Friday, May 17, 2002

Friday Notes IF you know of someone who could (trustees) or should (library staff) be getting copies of the Friday Notes PLEASE let us know their e-mail address. INDEX: CE: Here's what's coming up in NEILSA CE. OTHER CE: Things that you might also find interesting for credit. ANNOUNCEMENTS: General announcements Van 7 Summer Schedule: Van 1 Summer Schedule: Link: Book Reviews Find Homes on Web - Selection source Link: Guide to Internet Resources for Cancer Link: Infomine Link: Search the web with BBCi Link: 9/11 database P r i m a r y S o u r c e - IMLS Monthly E-mail Newsletter Teoma.com"...online reviews are not only abundant, they cover far more than what the print media focuses on: bestsellers and literary fiction books. The difference is Internet reviews don't have built-in respect. But that's changing. Harriet Klausner has written over 3,000 online reviews and ranks as Amazon's No. 1 reviewer." (5/14/2002 11:07:56 PM) Guide to Internet Resources for Cancer - "Welcome to the Guide to Internet Resources for Cancer - gateway to cancer information on the Net since 1996. This non-profit guide contains over 100 pages and more than 4,000 links to cancer related information. It is regularly updated and links are periodically verified using a link-checker." Every resource is annotated and there is a search box. Infomine Search the web with BBCi Why? 9/11 database (& more) http://www.researchbuzz.com/911/index.html P r i m a r y S o u r c e - IMLS Monthly E-mail Newsletter May 2002 Volume 3, Number 5 You can also read a Web version of the newsletter at http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/pscurrent.htm We have selected a few examples that provide a glimpse of the creativity and wit that libraries and museums bring to learning. What child wouldn't love to make a film about insects, learn to throw the perfect curve ball or explore ancient Mayan ruins? Check it out at http: http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/050102.htm. And, our May highlight offers an in-depth look at one of these projects; it uses technology to teach children about the natural world. Want to see more? Links to many IMLS-digital projects are posted on our Web site at: http://www.imls.gov/closer/cls_po.asp If your institution has developed a digital project with IMLS support, we would like to post it. Please email our Web master at mailto:Webmaster@imls.gov. The answer people - "How do I become a professional wrestler? How do I deal with the office troublemaker? Those are some of the burning questions asked by users of AskEarth.com, a new Web site out of Carlsbad that sells answers to nearly every quandary." "He envisions that the site could provide a side income for people who have accumulated vast amounts of knowledge, such as reference librarians." (from Dig_Ref ) (5/12/2002 10:13:46 PM) Teoma Challenges Google by Pointing to Expert Sites - "Producers of the Web's newest search engine, Teoma.com, are quick to shirk the mantle of "Google-killer." "It's not really us saying we're the biggest challenge yet to Google ; it's other people," said Paul Gardi, Teoma's vice president, with an aw-shucks drop in his voice." "At the same time, Gardi will tell you that his product - re-launched in April after making a largely ignored beta appearance Sept. 11 - is "the most advanced search technology out there today." And given time, he predicts, its advantages over the competition will become apparent to millions of Net users." (from Search Engine Guide) (5/12/2002 10:08:32 PM) MY FAVOURITE TIPPLES From Simon White * - The essential theories and formulae that keep the world of electrical engineering on track * - A page covering every measurement conversion factor any budding engineer, student or DIY enthusiast could ever need. * - A surprisingly interesting site from NASA which will identify the position of spacecraft in the night sky depending on your location. * - News and analysis covering the entire IT sector, interspersed with more light hearted stories. Definitely more entertaining than your average news site. * - The ultimate resource for the cynical movie watcher. A comprehensive list of the errors which should have never made it out of the editing room. Jerz's Online and Offline Literacy Weblog http://www.uwec.edu/Academic/Curric/jerzdg/writing/index.html> from Dennis G. Jerz of the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, covers "Links to writing resources, as well as articles, essays, and amusing Web pages related to literacy (both online and offline)". The resources are wide-ranging and come from newspapers, popular magazines, academic journals, other weblogs, searches of the Web, and students. The annotations are informative and offer comment as well as summaries. There are archives going back to 1999. Other weblogs that stand out include BookNotes "Books, libraries, preservation, digital convergence, music, politic" from Craig Jensen , The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog from Charles W. Bailey Jr. , YOU WROTE: snippets from your e-mails Friday Notes: FYI, my