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Despite the popularity of blogs, they are still an underutilized tool in academic libraries. From what I can tell, blogs are most commonly used for posting news and events. This is evident from personal observation, and is also represented on...
Lately I've been configuring a trial installation of MediaWiki and Movable Type using a shared instance of MySQL on a Windows server. I'm happy to say that I've got everything up and running. I expected this experiment to be learning...
A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out problems with RSS feeds associated with restricted journals because of the authentication issue for off-campus users. I was looking over my bookmarks today, and rediscovered the RSS Creator, a piece of software...
In late November, I'll be in London speaking at the Ingenta Publisher Forum. At this event, Ingenta's publisher customers meet with company representatives to hear about new developments and future plans for IngentaConnect, and to hear from invited industry insiders....
At the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans last spring, I was talking with a friend who works in an academic library in California, and she was enumerating the things her library needed to enhance its Web presence. Her list...
How are graduate schools of library and information science preparing students for Library 2.0? I've got a few suggestions. These suggestions are along the lines of what I'll call foundation skills that can prepare students for working in a Library...
Among the interesting offerings on the customizable Web are services that allow you to create your own search engine. These services allow you to create a search engine focused on your topic of interest. They are a welcome answer to...
The concept of the long tail raises interesting questions as we work our way into Library 2.0. Coined by Chris Anderson and described in his 2004 article in Wired magazine, this concept exploits the phenomenon of a statistical distribution in...
Library 2.0 depends on an active collaboration between librarians and users. This means expending effort, on both sides, in ways that are mostly untried in the academic library world. For example, we're expecting users who enthusiastically participate in social networking...
Flickr is the well-known photo sharing site. You can create an account, upload your photos in defined collections, and tag your photos for categorizing and searching. You can sign up for RSS feeds to follow your tags of interest. The...
What would an ideal Library 2.0 academic library Web site look like? I've been putting some thought into this, and here's what I've come up with. In a nutshell, such a site would run on a wiki-based content management system....
OK, I agree, it's enough already with the various names for RSS! Is it Really Simple Syndication? Rich Site Summary? RDF Site Summary? or something else? When it comes right down to it, few of us really care. The important...
Collaboration. Community. Radical Trust. Assessment. These are a few of the buzzwords fueling Library 2.0. In order for them to take on meaning, we need to work actively with our constituencies to find out what they need and how they...
Wikis have the potential to profoundly change the way libraries manage their Web sites and foster student and faculty collaboration. Let's review the salient characteristics of wikis: They are collaboratively maintained Web sites They are run on a content management...
The phenomenon of wikis is often mentioned alongside that of blogs to form the blogs/wikis partnership. This really isn't very accurate, since the pace of their implementation can hardly be compared. Blogs are much more well-known overall, despite the fact...