Librarian Way

If you want to keep up with what is happening in libraries as they move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 / Library 2.0, Michael Casey’s LibraryCrunch blog should be added to your RSS aggregator.

Speaking of Library 2.0, Michael Stephens has a readable overview of what it is on ALA Techsource: Do Libraries Matter: On Library & Librarian 2.0.

There is a lot of great stuff over on the MassonBisson.com Web site. I am putting this link here so that I don’t forget about it. He has provided a number of links to papers and tutorials for Using XML in PHP5, which I may need in my current project.

I am currently enrolled in two classes in SJSU SLIS. One is a special projects class where I am doing back-end PHP coding for the redesign of the SLIS Web site. Having studied XML/XSLT, I am going to investigate if the PHP/XML option will be better for something that I need to do, rather than getting involved in setting up a MySQL database for something very lightweight.

I went to Casey Bisson’s blog because I am writing a paper about Web 2.0, and I wanted to clarify something I remember him writing about creating a search in Lamson Library using A9.com. I found what I was looking for in his NEASIS&T presentation posted on one of his blogs at NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build Followup.

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