hotmail gets full quickly these days. Friday Notes this week was 56K. As usual, I copied and pasted it, erased what I didn't need and forwarded it to myself to print out. There was only 14K left, but it still took 4 pages! And the first time I tried it, I got kicked off the network and had to start all over again. REPLY – Something is being done about this watch for http://fridaynotes2.com CIPA UPDATE: Smile -- http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/3255745.htm FEEDBACK: Survey: NOTE - There will be a question in every Friday Notes. You may respond to the question or not. If you respond please send replies to Ken at davenport@neilsa.org This weeks Feedback Request: If you respond please send replies to Ken at davenport@neilsa.org WEEDING Class: Waucoma PL has volunteered to be the site of the class. We will be using the CREW method. This is not a theory class when we leave the library will have been weeded. IF you are interested indicate below the date(s) (Friday's) you will be able to take part in the class. THEN fill in the reservation form: Days: Weeding Workshop: 8:00 am - 12:00 noon & 1:00 - 5:00 - 8 hours When you are finished at 5:00 you will have followed a group of materials from shelf to dumpster (sale table). Last week's Feedback.: BELOW you will find an Editorial comment(Ken): about the END PLATE: Make the Connection: How can we let the power brokers know this is important OR if you do not think it is important let us know your thoughts about the subject. CHANGES: The Aurora Public Library has a new phone/fax number--(319) 634-3960. E-mail changes: Consortia e-rate: Blue forms received [by city]: NOTE: DEADLINE: June 1, 2002 14 days Previously Listed: Alta Vista, Aplington, Aurora, Beaman, Calmar, Cascade, Clarksville, Clermont, Conrad Cresco, Decorah, Dike, Dumont, Dunkerton, Earlville, Edgewood, Elkader, Elma, Fairbank, Fayette, Fredericksburg, Garnivillo, Grundy Center, Harpers Ferry, Hudson, Janesville, Jesup, Lamont, Maynard, Monona, New Hampton, Oelwein, Plainfield, Postville, Reinbeck Shell Rock, Spillville, Strawberry Point, Tripoli, Waukon NEW - Received after 4/20/2 4/25 Allison Dubuque County Fort Atkinson Manchester Nashua Readlyn Sumner Wellsburg 5/2 Colesburg Greene Lawler Lime Springs West Union 5/9 Arlington Ionia Farmersburg Wadena Waucoma 5/16 Ossian Volga NOTE: Most common mistake returning only One of the TWO sheets. END PLATE: White House Proposal to Recruit New Librarians Please visit our Web page describing the President's budget proposal to support the recruitment and education of librarians for the 21st Century. The President's proposed initiative recognizes the key roles libraries and librarians play in supporting both the formal education process and the independent learner. Libraries and librarians facilitate the flow of information that is critical to create the informed populace that lies at the core of democracy. Following a series of public meetings IMLS has further drafted a set of goals for the program. Your input on program development is needed. The goals and an invitation to provide additional input can be found at: http://www.imls.gov/grants/library/lib_bdre.htm For LOTS-O-US Freckles and Wrinkles ---------------------- An elderly woman and her little grandson, whose face was sprinkled with bright freckles, spent the day at the zoo. Lots of children were waiting in line to get their cheeks painted by a local artist who was decorating them with tiger paws. "You've got so many freckles, there's no place to paint!" A girl in the line said to the little fella. Embarrassed, the littleboy dropped his head. His grandmother knelt down next to him. "I love your freckles. When I was a little girl I always wanted freckles, she said, while tracing her finger across the child's cheek. "Freckles are beautiful!" The boy looked up, "Really?""Of course," said the grandmother. "Why, just name me one thing that's prettier than freckles."The little boy thought for a moment, peered intensely into his grandma's face, and softly whispered, "Wrinkles." FOR THE CHILDREN's LIBRARIAN ONLY: Three Little Pigs went out to dinner one night. The waiter comes and takes their drink order. "I would like a Sprite," said the first little piggy. "I would like a Coke," said the second little piggy. "I want water, lots and lots of water," said the third little piggy. The drinks are brought out and the waiter takes their orders for dinner. "I want a nice big steak," said the first piggy. "I would like the salad plate," said the second piggy. "I want water, lots and lots of water," said the third little piggy. The meals were brought out and a while later the waiter approached the table and asked if the piggies would like any dessert. "I want abanana split," said the first piggy. "I want a root beer float," said the second piggy. "I want water, lots and lots of water," exclaimed the third little piggy. "Pardon me for asking," said the waiter, "but why have you only ordered water " You're gonna hate me for this ... Hold on to your seat ... The third piggy says - "Well, somebody has to go 'Wee, wee, wee, all the way home!'" DID YOU KNOW...? It is impossible to lick your elbow. A crocodile can't stick its tongue out. A shrimp's heart is in their head. People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze, your heart stops for a millisecond. