Library Sandbox

The Golden Compass (movie version) is due out in December, and I love their viral marketing campaign. Take a quiz and get an daemon (a daemon is your soul in external form). Then you ask your friends to comment on whether it suits your personality. It makes me wonder what sorts of widgets (for blogs, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) libraries are creating.

My daemon is an ocelot apparently. This explains so much, and yet so little. If you click below, you can take a quiz about my personality. And if everyone disagrees with my self-assessment, I think my daemon changes into something else. So be nice. This is my soul your messin’ with. If I turn into a cockroach you’ll find me in your cereal someday.

A neat article about the Evergreen ILS recently appeared at Linux.com. Evergreen is an open source ILS developed by the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) for use in large library systems and consortia. Koha is another open source ILS intended for smaller systems. Key graphs:

According to Walker, the financial savings from Evergreen come on a number of levels….According to a study that PINES conducted in 2002, Walker says that if all of their libraries would have to buy a new system, it would cost more than $15 million dollars, plus about $5 million dollars a year for maintenance. They run PINES for a lean $1.6 million a year.

LaJeunesse says that they are presently in discussions with other institutions about development partnerships; and while GPLS is the only institution currently using Evergreen as their production system, he suggests that will change very soon: “Ask again in a month,” he says with a smile.

I’m writing this post using Windows Live Writer, and I’m impressed.  If you’ve used Performancing or Deep Sender to create and edit your blog posts, you have a sense of what WLW is.  It’s basically a blogging editor.  In essence, you link it to your favorite blogging tool and your favorite browser. Then you select some text on a web page, right click and select “Blog This”.  Up pops WLW with your text already blockquoted.  You type in your comments, click publish and it shows up on your blog.  It basically saves you the trouble of logging into WordPress and having to copy and paste between your blog and the website you’re looking at. 

It’s also fairly easy to write plugins for this, and there are already dozens available at http://wlwplugins.com/ (go here to get the Firefox extension).  WLW also gives you spell check, integration with your categories, and a preview feature that lets you see what your post will look like when it’s live.  Paul Stamatiou has a longer review.

Two drawbacks that I’ve noticed.  Can I split a post using WLW?  Or write an excerpt?  Maybe there are plugins that handle these things, but I didn’t notice anything on the plugins site.  Btw, has anyone used Ecto?  It’s another desktop blogging tool, and I’m wondering how it stacks up.

Wow. Thinking about a mission statement really sucks the fun out of any new project, but I figure as a courtesy to my hypothetical public I should explain why I’m starting this website.

• To improve my understanding of blogs, wikis, other web 2.0 technologies in preparation for a class I’m teaching next month, and in preparation for the next thirty years or so of life in the library and technology professions.
• To improve my writing skills.
• To improve my thinking by writing more often.
• To improve my writing, thinking and understanding by exposing my ideas and observations to the critical stare of the masses.

technorati tags:mission, goals