Handheld Librarian Conference II - Highlights

I attended a few sessions of Handheld Librarian Conference II, that took place earlier this month: Feb 17-18, 2010.


Overall the quality of sessions were okay - not nearly as impressive as I had expected from the topic of mobile technologies - the exception of course being the presentation by NCSU Libraries' David Woodbury, Markus Wust and Jason Casden - which was awesome! Here are my takeaways from the experience:

1) The mobile trend asks the question: what is/should/could be the interface between the physical or 'real' world and our virtual or online activities and environments (and in our work, Libraries)? QR codes seem to be an important part of trying to address this question. (see 7 Things you should know about QR Codes from Educause: PDF)

2) The notion or idea of "engineering serendipity" from Damon Horowitz of Aardvark (see YouTube video here.) Interesting to think about how this does/n't fit with the work of Libraries.

3) There are different approaches to mobile development, from creating mobile sized web pages from using plug-ins or widgets that convert web pages into mobile versions to building mobile pages using a framework for development. Decisions may be affected by how much IT or programming and development skills staff have, and related to that, the size of the organization.

4) My delicious bookmarks on "mobile" got some new entries.

5) Getting staff together from different departments to web conference together can lead to informative and thoughtful discussions.

All sessions have been archived and should be available for the next 6 months or so for NCSU Libraries staff (see David Woodbury's email this week for the password) : http://www.handheldlibrarian.org/schedule2010/

Pipes and Current Awareness

Many journal publishers now make RSS feeds available from their websites. These feeds are made available in slightly different ways across publishers. Here are a few examples:

Informaworld provides feeds for subject clusters of titles, such as "Business & Management" and "Economics".

Sage offers pre-set clusters at the title level for "current issue", "recent issues", "most frequently read articles" and "most frequently cited articles".

Emerald offers Table of Content feeds for some of their titles, and a general feed of recent publications across all titles.

Tools like Pipes can be used to 'rewire the web' and customize the aggregated output of content published online, from blogs to journals. A basic example of how you can do this is to "create a pipe" to "fetch feeds" and then "filter" them for the presence or absence of keywords, and "output" matching citations to either the Pipes display page or your preferred rss feed reader, or embed it in your own site.

You can also share, copy and adapt pipes that other people may have created. You can search for pipes because they have been tagged - e.g. at time of writing 13 pipes have been tagged with "academic" and "libraries".

fyi, I'll be taking a closer look at this at NCSULA's Cool Tools in March.