Links – September 24th, 2010

More than a few days late – the combination of helping run a community event all weekend and then doing the preparation for a phone interview today left me with limited time on Friday. But I don’t want to wait until next Friday, since some of this week’s great links are about Banned Books Week, which runs this week.

Access to resources: Banned Books week is meant to highlight books (and other materials) challenged in or removed from libraries – but it’s also meant to highlight other issues. Jessamyn has her yearly great round up of posts and notes. And this year, The Office of Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association is blogging daily – there are great links to videos, discussions, and other detailed thoughts.

And one other issue of access: there’s been a huge conversation in the online library world the past week or so about libraries using Netflix to provide occasional access to materials (the kind of thing a teacher needs only once, or only every couple of years, as opposed to more regularly used materials, often.) Jessamyn, as always, writes a really great roundup with links to the major conversations.

A public library’s also taken an interesting (and less common) take on dealing with stolen materials (in this case, games). Tame The Web has a good writeup and video. I like the way it highlights the consequences without shaming too much.

Finding great books to read: A recent discussion on the PubLib email list asked for alternatives to the NoveList database to help patrons find books to read. The sites suggested include:

• Sites for Mystery Readers from a Booklist article.
• FictionDB (free registration)
• Fantastic Fiction (a UK site with a lot of fans on PubLib)
• LibraryThing’s book suggester
• Stop, You’re Killing Me (mysteries)
• The Fiction-L archived lists (which let you find lists on all manner of things.)
• EarlyWord, which describes itself as the publisher/librarian connection.
• GoodReads
• Overbooked (which says “Overbooked is a website for ravenous and omnivorous readers.” I’m so there.)

Great design: Following a tip from the PresentationZen site, I found the Before and After quick videos from their design magazine. A number of them are really useful for libraries and library programs. Check out How to Design a Logo Fast, and The Visual Oxymoron. You can check out the others on the video page. (Both of these are reasonably well captioned.)

Related, PresentationZen posted a list of the top ten presentation books. I just finished reading Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun, and am thinking about how those techniques apply to library and education work (in lots of ways, though we don’t always have the fun and useful tech tools to help things look seamless.)

Social networking scenarios: Doug Johnson has followed up his great post asking for suggestions with another pulling out a list of situations from Carl Anderson. Both are great things to be thinking about in offering education around social networking skills.

Other moments of fun and of interest:

• I stumbled across Life in Elizabethan England while wandering around the web looking at recipes, and was delighted by the depth and range of information they share (a lot of it very much on the practical side about how daily life actually worked.)
• This circulated a year or two ago, but it came up again, and I still love it: the University of Bergen did an amazing YouTube video about avoiding plagiarism. Subtitled in English, sung in Norwegian. Enormously high production values for a video of this kind.
• A great roundup of online bookmarking tools. (I’ve been feeling frustrated by the Yahoo login for Delicious, as for various reasons, I usually prefer to stay logged into my Yahoo personal account, and my professional Delicious account, so I was glad to browse for alternatives.)
• An interesting explanation of why a website might not be working – especially large, database driven sites. And why adding new features is not just “Let’s add everything anyone wants!”