I put together a screencast about our News & Blog server for UIC's Office of Admissions & Records:
http://www.oar.uic.edu/circle
The server runs on Drupal and currently supports 5 different Blogs & News services. Built into the system is a publication workflow consisting of 'Authors' who create content and 'Editors' who give that content final approval. All comments are moderated and easily accessed on one page through a special 'Dashboard' utility.
Also, it being Drupal, we can use the deployment for special projects such as registration for last year's UIC Disability Expo or classroom listings for student finals.
Current Cites for August 2010 is out! You can find the issue here...
With reality being such a downer these days, I wrote about futurist visions of the library from a hundred years or more. This is how the thing ends:
In the utopian public library there was no fighting, no thievery, no noisy disturbances—in short, nothing to disrupt the general quiet and harmony that should reign within a library interior. People entered quietly, located the books they wanted, and either left or lingered to read or enjoy some quiet conversation. In utopia everyone knew how to use a library.*
*Kevin J. Hayes. "The Public Library in Utopia." Libraries & the Cultural Record 45.3 (2010): 333-349. Project MUSE. 23 Aug. 2010
Today was the first day of the Fall 2010 Semester.
Submitted by Leo Klein on Mon, 08/23/2010 - 2:12pm.
This jumped out at me as I was walking to work yesterday. They changed all the routes and people may be unhappy with that but the new signs look great.
Submitted by Leo Klein on Sat, 08/21/2010 - 5:24pm.
Roy's got a post on all the digital paraphernalia he was lugging around on a recent trip to Boston. This reminded me of my own experience going to Springfield -- and how attached I still was to the 'Cloud' no matter what the circumstances were.
Case in point, was my trip down to Springfield on Amtrak. We had to stop no less than four times so freight trains which have the right-of-way on this one-track system, could pass us by. Thanks to my smartphone, I was able to log in every delay as a 'Status Update' on Facebook. Also, thanks to my smartphone, I was able to figure out where we were, using the built-in GPS program. I even managed to upload a picture of the train's (less-than-fascinating) interior thanks to the phone's camera. And finally, of course, I was able to keep up with my email and look at the occasional webpage throughout the entire trip.
This level of connectivity -- the almost obscene ubiquity of the network -- would have boggled the mind even ten years ago. And sure, there are people who would point to the triviality of its use and who would wonder why I simply didn't put the damn phone down. To which I would reply, what's so fascinating about being on a train from Chicago to Springfield that's stuck for an extra hour?
It's one of the few benefits of living in the 21st Century, so why not take advantage of it -- for at least as long as the batteries hold out.
I had a great two days down at the State Fair in Springfield. The town itself is a great place just for walking around. Weather this year was borderline perfect. Now all that's left is going on a diet for the next 18 months.
So this is what the big boys are all excited about? 'Fat tweets'? The ability to tease out a whopping 141 or more characters in a completely text-based messaging system? Can we resurrect the telegram while we're at it?
I'm not sure why Michael Miner, who writes for the ChicagoReader on the local press scene, decided to dredge up the brouhaha over the recently closed-down listServ JournoList. I mean, it's been all over teh Internets™ for weeks now and doesn't really seem to have much to do with Chicago.
Nevertheless, I immensely appreciated Miner's shameless use of the word 'listServ' in such sentences as:
The Daily Caller exposé of the JournoList listserv [emphasis added] was a parody of a modern major newspaper investigation....
Miner then proceeds to quote fellow journalist Chris Hayes who -- sacré bleu! -- also uses the term.
Then what should I come upon but a post by James Fallows in the Atlantic (no less) where he commits the same crime, using 'listServ' four times! Unfortunately in this case, the language pedants must have gotten to Fallows since he quickly follows up with an apology saying he didn't realize the term was 'trade-marked'.
My reaction was, here you have three extremely articulate language professionals using this word in precisely the way most people understand it -- and yet one of them has to apologize because it's trade-marked by some company that neither they nor probably the rest of the English-speaking world has ever heard of.
Does this make sense? By the same reasoning, 'scotch-tape' should only be used when referring to products from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.
In any case, Fallows later emailed me saying his apology was only partly serious (which reading between the lines of his post you could kind of tell).
Current Cites for July 2010 is out! You can find the issue here...
Now this is no ordinary edition! Rather it's the 20th Anniversary Edition of our online current awareness service. Speaking for myself, I've merely been doing this since 2001 but Roy who's been there from the beginning has got a screed up at the top of the page explaining (whimsically):
While sloppily and apathetically compiling this month's screed which masquerades as a newsletter, it occurred to me that we have been foisting this dreck on an unsuspecting and mostly innocent public every single month for exactly 20 years.
May Ranganathan have mercy on your soul!
UPDATE: See Roy's "Lessons From 20 Years of Current Cites".
Being an English major, it's nice to read reaffirmations such as this one by Daniel Paul O'Donnell in The Edmonton Journal, called 'Humanities, Not Science, Key to New Web Frontier':
"Engineers and computer scientists are not the only ones who have played important roles in building our new digital economy; students of the humanities and social sciences have played an equally significant role."
It reminds me of the time when two Business librarians asked me what it takes to become a programmer and I replied, a knowledge of English poetry.
That said, I've never been a fan of 'all one way or all the other'. I've seen too many ambitious initiatives go sour because the people implementing them simply lacked the technical chops to figure out whether they were headed in the right direction or whether that product their vendors had just recommended was worth its high price.
So although I still think a knowledge of English poetry is perfect preparation for programming there still is the part about learning the programming -- or the systems development or whatever technical aspect is required. Hearing that you don't need one or the other is probably a sign that you should go elsewhere for advice.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Mon, 07/26/2010 - 9:19am.
