creativelibrarian.com

The Creative Librarian is a hub for matters important to librarians/information scientists of today. There is a definite lean towards electronic issues, however it isn’t restricted to only those. Hopefully this site will also be useful for informing non-librarians on these issues as so many of them affect us all.

Archive for July, 2004

Phoenix Gets it Right

When I first looked at the new Phoenix Public Library (PPL) web site I thought: nice job�they probably outsourced everything. Why? Because the site feels like a high-end commercial site. We’ve all seen the bells and whistles before�when buying a book, tracking a shipment, or performing any number of other complicated transactions online. Finally, my [...]

7 Things RSS Is Good For

New Media Musings: 7 Things RSS Is Good For is an excellent resource for explaining the usefullness for users. At the end is 5 Reasons Why Companies Should Publish an RSS feed, an equally convincing set of arguments for bosses.

Copyright Guide

Copyright Clearance Center, a licensing agent for text reproduction rights, has launched a Web-based resource for business professionals called The Guide to Copyright Compliance. The interactive guide is designed to assist companies in implementing corporate best practices for achieving compliance with copyright law and also helps organizations educate employees on how to lawfully use the [...]

Weblogs in Libraries

As Steven Cohen points out, Weblogs: Do they belong in libraries? never really addresses that question. The author does a nice review of how they are already being used but doesn’t mention any reasons for or against.
It wouldn’t take very long browsing through my archives to realize that my own answer is an unequivocal “Yes!” [...]

9-11 Report

9-11 Commission Final Report
The 9/11 Commission Report, Executive Summary (HTML)
The 9/11 Commission Report (Full Index)
Wired News: Techies Reshape 9/11 History

Accessability Test

Assessing the accessibility of fifty United States government Web pages: Using Bobby to check on Uncle Sam by Jim Ellison
This study evaluates the current accessibility of U.S. Government Web pages for people with disabilities. Several Federal laws, and specifically Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, require Web pages of government agencies to be accessible [...]

New Look

If you’re reading this in a newsreader, you might want to switch to a browser to see the new design. I haven’t done anything to the underlying structure. Just polished the visuals and changed the right bar a bit. Hopefully it will be easier to browse as well as prettier. If you have any comments, [...]

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NYT Fading?

As I’m sure you know, the online version of the New York Times is “hidden” behind a registration system. Access is free but that single impediment makes the site unlinkable, which makes it irrelevant for web-based conversation like blogs, emails, newsgroups, and message boards.
According to Boing Boing, it also blocks the Google search engine, [...]

Real Library Blogs

I recently came across two excellent examples of blogs published by libraries.

Librarian Geek at the West Warwick Public Library
UMN: Bio-Med Library – Public Health

Librarian Geek lists monthly tips about technology in the library. The library where I work has had excellent results from publishing weekly tips, they remind patrons we’re there and show that we’re [...]

Copyright Chart

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States is a chart (html and pdf), that spells out length of term for various types of works.

Catalog computers

One of the problems with switching library catalogs to web versions is that the dedicated computers start being used for Internet surfing instead of catalog searching.
Limiting Web Access is a set of instructions on how to keep those computers from being used for general searching while still allowing use of the catalog. It is written [...]

Measuring Value

TechnoBiblio: Grappling with changes in measuring our value makes a good point about the fact that the way libraries have traditionally measured the value of their services didn’t work too well before and are almost completely worthless now.
What the patrons at my (research/academic) library want most is to be able to search for sources and [...]

Into the Blogosphere

Into the Blogosphere is a set of peer-reviewed articles on blogging. The interesting part, aside from the subject, is that they have aloud comments on each article. It will be interesting to go back in a couple of weeks and see what has been said.

LIS Archives

E-LIS – Eprints for LIS is an open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, on Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related application activities.
dLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology.

Web Standards

[Developing With Web Standards] explains how and why using web standards will let you build websites in a way that saves time and money for the developer and provides a better experience for the visitor. Also discussed are other methods, guidelines and best practices that will help produce high-quality websites that are accessible to as [...]