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Thursday, February 14, 2002 |
Microsoft, WebEx Ink a Digital Deal
"Attempting to boost momentum behind its Tablet PC initiative, Microsoft on Monday showcased its 2.5-pound pen-based device and announced that WebEx would support its digital ink capabilities. Online conferencing vendor WebEx said at the Demo 2002 conference in Phoenix that it will build Web conferencing services for the Tablet PC, taking advantage of the portable form factor to boost enterprise communications in meetings, according to K.V. Rao, director of platform marketing at WebEx in San Jose, California.... In addition, Groove Networks says it is building a secure collaboration offering based on the Tablet PC that will allow users to work together on projects in real time, sharing comments in digital ink." [at PC World]
I hadn't thought of this. I've been focusing a lot on how PDAs can make reference librarians more mobile, but I hadn't considered that the Tablet PC could do this but with more screen real estate. Things that make you go hmmm.......
10:57:13 PM 
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Homer Library Plea Deserves Support
"Of the several tax referendum issues to be decided by Homer Glen and Homer Township voters in March, we find one (not necessarily to the exclusion of the others; we'll comment later) especially worthy of community support."
Yyyyyeeeeeesssssss! Local paper endorses my home Library's referendum issue!
10:24:18 PM
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Major score! Library_geek points us to the NOBLE Swap Shop, a collection of resources for libraries running on an Innovative Interfaces system, which SWAN just happens to do. Talk about saving us a ton o' time! I was going to write up the code next week for SWAN libraries to add a search box to their Web pages, and here it is on the NOBLE page. Perl scripts for booklists, snark search boxes, search shortcuts, and more make this the mother lode for III libraries. Oh, Diane.... I'm a coming to knock on your door tomorrow!
10:15:13 PM
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Today I got an email from Matt at Audible. It went out to some kind of a list, but it included two documents, an overview of the company and its services in general, and an overview of its services for libraries. When Matt spoke at our Tech Summit in September, only the Kalamazoo and Highland Community College libraries were actively circulating Audible titles. NOLA was just getting started, but now there are four more libraries on board the program. Here's their list, which is labeled as "partial":
- King County, Washington
- NOLA (Northern Ohio system)
- Kalamazoo, MI
- Broome County, NY
- Carroll County, MD
- Highland County, IL Community Coll.
- Rochester, NY (Henrietta Branch)
In my previous post about Audible, I was thinking of the Kalamazoo Public Library, not King County. KPL has a page devoted to their MP3 audiobook program, and it includes first and second quarter reports (both in PDF format). Their program has also been wildly successful.
Also of interest in Audible's general overview document is continued progress towards something called "AudibleWireless," which provides "customized spoken audio content based on the customer's individual selections, delivered to a wireless device or accessed with an ordinary handset."
So the next time you see an ad for a cell phone or PDA that plays MP3s and you ask yourself why on earth anyone would want that, now you know. It's another type of "heavenly jukebox" digital content coming to you wherever you are via your wireless device. I wonder if Audible can partner with satellite radio companies in order to stream content of your choosing to your car or home stereo. Hey, Matt....
10:05:37 PM
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Joel speaks the truth in an essay about The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. Although the first half isn't as applicable to libraries, the second half is music to my ears, and I'm going to pass it around at SLS. Choice quotes:
"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90% worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse."
"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.... And then when you spend the next year working 'under the covers,' so to speak, nobody will really see what you're doing and they'll think it's nothing." This is a big problem for me in the type of work I do at the System level.
"Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels." I'm still trying to learn this one, because I always think I can convince based on the potential outcome.
8:12:55 PM
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Miss Cleo Charged with "Deception", Water Accused of Being "Wet" [Plastic]
Besides the big-old-duh headline, I like the point of this post that Miss Cleo is a character and people who call her know that. Last year, when I first started seeing her commercials, I had an idea to do a parody ad for libraries based on a Miss-Cleo-like character. I mean, what could be better than a parody of a parody to spread libraries as a meme to the Net Generation.
So this was my idea. I wanted to have "Miss Cleo" sitting at a reference desk. Pan down. Telephone rings. Miss Cleo answers. Patron starts to ask reference question, but "Miss Cleo" already knows the answer. (Kind of like the librarian in Dilbert.) Then, when she needs the patron's information, she "reads the cards," the cards being library cards. The tag line would be "Call your librarian. We already know the answers," along with an Answers @ Your Library campaign.
I was going to flesh this out further, but nobody except me seems to think this would be funny. That's nothing new in my life, though.
7:32:05 PM
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Comments by: YACCS
© Copyright 2002 Jenny Levine.
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