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky. More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call. Rats and horses can't vomit. The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language. If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. If you keep your eyes open by force, they can pop out. Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married. A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why. In the course of an average lifetime, you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders. Most lipstick contains fish scales. Cat's urine glows under a black-light. Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different. Over 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow................. (Am I right)?? Free Pint "Helping 49,000 people use the Web for their work" http://www.freepint.com/ ISSN 1460-7239 16th May 2002 No.112 FEATURE ARTICLE first part of this article "Weblogs and Blogging" By Laurel A. Clyde Examples of Weblogs ------------------- As noted in the first part of this article , many commentators have suggested that Blogger and similar programs haveresulted in even more unreliable or mindless content on the Web than there was before. "Blogs are a natural for librarians" says Paula J. Hane ; certainly librarians have created a number of useful and well-regarded weblogs that cover either the broad field of library and information science, or specialist aspects of librarianship. Other weblogs are aimed at particular groups of people within the library and information professions - new librarians, for example. In addition, libraries have created weblogs for the benefit of their staff or users. LISNews.com (Library and Information Science News) has contributions from a number of people on any day, along with comments. In addition to providing good coverage of library and information science in general, it has items related to the Internet in libraries, intellectual property, filtering and censorship, freedom of information, electronic publishing, search engines, book news and awards, and information literacy. Harry Potter stories have their own special icon, so often do they come up. Library News Daily , created by Peter Scott, has postings about new Internet information sources and material on the Internet related to libraries, including information on forthcoming conferences. The site has links to other resources that Peter has created, including A Complete Guide to Weblogs and a page of links to Library Weblogs, arranged by country . Steven M. Cohen maintains the Library Stuff weblog which has links to news items from Internet- and print-based news services, and a useful list of his favorite weblogs. Librarian.net from Jessamyn West also provides general coverage of librarianship with links to current information. Gary Price's Virtual Acquisition Shelf and News Desk is a great way to keep up with quality Internet resources. The usefulness of this weblog is enhanced through a free weekly "Highlights" mailing list. Among the more specialized library-related weblogs are, for example, Roma's Reference Roundup from Roma Kail at the University of Saskatchewan Library, and The Handheld Librarian (librarians working with handheld computer technology) . For light relief from the serious business of librarianship, you can try The Laughing Librarian from Brian Smith. Weblogs that have been created by libraries include Liblog: A Library Weblog from the Redwood City Public Library , California ; What's Happening in the Richland College Library , Texas ; the Leddy weblog from the Leddy Library, University of Windsor, Canada ; h2Oboro lib blog from Waterboro Public Library, Maine ; and the etc. weblog of Gateshead Public Library in the United Kingdom . Weblog Search Engines and Directories ------------------------------------- Finding out about quality weblogs can be a matter of serendipity. There is no single source of information about all weblogs. Nevertheless, a number of search engines and directories provide information about, and lists of, weblogs. In addition, weblog creation sites such as Blogger maintain lists of weblogs that have been created using their service. Daypop is a specialist search engine that can be used to search either weblogs or news sources or both. However, the note on the home page, "Search 6800 news sites and weblogs for current events and breaking news (16 March 2002), while impressive at first glance, indicates that any weblog search is being carried out on a tiny proportion of the available weblogs. Daypop has a "Top 40" list of news stories of the day (including stories culled from weblogs), and its own Daypop Weblog. .blog is a new (2002) weblog directory that lists the weblogs by categories, by countries, by languages, by the number of visits, by the number of comments, by updates, and