GSLIS students at Simmons college are going to be ahead of their colleagues at other library schools. Within the first six weeks students at Simmons must meet a technology requirement (including designing and building a website). Some of their electives are Web Development and Information Architecture, XML and Systems Analysis in Information Services.
I first read about Simmons College from an article in American Libraries. The Simmons College GSLIS course catalog is available here.
Daniel Ellsberg, “the most dangerous man in America”, helped pave the way for whistleblowers everywhere when he released the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. See him speak at ALA in June.
I had been working on a mobile version of my library’s website for a short while when a colleague sent me a link to Brian Herzog’s excellent post on automatic mobile browser detection. He gives a step-by-step guide to using a little PHP and a free function generator from the website http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/.
Now when someone tries to access the library website with a mobile phone they will automatically be directed to our mobile friendly site. I wrote a scaled down version of our main site in a few hours with a few pages listing our contact information, hours, and linking to our catalog, etc.
This was the first time I ever used PHP and I was able to get it to work after I toyed with it for a while.
Best dystopian novels:
1. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. The Windup Girl by Paolo B
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
6. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Although Bradbury has written two of my favorite books (Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine) I haven’t read this yet.
7. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
8. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
9. The Giver by Lois Lowry
10. Feed by M.T. Anderson
I’ve been toying around with Google’s App Inventor for the past few months. I released an Android App for the library two weeks ago and I’ve already had more than 50 installs.
If you have an Android, please let me know if there is anything I can do to make it better.
Great post on the free things you can get from your library.
Dan McPhillips 