by Judi Wolinsky, Homewood Public Library; Nancy Faller, Sterling Morton Library; and Megan Marsh, Acorn Public Library, MLS Members
This year’s Internet Librarian Conference took place October 26-28, 2009 in Monterey, CA (http://www.infotoday.com/il2009). Several MLS Member Library staff had the opportunity to attend the conference and we’re willing to share their findings with the rest of the membership.
Gadgets Galore
Judi Wolinsky, Head of the Adult Services Department at Homewood Public Library (http://www.homewoodlibrary.org). This is my sixth Internet Librarian Conference. I was a graduate student in library science at the University of Illinois, when Mosaic, the first Internet graphic browser, was introduced there. It was love at first site!
At Internet Librarian the one session I never miss is Super Searcher Shares: Search Tips Spectacular where Mary Ellen Bates, Bates Information Services, presents the latest nifty tools and tips for web searching. Her entire presentation can be found at http://www.batesinfo.com/IL2009. Below I review a few of the tools she highlighted.
My favorite offering this year is Google Squared (http://www.google.com/squared), a tool currently under development from Google Labs, a place where Google lets you sample prototypes of new products and services currently under development.
Google Squared takes your search term, does a search, identifies common elements from the retrieved results and then creates a table on the fly with the information it has compiled. It's very cool.
It's easier to try than to try to explain:
Visit the site and enter a category to search for. Try your own or one of theirs, like "dog breeds". Google creates a table of results with, in this case, the breeds listed on the left and with subsequent columns detailing characteristics of the breeds. Scrolling to the right, you can add a column of your own, or use one of their suggestions. Scrolling down you can add breeds you'd like to see listed and watch Google populate the corresponding columns. You can delete columns or rows not needed; you can import the table or save it for later use.
Other highlights from this session include:
- Google FastFlip (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com), a quick visual browsing of news by source, topic, headline or section, kind of like an Ipod cover flow of news.
- Google's "show options" feature. Hidden in plain view, the show options feature appears in the upper left hand corner of the Google search results page. Click on this and you can customize and refine the results you've retrieved. There are many options to explore with this tool. Under the heading "standard results", click "Images from the page" and graphics from the retrieved sites become visible, giving you an easy way to find a relevant graphic that you might not find using Google Image search. Or click "Page Preview" to see a miniature view of the site.
Conference Attendee 2.0 Style – In the Cloud
Nancy Faller, Web Services Librarian, Sterling Morton Library (http://www.mortonarb.org/sterling-morton-library.html) at the Morton Arboretum.
This was my second time attending an Information Today Conference, the first one being Computers in Libraries in Washington, D.C. in 2006. Since this was a technology conference, I was determined to experience it from the perspective of a technology user rather than just an observer gathering info as I did in Washington. I brought along my laptop with great hopes of being able to access enough power outlets to keep my waning battery going all day. Happily the rooms were set up with long tables in the front and back with power strips every few feet, and WiFi was available in each room.
I had the #IL2009 twitter feed open the whole time so I could see what was going on in the other sessions. I was taking my notes in Google Docs. At night I would head across the street to a coffee house with free WiFi and check up on what the bloggers were saying about the other sessions. I was living' in the cloud! It was actually kind of cool!
The theme of the conference was Net Initiatives for Tough Times: Digital Publishing, Preservation, and Practices. Many of the sessions presented options for creating and managing digital content utilizing free and open source tools. As a librarian in a small museum library I was looking for something new that would be useful not only to our library but to our institution as whole.
The sessions that stood out for me were:
Dreaming, Designing, and Using Mobile Library Platforms, panel presentations.
Cloud Computing in Practice: Creating Digital Services & Collection, Amy Buckland, Kendra K. Levine, & Laura Harris.
During this session, we were given the opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of cloud computing. The presenters told us it was Cloudy with a Chance of Awesomesauce through their presentation which can be viewed at http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=a3xnrk9pmfc_302gkd73dhf. Do the advantages of cloud computing, such as easily accessible offsite data storage and collaboration outweigh the disadvantages, such as down time when there is no internet and the possible loss of privacy? The government is advocating cloud computing and has just launched at site at https://www.apps.gov/cloud/advantage/main/start_page.do.
Jason Clark's recommendations were to let the cloud architecture do the heavy lifting, archive locally if you must and outsource conversion.
Affordable Resources on a Public Library Budget
Megan Marsh is the Adult Reference Manager at Acorn Public Library (http://www.acornlibrary.org), in Oak Forest, IL. This was her inaugural Internet Librarian Conference.
The Internet Librarian Conference struck a healthy balance between providing information about readily available (and even free!) resources and those that are but a distant glimmer to most current public library budgets. The former was ably represented by sessions highlighting recent developments in search engines.
Microsoft's Bing (http://www.bing.com) garnered positive appraisals, particularly its categorization. Presenters were also excited about perennial pet Google and its new and upcoming offerings—namely Fast Flip, Wave, and Caffeine.
Fast Flip (
http://fastflip.googlelabs.com) presents news in a horizontal format, much like a magazine; Wave (
http://wave.google.com) is an audiovisual, impressively interactive IM service; and Caffeine promises to be a more accurate and expansive version of the current search engine.
It's interesting to see both Bing and Google challenged, or at least augmented, by Wolfram-Alpha (
http://www.wolframalpha.com), which is not a merely for searching, but regards itself as a "computational knowledge engine". While Wolfram-Alpha has a rather limited vocabulary at this point, successful queries are rewarded with a concise yet thorough informational presentation replete with reputable citations. Overall, I find Wolfram-Alpha to be a useful and promising technology that eliminates the sifting often necessary with online information-seeking.
The Internet Librarian Conference featured many excellent speakers and had much to offer librarians of all stripes and interests. All of the sessions can be found here:
http://www.infotoday.com/il2009/presentations.asp.
Thanks goes to each of our guest writers for a wonderful summary of some of the sessions at the Internet Librarian 2009 Conference. Questions about this article can be emailed to the MLS Consultants at consultants@mls.lib.il.us.
Published December 2, 2009 in vol. 3, iss. 23 [View]
