A great little short video from Maya Design about the future of computing and information…in short, things are scaling up fast in terms of how many computers we’ll see, what shapes and forms they’ll take, and how much information they’ll process.  Think trillions.

A nice piece by Mashable.com suggesting 15 great Twitter follows–people Twittering about the future of publishing, on-demand and digital forays, etc.

I just visited yesterday with the great librarians at Ziba Design, which opened in a new location about two months ago here in Portland. Ziba does great design work–industrial design, architecture, web design, etc–and their collection is made up of books, magazines, and also a materials lab. Their space is small (but appropriate for the size of their company), and they use LibraryThing as a catalog. Since they don’t check books in and out, I think they use LT primarily to keep track of what’s in their collection. It’s an interesting model (and reminds me I need to fire up LT again sometime to take a second look.)

The UO Portland Library and Learning Commons is on Facebook!  Become a fan and learn about our Flip video cameras, architectural blueprints, new DVDs, and Thanksgiving plans.

Now that fall’s in full swing, I’m teaching and doing reference as much as I’m, well, administering.  (What is the word for that–the endless work of emails, meetings, phone calls, and hallway conversations that makes an institution run?)  It’s a pleasure to be answering reference questions again, and it made me realize that I’ve let my reference question blog lapse.  I hereby offer some of the questions I’ve fielded recently, in the spirit of Bibliophagus, the much-loved, but now-largely-defunct reference question blog…

• Where can I find a building outline map of an address in San Francisco?
• Where can I find books on photography–not technical manuals, but books on theory and artistic approach–composition, ways of seeing, etc.?
• Where can I find articles on best practices for fundraising in nonprofits?
• Where can I find a general overview of the state of the conversation about political communication?
• Where can I find scholarly articles about crisis management and public relations?
• Where can I find scholarly articles about the differences between political campaigns and ballot measure campaigns?
• I want to use Zotero, but it’s not logging me in/not recognizing my username/not synching to the server/not working at all.  Help!
• I want to use Zotero Groups with my class, but I don’t know how it works.  Help!

I remember when I was in library school, examples of real-life reference questions were hard to come by and always fascinating.  I hope these pique the interest of some students or colleagues out there.  At least they’re more interesting than most of the emails I send.

Thanks to today’s ELI webinar, a couple of very cool new digital instruction projects at Cornell University…

Copyright in the Digital Age
This is a class page using customized WordPress MU; notice that it pulls in posts by students for other students to comment on, and even vote on.  Student writing actually becomes publication, right off the bat.  Very cool use of WordPress MU.

Intypes
A community-built database of interior design themes, strategies, and practices, illustrated by images and indexed by folksonomy.  With citations!  I love this and can imagine many, many more applications for the overall template.

I haven’t used Captivate in a while, though I’d love to get back to tutorial creation sometime in the future.  In the meantime, the Literatures in English Section of ACRL has posted a great new Tech Tip to its blog, titled “Captivate Your Audience:  Tech Tips for Adobe Captivate.”

Wow.  I’m not sure how we got to this pass (but I’ve been on a beach for the last week.)  If Pennsylvania’s state legislature doesn’t pass a budget soon, all Philadelphia Free Libraries will close.

They’ll close the buildings, stop all the programs, take back all the books–you get the idea.  Closed.  Finished.  Kaput.

These libraries made it through the Great Depression and through two World Wars.  And we’re going to close them now because the state legislature can’t pass a budget?

You can contact Philadelphia state legislators here, and ask them kindly to get off the stick.

And for more information:

The Free Library of Philadelphia was established in 1891, with the first branch opened in 1894.  There are 54 Free Library locations in the city. Read the Wikipedia article here, or the Philadelphia Free Libraries FAQ here.

This just out:  Google releases a new media-friendly newsreader tool called Google Fast Flip.  According to an article in the New York Times, Fast Flip is supposed to draw more readers to online news sites by making those sites faster to load and easier to page through, more like flipping through a newspaper or magazine than surfing the Web.  According to Google, this is what people want from a news-reading experience–and I’m pretty sure they’re right.  Or at least, I’m sure that slow-loading pages are a big turnoff for all Web users, and anything we can do to eliminate them is a step in the right direction.

The Google Fast Flip page looks like a visual mosaic of pages taken from electronic news sources:  the analogy that leaps immediately to mind is a newsstand.  It looks appealing, rich, user-friendly.  Imagine if we presented our libraries’ home pages sort of like this.  Imagine that users could configure a portal that gave them a landing page showcasing thumbnails of half a dozen “favorites” pages that they picked, or that were offered to them by default, either one-size-fits-all or by automatically offering up the pages they visit most within the site.  Or imagine if we just offered an alternative entry point, a side door, that showcased some of our pages and resources like this.  Or…imagine if we just offered this as a custom-build service:  we’ll make a page for you or your class that showcases useful research resources, blogs, websites, and other stuff you want to keep track of in one place.  Including, maybe Google Fast Flip.

Could be pretty neat…

Google Fast Flip Screen Capture

It’s been a busy summer, and I’ve thought many times that I need to pick this blog up again, but so far it hasn’t happened.  I’m not home-free yet (I’ll be out of the office for a week in a few days), but there’s no time like the present.  There’s just too much going on in the blogosphere not to pitch in.  But I’m starting off slow, with just a few link pointers and notes-to-self…

To read:

• The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

To write:

• A chapter for the forthcoming Best Practices for Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Courses, with co-teacher, co-author, and co-lleague Annie Zeidman-Karpinski

To ponder:

• The future of e-book devices.  I was just talking about libraries’ approaches to Kindles and e-readers with my wife the other day, and now here’s OverDrive working out an book loan plan for Sony e-readers.  Interesting to mentally match this up with open-access textbook projects…