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By recognizing the need to separate connectivity from applications we have the opportunity to unleash the power of the marketplace that has served so very well in computing and in the Intern

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

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. 

Just as libraries have historically provided reading rooms for users to access and work with print collections, they now provide common spaces for them to access and work with digital collections.

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.

Folksonomies, or user-created taxonomies, are currently used as collaborative tools to describe images, films, hyperlinks, and other objects and documents. LibraryThing is a website that lets users catalog their own book collections through the use of Library of Congress Subject Headings and social tagging. This paper records the results of exploratory research focusing on the connection between folksonomies and controlled vocabulary and utilizing LibraryThing as a possible benchmark to measure tagging’s efficacy and accuracy as an instrument for subject analysis.

Enter then the broadband-transportation link. Fast, reliable Internet connection makes telecommuting far more feasible –– to transfer files, worksheets and video clips, access company databases, create videoconferences and more. But "telework" can't function well when employees don't have broadband access. Simple equation: Universal broadband equals increased telecommuting, which in turn means less roadway demand, fewer greenhouse gas emissions and less pollution. Even if a worker telecommutes a day or two a week, it can make a real difference.

It's a 1964 recording of the great librarian S.R. Ranganathan giving a fifteen-minute talk about his connections with Melvil Dewey.

Some information observers have suggested that Web 2.0's rise has been due to software applications, while it is becoming increasingly obvious to futurists that the Semantic Web will be defined by services. How those services will be developed and leveraged to bring order to the Web is central to our discussion of the Semantic Web. We discuss the broad implications of these issues through a lens of our work as library professionals, and the time we spend blogging about information on the Web, and its evolution.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF), a method of connecting URIs in a meaningful way, is the key to making the Semantic Web possible.

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.

AquaBrowser® is the world leader in visual faceted search that connects to any number of data sources.