I cannot believe it has been six weeks since we began monitoring our technology sources! Mainly, I cannot believe it because I have yet to find an updated posting to my Educause site "Seven Things You Should Know About." My first posting from that site had to do with open ended response systems - where students could immediately respond to a teacher's lecture through their mobile device. That posting is still there - and the only other post I did from this site came from their archives, on "cloud computing." But alas, or as they say "wouldn't you know" - I happened to check my RSS feed today and guess what- not one, but 2 articles!!! Apparently, this is a monthly feature, and for some reason, they have not changed the website...yet. I guess that proves the value of RSS feeds! The new article is dated March 14, but has not posted on the website yet. Now that I understand this is a monthly column, I will have to rethink my original decision to NOT keep monitoring it.
Librarian in Black was a blog which I found to be much more interesting. Although she did not have a new post every week, her posts were extremely relevant to life in a library. I am still very excited about the fact that I was the first one in our department to learn about the HarperCollins/ebook controversy because of her column. She has continued to blog about that subject, and I have enjoyed her take on the controversy. Anyway, what I also liked about LiB was that people could enter their comments and responses to her blog - and those responses gave you even more information and perspective. Last week, the LiB posted the results to the book censoring survey that was taken at the beginning of my monitoring period. The bottom line from this report is that #1: libraries are not reporting material challenges to the ALA, and #2: Of those materials withdrawn from the collection due to complaints, items were twice as likely to be removed in defiance of library guidelines. (If that's the case - why bother with guidelines? Interesting!)
This week, Sarah Houghton-Jan (the Librarian in Black) continues her theme of dissing ebook publishers by commenting on an earlier 2007 article she wrote lamenting the restrictive nature of DRM (and thanks to this class, I knew exactly what DRM was!!!!) DRM restricts the free use of the digital material - and she proposes that due to the extreme actions of HarperCollins (restricting ebook useage to 26 check-outs) the library community is finally coming together to #1 - present an ebook users bill of rights, or #2 united advocacy against DRM. According to LiB - the library community is "going Egypt on this one" - referring to the revolt by the Egyptians against their controllling dictator. Our library is taking a stand - we will be participating in a semi-boycott of Harper Collins books, when we select our titles from Overdrive and for our printed collection. I say "semi" boycott, because unfortunately, Janet Evanovich is one of their authors, and we can't boycott her books - they are too popular! ;-) I will definitely continue to monitor LiB because I think it is something that will help keep me informed of library technology and library topics.
http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/
As an alternative to the Educause/Seven Things site, I checked the ALA TechSource site. I was pretty excited to read about the 3D printers - and as a follow-up to that, I was very impressed to see them demonstrated on the Saturday morning show "Fox and Friends" a few weeks ago. A doctor brought one in and made a "plastic" ear during the show. Fascinating! It felt good to be already somewhat familiar with this technology - proving that monitoring these sites DOES educate you! This particular site intersperses blog reports on new technology, and workshops on technology offered by the ALA. Sometimes they will have summaries of the workshops in the form of Powerpoint presentations. I felt that this site was most helpful when it came to specific technology information. I hope to one day participate in a workshop as well. This is definitely a site I will continue to monitor. http://www.alatechsource.org/blog
What I appreciated about this exercise, was reading the posts from my fellow blogging students that led me to check out their sources. As a result of your posts, I enjoyed adding Glengage, Tame the Web and Gizmodo to my list of sources to monitor. I will definitely keep those on my monitoring list as well. I guess the only one I'll be terminating is Educause/Seven Things....
This was a fun and valuable assignment!
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