Techie blogs I "read"

Although I couldn't write code or install a server if my life depended on it, I do like to read blogs by librarians who can. Although a lot of what gets posted on these blogs goes right over my head, there is a residue of learning that takes place too. I aspire some day to better appreciate the content of these blogs below. (Please forgive my overly brief annotations for each blog, as I can't really do justice to what these folks cover in just a sentence of two.)

Blake's Journal
Blake Carver is an all-around great guy who happens to run LISNews and LISHost, the hosting service for this blog and many other library-themed blogs and sites. In his journal, he frequently discusses the challenges of running a hosting service.

Caveat Lector
Dorothea Salo's got a lot to say about open access, institutional repositories, and much more, and she's not afraid to put it in print.

Dilettante's Ball
Ross Singer from Georgia Tech helped create that library's umlaut project that (as much as I can understand it) improves on the functionality and user interface of SFX.

Disruptive Library Techology Jester
Peter Murray's blog talks, among other things extensively about SOA (service oriented architecture), which is still pretty fuzzy to me.

ebyblog
Ryan Eby writes often on issues related to the OPAC and to APIs.

Library Web Chic
Karen Coombs at the University of Houston focuses on web design issues primarily.

One Big Library
Dan Chudnov's blog also features a great series of podcasts that even a non-library-geek geek like me can enjoy and learn form.

OUseful Info
Tony Hirst from Open University authors this blog that mostly "aspirational" for a non-techie like me.

TechEssence.Info
This blog does a better job of explaining itself than I can:

You're busy. You don't have time for a lot of jargon, techie posturing, or attitudes. You've come to the right place. We don't put you down, we don't talk down to you, we just give it to you straight. Come here for accurate, understandable explanations of important information technologies for libraries. Go elsewhere for the hype.

Firefox at the reference desk

My article, "Firefox at the Reference Desk," was just published today in the December 15th issue of Library Journal. You can read it online at the Library Journal web site. One thing that didn't make it into the final version of the article was a list of links to the resources discussed in my article:

BookBurro
http://bookburro.org/

Book Borough
http://userscripts.org/tag/brooklyn

Firefox 1.5
http://www.oldapps.com/firefox.htm

Firefox 2
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

IE Tab
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/

Internet Explorer 7
www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/

L2
http://lib20.com/blog/

Mycroft
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

OpenURL Referrer
http://www.openly.com/openurlref/

Pearl Crescent Page Saver
http://pearlcrescent.com/products/pagesaver/

Snapper
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2703

After reading Dorothea Salo's post about how she requested a less restrictive agreement from Library Journal for the article she wrote for them, I followed her advice and am glad I did. While I am thanking people, I should really reserve special mention for Jay Datema at Library Journal for asking me to write the piece in the first place. He's got a great blog, Open Libraries, and a podcast that I highly recommend.

I wouldn't have met him if I hadn't gotten over my fears of being a non-techie person and attended Library Camp East earlier this fall. The last code I wrote was in the early 1980s when I was in high school and involved using Basic to sketch quadratic equations. In the past year, I've been subscribing to a number of blogs and podcasts that feature all sorts of code talk that is always far beyond me. Despite my limited understanding, I still try to plunge right into the posts and podcasts; I have even begun to glean useful tidbits (I'll do a separate post detailing the techie blogs I "read.") Some day (after tenure is secured, perhaps) I'll pursue my secret fantasy of being a librarian coder and will speak authoritatively about things that are just mere names to me now: Ruby on Rails, Lucene, Python, REST, SOAP, etc.

QuestionPoint's strengths and weaknesses

With his latest post about using enterprise IM as a proof-of-concept project for chat reference, Caleb Tucker-Raymond shows himself to be one of the most thoughtful and innovative persons around working in chat reference. How did I learn about this great idea of his? By reading this well-reasoned blog post about "the problem with QuestionPoint," which itself was crafted in response to Rikhei Harris' post, "No Love for QuestionPoint."

I'd have to say that if there's one thing that I am most annoyed about with QuestionPoint, it's the buggy co-browsing feature. Yesterday, while doing a training session at Brooklyn College to help set up a chat reference cooperative consisting of the library at my school (Baruch College) and at three other CUNY schools (Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and the CUNY Graduate Center), all was going well with co-browsing demos with web pages and our catalog. Trying to co-browse an authenticated database (most of us at CUNY use EZ Proxy for authentication) was a typical mess: all the gifs from the patron's and librarian's interface for the database (in this case, Academic Search Premier) were missing from our screens, making navigation nearly impossible.

How do we get around co-browsing's funkiness (a work-friendly euphemism) when we need to teach a patron how to run a search in a database? We ask the user to open another browser on their screen, navigate to the database, and then follow our step-by-step instructions typed into the chat window (something that we could do with IM software, too).

Our patrons at Baruch absolutely love that we can offer the service 24/7, and our patron surveys reveal a high satisfaction rate with the service overall (83% say they are "very likely" to use the service again). Without QuestionPoint, it would be very hard to give them the round-the-clock service they need (our students are all commuter students with busy schedules, as most of them work part-time or full-time). For me, the ability to offer cooperative reference around the clock is the biggest reason why we stick with QuestionPoint. But I am also completely sympathetic to the kvetching among librarians about the software itself. In short, I love the service, not the software.