Last week, I high­lighted Ed Vielmetti’s thoughts about adding cov­ers to the list of over­due books you have checked out, as well as the abil­ity to text the loca­tion of an item to your cell phone. Both of these are enhance­ments that I, as Patron 2.0, would very much appre­ci­ate my library providing.

In the com­ments on that post, Jason from the Iowa City Pub­lic Library gave us a work­ing exam­ple (work­ing in an Inno­v­a­tive cat­a­log, at least). I tried it out and sure enough, a few sec­onds after enter­ing my cell phone num­ber, up popped a text mes­sage with the loca­tion of the item.Very slick, and very useful.

Even bet­ter, Ed came back into the com­ments on that post and pointed at the script that runs this ser­vice. It was orig­i­nally writ­ten by Adam from Bryn Mawr more than a year ago, where it’s still in place today. Not only is it freely avail­able online, but there are very clear direc­tions for send­ing SMS from a III cat­a­log (thanks, Adam!).

If you have a pro­gram­mer on staff or some­one who knows just enough to be dan­ger­ous, now you, too, can imple­ment this ser­vice at no cost to your library to make your cat­a­log that much more useful.

2ndliferead.jpg

Orig­i­nally uploaded by ash966

Another great READ mini poster!

more graph humor and song chart memes

Using Wor­dle in Schools

“The idea of cre­at­ing Tag clouds is not new or unique but the Wor­dle appli­ca­tion offers those in schools with a uniquely visual way to view and/or analyse some text. It is very sim­ple to use and the results are cre­ated quickly. The style can be changed eas­ily, if required, and eas­ily saved.…

We used this aspect in the library this week when we made a Wor­dle using a num­ber of lists of banned books. The authors, the titles and types of books were entered into the text box. Over­whelm­ingly the word ‘novel’ stood out. A sec­ond Wor­dle on banned authors had William Shake­speare and George Orwell as the stand­outs. This could form part of a greater dis­cus­sion about the rea­son for this and we intend to give the issues of banned books and cen­sor­ship a wider focus at a later date, per­haps as part of Social Jus­tice Week, run at our school each year.

We are also using Wor­dles as the basis for one of the com­pe­ti­tions for Book Week. We cre­ated Wor­dles of syn­opses of var­i­ous well known books (tak­ing out any ref­er­ences too unique to the book) and printed out copies. One of the library staff mem­bers had fun play­ing with the colours and for­mats. We did one for ‘Bryan Strauchan: my story’ and made it black and white. (Bryan Strauchan is a fic­tional char­ac­ter who plays for a foot­ball team that hap­pens to have team colours of black and white.) Another book involv­ing ani­mals was done mak­ing the Wor­dle resem­ble tiger stripes. The Wor­dles look great lam­i­nated and I will also be putting up dig­i­tal ver­sions on the library web­site.” [Rhondda’s Reflec­tions — Wan­der­ing around the Web]

Win $100 of Games!

“Out of the Box is giv­ing $100 worth of games to who­ever posts the best story about using games in edu­ca­tion! The dead­line is 8/31/2008. What are you wait­ing for? Go Post!” ]

This offer includes libraries, and I know we have some great sto­ries about using games in edu­ca­tional ways!

Out of the Box pub­lishes a whole slew of boardgames (includ­ing Snorta, which I really want to try), but they also dis­trib­ute one of my all-time favorites, Apples to Apples. Did you know that you can make your own A2A cards using a spe­cial pack of blank cards you can buy for $5.99? For the trial run of National Gam­ing Day @ your library on April 18, we did some staff gam­ing at ALA, some­thing we’ll prob­a­bly do again lead­ing up to the offi­cial NGD on Novem­ber 15. I’m think­ing of cus­tomiz­ing A2A with a few…carefully-chosen cards about ALA. If you play this game at your library, this could be a fun way to tai­lor the game to your community.

If you’ve never played this great game (good for kids, adults, fam­i­lies, and any com­bi­na­tion thereof), you can watch a demo of how it’s played. Much laugh­ter is guaranteed.

