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In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

Our Mission: To successfully establish the public library as the hub of the community in which collaborative information sharing by community members and library patrons enriches and informs their library experience, their cultural and recreational life, and their community involvement.

The thread that runs through all of this discussion is the most burning question to ask before implementing any folksonomy: What are you willing to do to make it work for your user community? What kind of skills can you and your organization bring to the task? What kinds of hassles and conflicts are you willing to settle? And who in your organization is best suited to oversee such an endeavor? In each of the examples presented here there is a way to contact the ones who run the community, hear complaints, listen to suggestions or provide help to those in need. While there is necessarily a greater (Wikipedia) or lesser (ESPGame) need for supervision, there is nonetheless someone in charge. Who that is for your organization is essential to the success of the community.

In essence, the Web Communications Department is new, but pulls from resources, people, and ideas rooted deep in The University of Oklahoma's culture. We're not about change for change's sake. We're about transforming the current OU website into an intuitive resource for the entire community.

"For just one day, we'd like to unite as many of the millions of bloggers around the world and speak about one issue -- the environment," said Collis Ta'eed, an Australian blogger from FreelanceSwitch.com, and a cofounder of Blog Action Day. "We want to display the potential and the power of the blogging community, which is a disparate community but one with an amazing size, breadth and diversity. By bringing everyone together for one day, we can see just how much can be achieved, and how much we can be heard."

While face to face interaction is especially rich in ways to establish connection (touching, eating together, making eye contact, sharing common space, informal chitchat), people also establish connection through mediated communication. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, email, chat, newsgroups, listservs, websites, and games are especially interesting forms of human communication that establish and maintain fields of connection as well as allow for the exchange of substantive information. M

Community Resources for the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Area

The DCMI Knowledge Management Community is a forum for individuals and organisations with an interest in the application and use of the Dublin Core standard in knowledge management.

Lately, I’ve been hearing librarians say some interesting things about incorporating emerging online trends into their already hectic work lives

Deki Wiki is a free open source wiki and application platform for communities and enterprises

The evil Lord Waldemart killed Harry's parents business. Now Harry must stop him in his attempt to torture House Elves and suck the magic from local communities!

In this brief overview, I hope to illustrate some of the bstrategies and practices I've encountered in review writing--from my own experiences as a reviewer, from my students' questions and comments related to reviewing, and from several eminent voices in LIS who have written about reviewing--as well as what you can expect related to processes and communication between you and JWL. Review writing is one of the clearest examples of professional service within LIS, impacting continuing education activities, collection development decisions, and, indirectly, the surface of the publishing landscape for LIS serials, monographs, and software. There are, of course, individual benefits as well, but I'll get to those shortly. The discussion below is meant to illustrate several techniques that might be useful as you prepare your first few reviews, but with respect to any specific technique, your mileage may vary; feel free to adapt these suggestions to match your personal working and writing styles.

The American Library Association and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute (http://www.ii.fsu.edu) in the College of Information at Florida State University, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is surveying a national sample of public libraries regarding their Internet connectivity and computing access resources.

he data from the enhanced study will help you to identify the impacts of your library's public computer and Internet access on the community that your library serves.

this video presentation by Michael Wesch on how we make, find, and share information in a world where we’ve shed the idea of paper as our sole medium for storage and communication — where ideas can munge and mix freely, thanks to digital collaboration.

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.

If the point of reference service is to help people find the information resources they want or need, then the technological environment should help to dictate what a service should look like.

ibraries will need to provide a mix of services via a range of methods:

It would make more sense to play to our strengths: concerns about evaluation and quality of information sources, sophisticated tools and techniques for searching, understanding the nature of users, their communities, their needs and situations, compiling and organizing and packaging information resources for their use, helping them to understand how to help themselves and how to use and evaluate information. These, the goals and motivations for reference librarians for over a century, would lead us to a school of reference librarianship less focused on the answers to specific questions and more on providing assistance and support to people with more detailed, more demanding, more comprehensive information needs of all kinds, from the personal to the professional, from the mundane to the cosmic.

Web 2.0 Summit program chair John Battelle moderated a public policy discussion with Art Brodsky, the communications director of Public Knowledge, Ebay's Tod Cohen and Amazon.com's Paul Misener.