Use These Tools (But Don’t)
iPhone. Android. Flickr. YouTube. Delicious. Goodreads. Meetup. Formspring. WordPress. Bit.ly. Github. Dropbox. QR Codes. Creative Commons. Twitter. Facebook.
All of these things have something in common: they are all technologies that Chicago Public Library (as well as countless other libraries across the country) should be embracing.
I’ve gotten a ton of work done in the last couple of days on what’s going into the social media presentation I’m working on, for which there will be both patron and staff versions. I am particularly excited about the one for library staff, which will focus on how libraries can and should use these technologies to go where their patrons are and to innovate quickly and cheaply.
However, it has not escaped my attention that the City of Chicago has some fairly draconian policies regarding the use by staff of many of these very same technologies. That flavor of irony is particularly bitter.
Folks, when the Library of Congress has a Flickr account I think it should be understood that librarians should be allowed use social media. Because we have to special collections. The curated selections.
And one of our major raisons d’être is to catalog every single item in them to within an inch of its life.
Because that’s how librarians roll.
♦ Posted on Thursday, 20 January 2011 at 10:14 pm and filed under Social Media.
Dump the WWW!
Here we are, in 2010, and I’m still seeing ads and other links to websites that include the “www.” at the start of the web address. Now, thankfully, most people have gotten the message already that there’s no need for the “http://” in front of a URL, but I am still baffled as to why we’re still hanging on to the “www.” part, which is about as useful to a web site as the appendix is to the human body.
♦ Posted on Sunday, 16 May 2010 at 7:12 pm and filed under Web Design.
Whither Broadband?
Broadband in the US is lagging (no pun intended) behind the rest of the world, both in terms of adoption rates and in speed. According to the OECD, the percentage of American households with broadband Internet is ranked fifteenth in the world. Even worse, the OECD defines “broadband” as “256 kbps and up”, which many would probably agree is a pretty paltry speed in this day and age. The FCC even used to define it as a mere 200 kbps—which isn’t even four times as fast as an old 56K modem—although thankfully, it seems to have been bumped up to 768 kbps or higher, which is a bit better.
Now, if you follow that link and read the first two Excel spreadsheets (curse you, OECD, for not providing PDF or HTML versions of this data!) you’ll see that it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds: first, the US has the highest number of overall broadband subscribers of any country; second, most of the countries with higher adoption percentages are countries far smaller than the US (Britain, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, S. Korea, etc.). Naturally, it’s a lot easier to wire up the entirety of small countries than it is a continent-spanning nation that’s quite spread out, as much of the US west of the Mississippi River is.
♦ Posted on Friday, 26 February 2010 at 3:51 pm and filed under Broadband.