a concise, grid format, with lots of options for sorting and refining the search results. There are options along the top of every page that let you sort results by Most Relevant, Most Recent, Most Viewed This Month, Most Viewed of All Time, etc. If you scroll down below the main search results grid, you’ll find various featured content. This varies depending on your search. For example, for a search on origami, you’ll find featured channels (content providers) like MetaCafe and Revver, and a list of other channels, like HowCast. A search on the name of jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden also has facets for channels, but also tags like “ukelele” and “armstrong.”
Every set of search results also has two buttons, Feed and Snag. Feed is an RSS/XML feed of your search results, handy for putting into your feed reader, personalized Google page, etc. Snag is lets you create a nice blog widget of search results, which you can add to any blog or webpage. Here’s my snag widget for the Malcolm Gladwell search:
I highly recommend Truveo — I can’t imagine how I lived without it!
[This post is based on a presentation I did for NOBLE's annual Tech Expo last month]
Libraries have traditionally dealt mostly with two-dimensional objects: books, maps and pictures and other objects that are inherently flat. But the world is not composed of two-dimensional objects, and computer technology now makes it easy to present information in 3D so the user can explore different angles and viewpoints. 3D systems are important now in all kinds of geographical work, including meteorology and ecology; in community planning, architecture and design; in forensics, medicine and science and many other fields of study.
Young people typically get their first experiences working with 3D systems in the world of gaming, but there are now powerful, simple, free programs that allow users to explore 3D information in the real world, including Google Earth, which is a 3D mapping program, and SketchUp, with can be used to create models of buildings and much more.
Google Maps
Although Google Maps is not a three-dimensional program, but it is an interactive, highly mixable application that allows many different types of data to be presented geographically. It also has one very important 3D function — it gives you an easy way to create files that can be read in the 3D Google Earth program.
Google Earth is a free software program that you download to your PC. It’s normally used online, and is the best-known example of a virtual globe program. It’s an interactive, three-dimensional geographic program. Anyone can create and share files in the Google Earth format (KMZ) — one way to do this is through Google Maps. Google Earth files are collections of placepoints or markers. These markers can include text, images, links, etc. Additional content is added to Google Earth through layers, which can include travel information, news, images, YouTube videos, historic maps, environmental data, and anything else that has been or can be geocoded.
Google Earth Links
Google Earth — Download the software, learn how to use it, visit the gallery
SketchUp is a separate free program that can be downloaded from Google. It’s used to make 3D models of all kinds, including photorealistic models of real buildings that can be placed on Google Earth. SketchUp can also be used for any other type of 3D models, including household objects, people, animals and imaginary creatures, etc. SketchUp is a simple, versatile and extremely powerful 3D program that can be extended through the use of plugins. The SketchyPhysics plugin, for example, lets users create moving models that obey the laws of physics.
Google has created a lot of interesting content, including models of the American Institute of Architects 150 favorite works. Members of the Google community also contribute individual models and whole collections to the Google 3D Warehouse. These shared models are a great learning tool and are one of the reasons SketchUp has been so successful.
SketchyPhysics Examples — A showcase of some interesting models created with the SketchyPhysics plugin
Project Spectrum — Google teamed with parents, teachers and kids on the autistic spectrum to do some interesting projects using SketchUp. The video here shows how kids used SketchUp to design their dream houses, and the manual of lesson plans has some great ideas for using SketchUp across the curriculum. (Most of these ideas could be adapted for working with any group of kids.)
I have added a new feature to this blog — an AudioFeed automatically generated by ReadSpeaker, a company that provides text-to-speech services for the International Herald Tribune, the New Statesman, and many business, non-profit and government sites, many in the UK and other parts of Europe. ReadSpeaker is now working licensed databases from Gale and Factiva.
What I am using here is a simple, free service, which may include advertising. The quality of the recordings is pretty impressive for an automated service. You’d never mistake it for a real person actually reading my words, but it does a good enough job of mimicking the general cadence of English, pausing appropriately at commas and periods, and so on.
ReadSpeaker’s services are intended to provide spoken versions of text aimed not only at the visually impaired, but at a larger group of people who may appreciate a spoken version instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the written words. This may includes people with language, literacy and learning issues, those who find the spoken track an aid to concentration while reading, and those who for reasons of circumstance or preference prefer an audio version to a written one.
I must say that although I have been an admirer of ReadSpeaker’s speech software on other sites, I find it rather odd and unsettling to listen to this disembodied, not-quite-real male voice read my own words. But I do think this free service is interesting and could be a good option for libraries who want to make their blogs and other feed-based services more accessible.
And, of course, if people find the AudioFeed a little off-putting, they can always add their own, personally-recorded audiofeed, which would be a good way to enhance their services without much time and effort.
The Boston Public Library is sharing several collections of artistic and historic images to Flickr, including local brewery posters, rare books, manuscripts, postcards, photographs and much more.
Two collections are of particular interest for local interest to NOBLE libraries. The Tichnor Brothers postcards of New England includes over 1,800 Massachusetts images, including many from our area. These postcards are a good source of images of parks, bridges, statues, libraries, churches and other local landmarks.
The Leon Abdalian collection includes historic sites photographed in 1930 during the Massachusetts Tercentenary celebration, when the Boston Daily Record hired Abdalian as the “Photographer of Historic Shrines,” and it includes some sites in our area, including the Balch House in Beverly.
Flash-Mob Cataloging Party — A few weeks ago, this announcement on the LibraryThing blog caught my attention. Many church and other small organizations use LibraryThing to catalog their libraries, but it can be difficult for a single volunteer to get the collection entered. So, according to the blog, “…we thought we’d try a ‘flash-mob’ cataloging party and see how fast we can enter an entire library into LibraryThing.” Lucky for me, this event was happening nearby, at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms. They put out the call for volunteers, and today about twenty of us gathered at the church and entered over 1,300 books into LibraryThing.
