Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

Social bookmarking and tagging boost participation
By Melissa L. Rethlefsen -- Library Journal, 9/15/2007

Traditional library web products, whether online public access catalogs, library databases, or even library web sites, have long been rigidly controlled and difficult to use. Patrons regularly prefer Google's simple interface. Now social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative, well-organized information and their patrons' web experience.

A very interesting and thought provoking article. Read the entire article here: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

Teaching Portfolios for Librarians

This Friday, October 19, is the deadline to register for the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) online seminar, "Teaching Portfolios for Librarians," to be offered October 29-November 16, 2007.

Teaching Portfolios for Librarians will introduce the concept and structure of teaching portfolios, which are dynamic works of selected documentation and commentary that demonstrate teaching performance. This course will lead participants in activities designed to help them compose a teaching philosophy, write a portfolio narrative, and outline a plan for supporting documentation. Participants will have the opportunity to examine the mentoring process and identify strategies for successful mentoring and explore the value and use of the teaching portfolio in academic librarianship for self-improvement and tenure/promotion.

More info (including registration) is available here: http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlproftools/portfolios.cfm

Storage: From Highway Robbery to Runaway Bargain

Interesting item from PC Magazine (2 October 2007 pg. 21) - "Back in 1956, Don Larson pitched the only World Series perfect game, Elvis broke into the music charts with "heart-break Hotel", and a 5MB IBM hard drive cost $50,000. The price of digital storage has plummeted: Now you can have a terabyte for less than $200. If car prices had followed the same curve, you could buy an SUV with pocket change."

Implications of this have been obvious to the library world - Google Book Search is possible (along with Flickr, etc.) because storage costs are a small fraction of what they once were.

Article here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2184654,00.asp

Watch Out for Online Ads That Watch You

Online ads are not only booming--and scrolling, spinning, shaking, shouting, and singing--they are also watching you even as you are viewing them, capturing your click patterns to create more detailed profiles than traditional browser cookies do.

Behavioral marketing networks such as BlueLithium, Revenue Science, and Tacoda display ads based on your browsing habits. Spending on these behavioral ads will grow from $1.5 billion in 2007 to more than $2 billion next year, according to eMarketer, a market research firm. And the company expects video ads to account for more than a third of that total.

This could be a topic for an information literacy session...

[Information in this post has been taken driectly from an article in PC World, Watch Out for Online Ads That Watch You: New Web ads respond to your activities--and this has privacy advocates worried, written by Dan Tynan, March 2007, p. 26 - Available online: Watch Out for Online Ads That Watch You

MILEY CYRUS is pregnant!

It is not as if we librarians need another reason to illustrate to students the pitfalls of the Internet, but what the heck, here is another one anyway!

It seems that someone altered an article from J14 magazine, changing the text to read that "Hannah Montana" star Miley Cyrus is pregnant. Needless to say, publicist and J14 deny the rumor. Before the denial however, the damage was done and the rumor was all over the Internet and Blogosphere. As I always point out to students, don't believe anything you see on the Web unless it is from a verifiable, reliable source.

Before passing on something contained in an email, http://www.snopes.com/snopes.asp is a great place to check to dispel the urban legend hoax.