Group items tagged

Technology is transforming the way in which researchers gain access to archives, not only in the choices archivists make about their uses of technology but in the portable technologies researchers bring with them to the archives. This essay reviews the implications of electronic mail, instant messaging and chat, digital reference services, Web sites, scanners, digital cameras, folksonomies, and various adaptive technologies in facilitating archival access. The new machines represent greater, even unprecedented, opportunities for archivists to support one of the main elements of their professional mission, namely, getting archival records used.

Professor Nov, an information systems expert, produced a nice data point that seems to be methodologically sound, covering eight different motivations for contributing to Wikipedia.

The intrinsic motivations in the list may add a bit of extra incentive, but the main goal is to get one's point of view heard.

catalog and community where users can upload work or select a piece of public domain writing, create reading groups and tag literature.

a web-based format where users can read and discuss the book right inside the text. The Unbound Reader uses "proximity chat," which allows users to discuss the book with other readers close to them in the text (thus focusing discussion, and, as an added benefit, keeping people from hearing about the end). It also has shared annotations, so people can leave a comment on any paragraph and other readers can respond.

I've finally put together a slidecast on how to create a slidecast (very meta). It's short (only 3 min), but it shows off the basics of how to use slideshare to make web multimedia using only a ppt file and an mp3.

This industrial film from around 1960 clearly demonstrates that knowledge management was being touted as a management philosophy a whole generation before it became mainstream. A Prelinger Archive mashup.

So I was in a OhioLINK meeting yesterday, and one of the committee members told me that her colleague, Andrew Whitis, had gotten a meebome widget to work with Pidgin. They use Pidgin instead of Trillian to connect to multiple IM clients. Being able to connect to the meebome widget through my IM client sounded like a dream come true, so I decided to check it out. For libraries who staff IM with Trillian, a Meebome widget with meebo, and skype with skype, logging into to three different things can be quite the ordeal. Even NASA doesn’t have to start as many programs when launching the shuttle. I’ve written before about using multiple clients, so this seems to help get rid of the need to log into meebo. I downloaded and installed this plugin, and thus far it seems to be working great.  Here’s what I did. 

The goal of the Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse Project (DREW) is to create a large database of reference transactions so that researchers might better understand the process and then create tools for measurement and evaluation that managers of reference services could employ.