An article in today's Campus Technology cites a comScore research study showing that mobile broadband use is growing rapidly - their figures show a "154 percent in the 4th quarter of 2007 versus the same period in 2006," accounting for about 2 million users in 2007 versus around 900,000 in 2006. Competition among mobile providers... Continue Reading →
authentication meets digitization
It's something of an old story by now, but I heard an amazing piece this weekend on Tech Nation about a novel process that uses CAPTCHAs, the distorted series of characters you confirm when a website needs you to prove you are human, to decipher scanned words. Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon computer science... Continue Reading →
lightning strikes.
I hadn't heard this before, but back in 1971 my library was apparently the first to catalog books electronically, in partnership with the OCLC. Lightning coincidentally struck OCLC headquarters that same night - perhaps signaling their "auspicious beginning," or perhaps as electrostatic retribution for those 17 OU cataloging positions that weren't refilled as a result... Continue Reading →
ignorance is bliss.
Last week Slate and the New York Times reported on Still at Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now, a just-released Common Core survey that sheds dismal light on the basic factual knowledge of today's high school students in areas such as history and literature. I'm not particularly surprised by the findings - the authors... Continue Reading →
slate covers library extinction, architecture.
Slate Magazine recently posed the question, "what sort of public library does the 'digital world' of Google, Wikipedia , and Kindle require?" Witold Rybczynski's brief photoessay covers a range of modern approaches to library design, with examples ranging from Chicago's (in my opinion, rather amazing) downtown library to the more recent Denver Public Library: As... Continue Reading →
kindle meets the 21st century.
It's just a concept, but this student-designed ebook reader looks a lot better than the competition: It could probably stand to be a little thinner, but the simple touchscreen user interface idea is nice. Plus, "the traditional stitched leather cover brings the feel, tactility and smell of old style books to LIVRE." I'm betting that... Continue Reading →
definitely worth noting.
In case you don't keep up with the ever-useful Distant Librarian, you missed a writeup today that is guaranteed to warm the heart of anyone interested in library technology integration and user engagement. It highlights a post on ruk: peter rukavina's weblog, maintained by a nonlibrarian "superpatron" who regularly creates or brainstorms the types of... Continue Reading →
academia and open content.
In the wake of the recent Harvard faculty decision to allow open access to their intellectual output and recent moves by some academic publishers (Columbia University Press, for example) to make electronic books freely available, the open access movement in higher education is definitely gaining momentum. Today's Inside Higher Ed features an article that considers... Continue Reading →
100% hazer
As a place where many students spend endless hours procrastinating, the library is often used as a vehicle for the quiet perpetuation of drama and intrigue. As such, I regularly find things of cryptic and anonymous interest on the ground. In the spirit of one of my favorite magazines/websites, I submit the following creative use... Continue Reading →
genius book/staircase.
Just a little envy stimulation from Apartment Therapy: Is that two copies of Brave New World I see on the first row?
info-mational 