other criteria. It is currently available in English and Portuguese with other languages "coming soon", though when I last visited the site on 24 March 2002, there were still some problems with non-English language character sets. There were 999 weblogs listed on that date. Yahoo!'s Directory of Weblogs provides an alphabetical list that can also be retrieved as a list by geographical location . GBlogs is a listing of weblogs in the United Kingdom (516 listed on 25 March 2002). Xenoblogs , "Weblogs from outside the USA", provides access to weblogs in 30 countries (including the United Kingdom), with a list of other directories. Meanwhile, the Open Directory Project has a growing list of Library and Information Science Weblogs , a list that complements the list of Library Weblogs created by Peter Scott . The observation made about the number of weblogs indexed by Daypop (above) is equally true of .blog and the other directories. Each of these services and directories indexes or lists a small proportion of the weblogs that are available. This means that searchers are forced back onto trusted weblogs for links to other weblogs, and onto Internet stalwarts like Yahoo! and Google for access to information in weblogs. Weblogs and You? ---------------- Many claims have been made for the usefulness of weblogs. At their best, they can "Help readers cope with an information avalanche", says Andy Wang by highlighting and summarising useful material. Rebecca Blood suggests that they can also "contextualize" an article by listing it among related articles from different sources, so that "Each article, considered in the light of the other, may take on additional meaning" . Weblogs may bring to the attention of the reader, material that would otherwise have been missed. On the other hand, weblogs are part of the "information avalanche", and perhaps part of the problem. In the case of businesses, Dylan Tweney suggests that "Weblogs [can] Make the Web Work for You" . Public relations professionals have always monitored newspapers and magazines for coverage of their companies. In recent years, Internet-aware companies and organisations have also monitored chat forums, listservs and Usenet newsgroups to keep up with rumours and comment that could affect sales of their products or have an impact on public image. Dylan says that those companies should now also be monitoring relevant weblogs and even providing news feeds and stories to weblogs. In addition, organisations can establish and use their own weblogs to present information as they want it to be presented, and to communicate with clients or potential clients. As we saw earlier, some libraries are already doing this. Weblogs can also have a place within an organisation, as part of an intranet. UserLand, creators of the Radio commercial weblog software, are slanting their marketing in this direction. They say, "Weblogs have emerged as a powerful knowledge management tool for corporations and education. Radio UserLand is a weblog tool that makes it easy for employees to quickly publish knowledge to an intranet where it is archived and is accessible to other employees using search engines" . Weblogs might be one possibility within a knowledge management strategy, providing as they do for publishing, comment and collaboration. In terms of weblogs, there do seem to be advantages and possibilities. However, there are many people who see them as nothing more than a passing fad. Whether or not the latter is true, John Hiler points out that weblogs are already having an impact on most Web users through Google search results. He further notes that weblogs will probably continue to have such an impact for at least some time into the future, whether or not the Web users actually know what a weblog is. > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dr L. Anne Clyde is Professor in the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Iceland where she specialises in online searching and Internet applications. An Australian, she has worked in Canada, Namibia and other countries as well as in Iceland. Her books include "School Libraries and the Electronic Community" (1997), "Managing InfoTech in School Library Media Centers" (1999), and "An Introduction to the Internet" (2001). She is Webmaster of the award-winning School Libraries Online site and she maintains a page about weblogs on her teaching Web site at . > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Related Free Pint links: * "Internet Searching" articles and tipples in the Free Pint Portal * Post a message to the author, Laurel A. Clyde, or suggest further resources, at the Free Pint Bar * Read this article online, with activated hyperlinks * Access the entire archive of Free Pint content > = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = COPYLEFT NOTICE 2002 THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt UNLESS Specific copyright notice is posted to an item. Please note - material found on the web should be assumed to be under copyright and is presented here for purposes of education and research only. 3:29:50 PM