So You're Going To Start A Huge New Web Project
I was asked this past week to consult for a company embarking on a huge new website redesign. I thought I'd write up some thoughts that I would share with anyone in that position. You cannot neglect mobile. Look at any graph of mobile usage and it will tell the tale for you. Millions of mobile devices enter the world every day. You'll need to decide if you are going to build a mobile-specific site or not. Mobile is a whole different world. Can you handle all of that in a single site? Your CMS needs to be in good shape. You should be able to ask your CMS for anything you want and get it. Need a guide? Karen says in her talks there are companies that will go out of business because they are so bogged down by their CMS and can't accomodate mobile and the future of content delivery. You need a plan for your CSS. You have options for just about every other technology you choose for a project, but you always need to use CSS. Need a guide? Code clean. You should be preprocessing your CSS.
Mobile Connections to Libraries
Released: December 31, 2012 By Lee Rainie, Kathryn Zickuhr and Maeve Duggan Some 13% of those ages 16 and older have visited library websites or otherwise accessed library services by mobile device. This is the first reading in a national survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project on this subject. An earlier survey in 2009 by scholars at the University of Washington found that 6% of Americans ages 16 and older had used a mobile device to connect to a library site, so the incidence of this activity has doubled since then. Those who are most likely to have connected to a library site include parents of minor children, women, and those with at least some college education. Library website users In all, the Pew Internet Project survey finds that 39% of Americans ages 16 and older have gone to a library website at one time or another and, of them, 64% visited a library site in the previous 12 months. Prev Next
Library Lab | Office for Scholarly Communication
About the Library Lab Harvard Library has established the Harvard Library Lab in order to create better services for students and faculty and to join with others in fashioning the information society of the future. By offering infrastructure and financial support for new enterprises, the Lab offers opportunities for individuals to innovate, cooperate across projects, and make original contributions to the way libraries work. The Lab leverages the entrepreneurial aspirations of people throughout the library system and beyond and promotes projects in all areas of library activity. Proposals from faculty and students anywhere in the university are welcome and the Lab encourages collaboration with MIT. Harvard Library Lab Description & Guidelines Harvard Library Lab Application Requirements Review Committee Members The project review committee includes faculty and staff from the Harvard Library, Law Library, Medical Library, Business Library and FAS:
Download Calibre Portable
The calibre portable build can be run on any windows computer running at least Windows XP SP3. It is self contained, your calibre libraries and settings are all kept together in one place. To use, just run the portable installer and select the location where you would like the "Calibre Portable" folder. To launch calibre, double click the "calibre-portable.exe" program inside the Calibre Portable folder. While you wait for the download to complete, please consider contributing to support the development of calibre. Previous releases of calibre are available here. Upgrading If you want to upgrade a previous version of calibre portable, download the latest version of the installer from here and run it, choosing the location of your previous Calibre Portable install. Precaution Portable media can occasionally fail so you should make periodic backups of you Calibre library. Automated install calibre-portable-installer.exe "C:\Calibre Portable"
A universal digital library is within reach
Since 2002, at first in secret and later with great fanfare, Google has been working to create a digital collection of all the world's books, a library that it hopes will last forever and make knowledge far more universally accessible. But from the beginning, there has been an obstacle even more daunting than the project's many technical challenges: copyright law. Ideally, a digital library would provide access not only to books free from copyright constraints (those published before 1923), but also to the tens of millions of books that are still in copyright but no longer in print. Copyright law makes it risky to digitize these books without permission from copyright owners, and clearing the rights can be prohibitively expensive (costing on average, according to estimates, about $1,000 per book). But the dream of a universal digital library lives on. A broad consensus already exists to remove copyright obstacles to orphan works. The U.S.
Future U: Library 3.0 has more resources, greater challenges
Libraries are changing, despite their facades. And they're changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren't defunded out of existence. For ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, the library is changing too fast. For kids, it's not changing fast enough. One popular image of the library of the future comes from the cartoon Futurama. In many ways, the library of today looks much the same as the library of yesteryear. Transition is underway: from a place where you go to get information to a place you go to create; and from a place you go to create to a service you use. From kids to adults Sarah Houghton, the director of the San Rafael Public Library in California and the blogger behind Librarian in Black, said the little kids who come into her library expect three things. “Every screen is a touchscreen,” she told Ars, “and when it’s not they get confused as hell. From books to tools Green agrees.
