On Friday I was lucky enough to speak about information shifting at the annual Polaris Users Group meeting. Great group of people, and I learned a lot about GIS Information Systems. For example, I didn't realize they were positioning Polaris the catalog to be the infrastructure for a library's site (actually, a portal). A. Paula Wilson and Vicki Terbovich from the Maricopa County Library District talked about the philosophical change between a catalog-based portal and a traditional library web site. Interesting stuff, and I encouraged Vicki to start blogging about this (among other things).

The GIS folks were great, too. I met Anita Wagner and Bill Schickling, both of whom totally get it, as do their staff (at least the ones I met). I have high hopes that they will be the first ILS vendor to blog and provide RSS out of the catalog (despite my rabid desire for my System's vendor, Innovative, to take that title). And I owe Kathleen Cerminaro big time for keeping me on track and making the arrangements that made my trip so enjoyable.

One other thing I wanted to note to the group was that you don't have to spend thousands of dollars to get started with virtual reference. AIM accounts are free, and some libraries are successful using them, despite also investing in full-fledged VR software.

Other cool things that happened during my time there:

• When I checked in to the Wyndham and settled in, I couldn't find an ethernet port anywhere. I began to despair that they had not yet implemented high-speed internet access, but when I called the front desk, they told me it was wireless. Score! Very easy to get on the network, too.
   
• After my presentation, fellow Treo user Ted came up and beamed his "business card" to me. I think that's the first time that has happened to me at a library-related event!
   
• At the vendor fair, I met Emmett F. Erwin, Preseident and CEO of Bibliotheca, who gave me the rundown on their latest RFID tags for CDs and DVDs (picture). He's convinced me, and he told me that the BiblioBus will be at the ILA Conference in a couple of weeks and could stop by our office if we'd like.
   
• I met Mary Hedrick from the Harrison Regional Library System in Alabama. She has some great stories to tell about virtual reference, which I truly hope she will blog. She told me that her System has just three full-time reference librarians with MLS degrees and that some of their buildings are run by just one person. They've implemented Ask Us, a virtual reference service, that has increased exponentially the number of residents to whom they can provide reference service. VR isn't always the best tool, but sometimes it really helps.
  
  Oh, and Mary has a book on a shelf in a library entered as a GeoCache. How cool is that??

And for the PUG attendees, the presentation will be available at http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/PUG/infoshifting.pdf sometime on Monday. Thanks for a great experience!

The Cass County Public Library has a gorgeous georgeous web site, which I would highlight even if the home page wasn't a blog. It really shows how much you can edit blog templates to make them look however you want (in this case, they're WordPress templates), so this one is definitely going in my presentations.

By the way, I keep forgetting to mention that we've opened up the third round of enrollment for ListenIllinois. If you're at an Illinois library and you're interested in joining this wonderful group purchase of audio ebooks, please feel free to contact me. Agreements are due back to MLS by October 1.

Watchcow.net

"You want to keep an eye on your Amazon.com wishlist or a particular Amazon.com/de/co.uk item, want to be informed whether and how much the price has been changed, but don't have the time?

Watchcow.net to the rescue! This simple and handy service allows you to passively watch single Amazon products and entire wishlists in your newsreader, such as Bloglines (web), NetNewsWire (Mac), NewsFire (Mac) or FeedDaemon (Windows), just to name a few. It works with every newsreader/-aggregator that supports ATOM feeds. Which, incidently, means pretty much all of them."

Another great service from Carlo Zottmann!

Mobile Learning Attracts High School Students

"Starting this month, high school students preparing for the college entrance exam will be able to use personal gadgets to study instead of textbooks on the bus or subway....

The mobility-specific educational services will start on Sept. 22, when Iriver, the sales unit of local MP3 maker ReignCom, releases the PMP-100 in stores.

Koreaedu will offer lessons from 12 top lecturers for the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), and students can download them free of charge with a PMP-100....

The gadget is an all-in-one handheld device, which allows users to view full-motion video, listen to MP3 music, record voice messages in real time, view still images and play games.

'With our new services, students will be able to study via seamless video lectures. Afterwards, we plan to continue to make reaches in the m-learning market,' Koreaedu president Yoo Doo-sun said." [The Korea Times, via Smart Mobs]