Librarian Way

Knowledge@Wharton has a couple of articles this past week that I find interesting: What’s the Next Big Thing on the Web? It May Be a Small, Simple Thing — Microformats and Podcasting: Can This New Medium Make Money?

The Next Big Thing article is part of a special section titled “Supernova 2005: It’s a Whole New, Connected World.” Wharton, of course, approaches topics from how it relates to business, which is not always relevant to a library. This article interviews Tantek Çelik, senior technologist at Technorati, about microformats. It is about making it easier to share and it is about social networking. The emphasis is on people, rather than the technology, but it is technology that makes it easier to network on the Web. As an example, Çelik says,

For the microformats for people and events, we said, “Let’s look at vCard and iCalendar. And let’s create a one-to-one correspondence in XHTML.”

We’re literally reusing vCard and iCalendar for two of the microformats. Now when all these event and venue sites publish their event information, people have already built open source software, plug-ins, that let you subscribe to that data that’s in [the] hCalendar [microformat], automatically converts it to iCalendar, and loads it into your calendaring program.

I am sure this will be important to the techies in the library world.

The Podcasting article gives a non-technical explanation of podcasting and discusses the business side of podcasting and whether it is a viable business venture.

The market for podcasts is growing quickly. A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than six million people out of the 22 million who own iPods or MP3 players have listened to a podcast.

There appears to be a general agreement with comments made by Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of information technology at Wharton, who suggests that podcasting is useful and viable in niche markets:

podcasting in many ways is the audio version of weblogs, or blogs — online diaries that allow any amateur to report stories and give his or her opinion to a wide audience. …Add it up and broadcasting is quickly turning into “narrowcasting,” or producing audio and video to reach niches, such as 5,000 surfers in southern California.

Further Research
What are microformats Microformat.org
Museum of Broadcast Communications on Narrowcasting

While researching references in an article on Social Security for my government documents class, I discovered that AARP has a blog on Social Security: AARP Social Security Blog.

I also came across their 48-page PDF file of acronyms of government agencies and laws that are related to aging issues, Acronyms in Aging: Organizations, Agencies, Programs, and Laws, which is very useful.

[Thanks to Law Librarian Blog for the AARP blog tip.]

I spent Saturday attending a workshiop given by the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University at Fullerton. It was titled Protecting and sharing the legacy: Documentary films and photos.

It was two workshops—see COPH Workshop—that complimented each other. In the morning seesion, Sandra Membrila-Robbie showed us her Emmy award-winning documentary film titled Mendez vs. Westminster: For all the children/para todos los ninos. Robbie discussed the details in going from idea to completed work, including tips about making a better documentary. She is a dynamic speaker who exhibits great passion for her subject, and she has a fascinating story to tell about the a period of California school desegregation that happened seven years before Brown vs. Board of Education. She would like to see her documentary shown to fourth graders in California, which is when American history is taught.

In the afternoon, Yolanda Morelos Alvarez gave a presentation and explained the details of putting together a traveling exhibition of historical photographs. Her subject was her exhibit Fire in the Morning, which is a pictorial documentary with typed stories of Mexican Americans in Orange County from 1910 through the late 1940s. She is taping interviews with Mexican Americans who lived in Orange County in that period. She stressed that it is best to do background reading about the history before interviewing, so that you know what kind of questions to ask to trigger memories.

Both talked a little about copyright and getting permissions. Both are running against time because people who were involved in the incidents or period of time that they cover are quite old. Alvarez mentioned that when the old Mexican neighborhoods are torn down, whole bits of history disappear, as the people are gone and hard to trace and their photographic collections may be scattered or lost.

Contacts:
The Orange County Metro did an article about Robbie: OC Metro’s hot 25. Robbie is starting work on a sequel that gives some of the harder facts that cannot be put before fourth grade children. Sandra Robbie wrote an article for LatinoLA, which gives a synopsis of the documentary. She can be reached at srobbie@koce.org.