As always, Ed Viel­metti is think­ing about how to make the library’s data work harder for him, with or with­out the library’s help. (Of course, Ed’s library is the phe­nom­e­nal Ann Arbor Dis­trict Library, which already offers more web-based ser­vices than most other libraries, but the sim­ple open­ness of their sys­tems makes it easy for a super­pa­tron like Ed to extend these ser­vices even fur­ther on his own.)

So when Ed couldn’t find some over­due library books in the house, he started won­der­ing aloud how the library’s ser­vices could help him out. Now we just need to think like Ed, too.

Now Where Did I Put that Book?

“All of the library books I have are tagged with RFID chips, which is used for inven­tory con­trol. That should mean that I can use some­thing like this 3M RFID loca­tor device as a reader and scan­ner to locate a lost item.”

Wall of Books Revis­ited: Just What Do I Have Checked Out?

“No, I still haven’t found my over­due books, but at least now I know what they look like.

The AADL prints a help­ful list of the books you have checked out, but doesn’t give you pic­tures of them (not yet at least). So I’m work­ing on the Grease­mon­key script that will insert cover images into that page. This is not that, but a step along the way.”

What I’m really wait­ing for, though, is Ed’s Grease­mon­key script that adds “text me the loca­tion of this item” to a library cat­a­log viewed in Fire­fox. I don’t think I’ll be able to use it for my home library’s cat­a­log, but I’ll hold out hope it can be adapted.

Text Me the Loca­tion of this Book — Step One of a Grease­mon­key Plu­gin for the AADL

“At the time I noted “how hard could it be to add this to my own library with Grease­mon­key” or some sim­i­lar off the cuff remark (oh how fool­ish I can be some times). So let’s pick that apart and see how I’d do this at the AADL.”

Just a quick note that the pre­lim­i­nary pro­gram for the 2008 ALA Tech­Source Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium is now avail­able online. I’m excited about the pro­gram, because I think we’ve got some great tracks and ses­sions that will be valu­able for any­one try­ing to imple­ment gam­ing in their library or look­ing for ways to expand or enhance an exist­ing pro­gram. Like last year, we’re going to push the bound­aries of the con­no­ta­tions for “gam­ing” in libraries, in addi­tion to answer­ing your prac­ti­cal, “in the trenches” ques­tions (legal issues, acces­si­bil­ity, cat­a­loging, etc.).

Our keynote speak­ers con­tinue last year’s tra­di­tion of address­ing games & learn­ing while also help­ing to make sense of today’s hot topics.

• Andrew Bub, writer, par­ent, and Gamer­Dad, will explain how to help par­ents and play­ers find the right games for them.
• Jon-Paul Dyson, Vice Pres­i­dent for Exhibit Research and Devel­op­ment and Asso­ciate Cura­tor at the Strong National Museum of Play, will explain the impor­tance of play, not just for learn­ers but for librar­i­ans as well.
• Dr. Lawrence Kut­ner, co-author of the book Grand Theft Child­hood: The Sur­pris­ing Truth about Vio­lent Video Games, will detail his research about vio­lence and videogames.
• Marc Pren­sky, whose most recent book is titled Don’t Bother Me Mom, I’m Learn­ing, will explore Mil­len­nial learn­ing styles and gaming.

Fan favorites Chris Har­ris, Scott Nichol­son, and Eli Neiburger will be back, too. Scott will give us a cen­sus update on the num­ber of libraries offer­ing gam­ing, while Eli will explain how to fos­ter Civic Engage­ment through Gam­ing and give us a Poke­mon Primer so that we can at least talk the talk with the play­ers in our communities.

Brian Mayer will be join­ing us this year and with Chris and Scott, he’ll help us under­stand how mod­ern boardgames are dif­fer­ent than the ones we grew up with. Chris and Brian will also dis­cuss their align­ment of the AASL Stan­dards for the 21st Cen­tury Learner with boardgames and how librar­i­ans can use them to meet stu­dent learn­ing needs. Plus, Paul Waelchli will present ideas for incor­po­rat­ing videogame strate­gies into ref­er­ence and instruc­tion ser­vices to inter­act with stu­dents in a more engag­ing way.

And that’s just the start — three days of ses­sions, open gam­ing (both boardgames and videogames), dine-arounds with experts, and all of the fun and learn­ing you can han­dle. Atten­dance is lim­ited to 350 peo­ple, so reg­is­ter now. I hope to see you there!