Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The book goes live

   "Google this: Putting Google and other social media sites to work for your library" has gone from being a concept to being a real book that is sitting on my desk right now. Along the way I got to talk with librarians from the Library of Congress, New York Public, Harvard and the British Library. Most exciting, I was invited to the Googleplex for a day of talking with project managers. Later that day, we got to drive south and visit YouTube headquarters to interview a manager of educational projects. The seven months of writing went very quickly, followed by months of editing, copy editing and last-minute tweaks. I'm very proud of the final result, so we'll wait to see if it strikes enough chords with people to merit a second edition. The thesis here is that there are a lot of free or nearly free online products that are being underutilized by libraries. When possible, I've included a step by step instruction on how to create things like IGoogle gadgets or get links to your content in Google Earth.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Virtual Law Reference shelf

I'm experimenting with  a new page that shows a shelf of books arranged in call number order. If you click on a title you get a link to the online edition of that work. About half or slightly less are books in the public domain, so you can get them without authentication. The proprietary works will direct you to our proxy site for authentication. The idea of this site is to reaffirm the idea that electronic information is not just a lot of stuff that comes out of your computer. All of these started as printed books with editors and chapters. You can see it live at http://libftp.nyls.edu/VRS/vrslaw.html