I thought the matter was dead after Boeing shut down their much hyped in-flight WiFi plans (yep), but Engadget got a seat on JetBlue’s private introductory flight for their WiFi service. The good news is that it’s free, the not surprising news is that Yahoo! is partnering in it (and it requires a Yahoo! account), the bad news is that all you get is Yahoo! IM and email. No web browsing, or anything else useful. Well, that and there’s no power outlets.

The Library Problem:

In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.

(via)

It’s way cool to see Lichen‘s Scriblio installation instructions translated to Hungarian. Even cooler to have Sarah the tagging librarian take hard look at it and give us some criticism (and praise!). But I’m positively ecstatic to see Robin Hastings’ post on installing Scriblio (it’s not easy on Windows, apparently).

Part of it is pride in seeing something that I’ve been working on for so long finally get out into the world, but Scriblio really does get better with every comment or criticism. And it takes giant leaps forward every time somebody installs it and reports on how it went. Way cool. Thank you.

Eurostat 2006: Internet usage in the EU25: “Nearly half of individuals in the EU25 used the internet at least once a week in 2006 and a third of households and three-quarters of enterprises had broadband internet access.” Statistics Denmark 2007: Access to the Internet: 78% of population has home internet access.

NPR : Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety

As students return to school in Virginia, there’s something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.

Answers.com is throwing a bone to WordPress users with their new AnswerLinks plugin written by Alex King.

But wait, there’s an Answers.com API? A few pokes at the Google machine reveal nothing relevant, and Asnwers.com’s site is mum too. Taking apart the code, I get the following (modded enough to make it run-able if you drop it in the base of your WordPress install):

If the input string isn’t sufficiently long, the output will be empty (eliminating one of my potential uses for it), but it’s interesting to twiddle.

Thanks to Mike Giarlo‘s unAPI Server for WordPress. Now if only there were a library catalog built on WordPress, I could probably just drop it in.

Ellyssa Kroski‘s Librarian’s Guide to Creating 2.0 Subject Guides is good introduction for Librarians who think know “there has to be a better way.” But why no mention of blogs and blogging tools? (I’m still really happy that when you search our catalog for something, a subject guide for that term appears (if we have one that’s relevant)).

Via Ryan: Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies at Centripetal Notion.

Matt pointed out that Automattic has purchased Gravatar, the globally recognizable avatar service. Om speaks of the economics and Matt’s cagy, but it’s hard not to see the possibility of creating a larger identity solution around this. WordPress’ market penetration is huge, a service that connects those nearly two million blogs could offer real value, especially in connection with Automattic’s Akismet.

Aside: now that Gravitar’s reliability is up, I’ll probably get Sexy Comments running here soon.

Our intention is to feature “a series of books that challenge our beliefs and test our commitment to free speech,” but on this post about Holocaust denial I found myself unwilling (and unable) to link to the free, online PDF full text of David Irving‘s Hitler’s War. And when we discovered it wasn’t in our collection (though it may have been lost/stolen, not replaced, and the record deleted), we decided not to purchase it.

Sometimes books are challenged. Sometimes they’re just not purchased.

Over at KLE’s Web 2.0 Challenge I was surprised to learn:

Both Bisson and Stephens are so excited about this concept of Web 2.0 they have not taken a good look at what they can’t do for our libraries. …with all this new technology we can not forget that what is the most important in our libraries is the personal touch. We are one of the few institutions left that still offers individual attention.

KLE is doing some cool things, so I can tell this isn’t an offhanded rejection of Web 2.0 concepts, but the criticism makes me feel as though I’ve been missing my target somehow.

We wouldn’t accept poor service at the desk or over the phone, why should we treat our patrons so poorly online? I don’t think we’ve yet figured out what “good service online” is yet, but that’s what I’ve been focused on. Make no mistake, the future of libraries demands outstanding service everywhere we serve our users.

[tags]web 2.0, library 2.0, lib20, service, quality, libraries, criticism, online, good service, good service online[/tags]

Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian at Colgate University, posted to the IUG list with this notion today:

I’m clearing out a large group of expired student records, and wonder if anyone else has had the same idea that has occurred to me. [Our ILS] keeps track in the patron record of TOTCHKOUTs (total checkouts). At the expiration of the students’ record at the end of their four or so years, this represents a measure that is not perfect, but could distinguish heavy library users from non-users. Of course, it combines book chekouts, video and music checkouts, reserve checkouts, etc. And it misses the effect of electronic sources. I was thinking of trying to get GPA data for these graduates and use an ANCOVA (Analysis of Covariance) to see, once you’ve accounted for the effect of different majors and year-of-graduation effects, if there’s a correlation between library use and GPA?

Has anyone done this type of study? Do you analyze your TOTCHKOUT data in any way?

I’d second her question. Public libraries, I think, do better at correlating their statistics with other metrics in their communities. What do we know about academic libraries?

We must stop thinking of ourselves as a good-idea factory whose every thought has greater merit than those of our customers. Procter & Gamble doesn’t even do that.

— paraphrased