by Cathleen Ash
Getting Tech Savvy in rural Texas – a few of the students will join me as we present how we turned a closed, defunct, dirty library into the happening spot on campus - now including a gaming club, open mic night, library club, blogs, podcasts and more. In just three years, we've quadrupled usage numbers, encouraged all-community relations, appeared on the local news and radio, and engaged more students with technology than ever before – all at almost a tenth of the budget of the lowest performing schools in Texas (less than $2/student/book verses $16+).
Specific grants, donors, community buy-in (Laura Bush Library Foundation, DonorsChoose.org, Project Hope, Fine Arts Department, Austin Lyric Opera) have pulled together and the students are more experienced, tech-savvy and ready to work for chances to go places and get things.
We will showcase how we did it, what we used, and provide specific ideas about student use of tech at the rural level – and how to increase it.
by Nate Hill, Michael Porter, Char Booth, Amy Buckland and Amy Buckland
Good libraries are community-minded, technologically-aware, devoted to increasing access to information, and interested in preserving the local cultural heritage. Good newspapers aggregate and curate information for their readers, prioritize the local population, and are the record of a place, a time, a citizenry. Both believe they must tell stories for everyone, not just themselves.
Libraries have experience with media production, and are already a known community resource. Supporting communication within their community falls within the library’s mandate to increase access to information. Building on the “maker” ethic, how can libraries help their communities make their own news, write their own stories, publish their own histories?
by Carson Block
Libraries, oft loved and honored are under attack from the most unlikely of sources. Book publishers, municipal governments and others seem hell-bent on library destruction, while many wonder if libraries are even relevant at all in the digital age. But – if the library disappears, who will really defend your right to confidentially access free information? Business? The megaminds of the Interwebs? Think again, compadre. Libraries - and librarians - care about your rights. Come to learn what the library offers you, what's really at risk, and how the library is more relevant today than ever.
by Nell Taylor
Read/Write Library is a replicable project that uses local media to examine a region’s creative, political and intellectual interdependencies, creating a visible network of primary sources. We hope to make it available as an open source technical and theoretical template for other cities, borrowing models from library science, urban planning and social networks. Non-professional content receives more respect than in any previous era. By developing contextual and social features within a catalog, we can direct this sentiment at media that wasn’t valued in the cultural climate of its day. Using relative tags and non-hierarchical subject and keyword combinations helps hyperlocal or alternative perspectives compete in search engines alongside dominant historical records and fill in massive blindspots, and each entry is mapped and treated as a social object where users can share stories of the forgotten, marginalized or even still-active communities connected to these publications.
by Monica Sack
Let's deconstruct & design actionable ideas about why Libraries, Archives, and Museums (aka #sxswLAM) within the SXSWi conversation is important -- beyond rubbing shoulders with meme-enablers and tool creators. You'll leave with new partners to work on realistic goals that will keep us all engaged beyond the final hours of SXSWi bandcamp. Members of the librar* community at large are encouraged to attend. So be like Dian Fossey and find out who are the librarians in the/your mi(d)st."
Librarians, Info Pros, Data Hounds, Information Enablers...
Simmer down after a day chockful of panels and awesomeness that is SXSW before gearing up for the full night ahead.
Keeping with tradition, thouough we're moving the mellow meetup to Skinny's Ballroom
(NOT Lustre Pearl)
Details: Saturday at 6pm, a couple blocks from the Convention Center
Skinny's Ballroom
115 San Jacinto Boulevard
Austin, TX 78701
Saturday, March 10, 2012 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (CT)
- talk, share, enjoy a cold beverage*, grab a taco* from the truck, amaze each other...
*free (Thanks to our fairy godmother sponsor: Serials Solutions who loves awesome kicking ass library folk)
by Erik Swan and Michael Wilde
WTF is Big Data & Why Should I Care?Love that smartphone? Navigate with your GPS? Tweeting about this session? Everything other than brushing your teeth has is generating data. Every action we do generates data & a record of that action. According to a recent study by McKinsey, 15 out of 17 industry sectors in the US have more data stored per company than the Library of Congress. The sheer volume of data, driven by new devices & disparate data sources, requires a shift in how to capture & analyze information. If you could mine data generated by your audience, what questions might you ask? Improving your perspective on what users are doing or how they're interacting with you can yield some amazing returns. Analyzing big data can be as easy as surfing the web. We'll show some cool ways to ask questions, in realtime, to some fun data sources & get amazing answers. See how to turn data into information, information to knowledge & knowledge to action.
by Alvin Hutchinson and Martin Kalfatovic
12% of U.S. adults currently own an e-reader; Hispanics are the largest demographic in that group with 15% owning an e-reader. Though there are many Spanish-language options available for this reading community, mainstream offerings still cater to a largely English language community. Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL), as part of its efforts to move beyond page image presentation of library content, is making a focused effort to bring quality, scholarly and other materials in Spanish to the e-reading community. With a grass-roots effort to identify appropriate materials, SIL hopes to build a space where there are "Libros digitales para todos".
by Shannon Okey
Larger publishers and distributors are often unwilling to take a chance on what they consider "niche." Yet consumers want specialization and more advanced content rather than lowest common denominator material. What's a creative professional to do? Using the example of knit publishing and its evolving presence in the e-book market, as well as best practices for designers and creatives relating to publishing, we'll explore ways to increase creators' revenue and buck the established publishing system.
by Pete Warden, Drew Vogel, George Oates and Tyler Bell
The Internet today consists of a morass of partial and redundant content: the ~17m businesses and POI in the US, for example, are duplicated over 1.2 billion website across over 5 million domains. This tangle of duplicate, fragmentary, and often incorrect information ensures that unequivocally identifying a person, place or thing on the Internet will always be a challenge. The members of this panel are working to fix this, and will discuss their projects in the Library, Government, and Big Data sectors to create an Internet where real-world people, places, and things can be referenced unambiguously. It focuses on pragmatic, real-world examples: the panelists from Factual, the Sunlight Foundation, Jetpac, and the Internet Archive each highlight their specific experiences in creating platforms and apps that identify and disambiguate individual entities across applications and verticals, and describe both the pitfalls and benefits of working towards an Internet of Entities.
by Peter Meyers
Some ebooks are print edition replicas, some are overstuffed mediafests. Neither fulfill one of screen publishing’s biggest promises: adapting content to meet readers’ needs. The digital page can do much more than its “dumb” static counterpart. Possibilities range from memory-coaxing character summaries embedded “beneath” the digital canvas to continuously streamed in updates. Join author Pete Meyers (“Breaking the Page”, O’Reilly) for a lively group chat. He’ll kick off with a fast-paced tour of digital document design principles and best practices. From there he’ll help attendees compare modern readers’ most pressing needs to the kinds of just-in-time services digital books can deliver. Together we’ll swipe away the notion that digital book design is just about picking fonts or adding video. It’s about shaping content on an infinite canvas so that ebook readers become ebook lovers.
by Julie Allinson, Rachel Frick, Jon Voss and Adrian Stevenson
What happens when tens of thousands of archival photos are shared with open licenses, then mashed up with geolocation data and current photos? Or when app developers can freely utilize information and images from millions of books? On this panel, we'll explore the fundamental elements of Linked Open Data and discover how rapidly growing access to metadata within the world's libraries, archives and museums is opening exciting new possibilities for understanding our past, and may help in predicting our future. Our panelists will look into the technological underpinnings of Linked Open Data, demonstrate use cases and applications, and consider the possibilities of such data for scholarly research, preservation, commercial interests, and the future of cultural heritage data.