Links of interest : March 16th, 2012

Welcome to the first edition of “links of interest” since, um, July? Yeah. Turns out that when I swap all my work blog reading from home to work, I then totally break my workflow for writing the blog posts at home. I think I now have a solution to that, involving dumping everything into Instapaper and sorting it out from there.

I am not even going to try collecting all the awesome links from the past seven months, but here’s a range of ones currently intriguing me.

Presentations from LibTech conference:
(there are tons of these, but these are ones I’m particularly interested in that came up before I go wandering through the presentation notes files)

• Ways to use Prezi beyond the basic presentation tools
• Ways to make your library website not stink.
• Horizon Project Navigator – collection of curated articles about technology (with particular focus on education and museum implications, as well as libraries) discussed by one of our keynote speakers, Larry Johnson.

Search and information gathering tools
(also mentioned at LibTech) – I have not tested all of these, but they have interesting stuff going on with them.

• Kurrently – real-time search for Facebook and Twitter.
• ifttt : automatic task management (i.e. star something in Gmail, send it to Evernote. Need to dig into this more.)
• SmallDemons : lets you dig into the people, places, stuff (music, art, etc.) mentioned in a book. (For books they’ve applied their algorithms too, naturally, but a really cool concept.)
• BookLamp – the book genome project that looks at relationships between books (i.e. “if you liked X, you might like Y” stuff)
• sqworl – lets you do a visual bookmark of multiple links.
• twitterfeed – lets you send your blog posts to Twitter, Facebook, and more.
• hootsuite – social media dashboard.
• spiceworks – free networking monitoring tool (including some useful data combos.)

Assorted news :

• Encyclopedia Britannica ceasing print after 244 years. (What’s really interesting are some of the stats in the article – like the fact only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition sold. Which is, to put this in proportion, 2 sets for each of the 4,000 contributors.)
• Brian talks about Freading, an ebook equivalent to Freegal for ebooks (basic difference from Overdrive: you get access to all the books they offer – about 15,000 right now – and pay for the access you actually use. (He’s pretty detailed about the costs, his library’s stats, and other useful info, too.)

Resources:

• Association of Research Libraries code for fair use in academic and research libraries. (Or, rather, more info about what’s in the publication.)
• Choose Privacy week resources and info.
• An Ask.Metafilter discussion on online-based room reservation services for libraries.

Explanations:

• Payment Wars : Infographic about mobile payments and digital wallets.
• Right versus Pragmatic : look at service design using a public bathroom as an example – what do people do vs. what do you think they should do.
• How do we explain privacy in a world of target markets? (Related to something I’m talking about later this weekend in a somewhat different context, too. Handy, that!)
• Human-centered librarianship (thinky stuff!)
• Quitting Facebook, how many friends are too many, and some new ways to think about the question.
• The “getting rid of outdated books” problem.
• Learning about what people need to hear in doing outreach (bonus astronomy awesomeness!)
• Why “Try it and see what happens” is not always the useful choice.
• Some really interesting thoughts on books in libraries (with numbers to back it up.)
• Jenica on doing good presentations.
• The real issues with academic journal access are not the ones the Atlantic Monthly thinks they are.
• Libraries as collision spaces.
• Seven deadly sins of academia.
• Study: people using pseudonyms leave better comments.
• Power library users and what they use (with some interesting survey results)
• The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge – book referenced in a workshop on getting out of silos of who does what, and developing an organizational culture that encourages sharing.

Just plain fun:

• Nine lost treasures and why science wants them back.
• 10 lost voyages, and some speculation (because history is awesome.)