"Rajesh has a mock-up of a digital dashboard available.  You can see where this is going.  A portal of one.  All data on the desktop.  Simple, easy to customize, and powerful." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Excellent! I've needed a mock-up of a digital dashboard in order to illustrate some of my ideas for the SLS portal (intranet + extranet). Mainly, I want to show the "snapshot" idea. We have Lots (capitalized, bolded, italicized, in red) of statistics, but we're not very good at displaying and disseminating them. That's one reason so many people don't understand what Illinois Library Systems actually do (including a goodly number of our own members).

A real-time snapshot of these numbers would definitely help, and aggregating them in one place would be essential. Combined with current SLS headlines and usable navigation, it could be a good entry page for the extranet. In addition, having it visible on the intranet would probably be a morale booster because as with most organizations, the criticisms and complaints are always louder than the praise and gratitude.

On a side note, I interlibrary loaned the book Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (I know Jim was reading it, as was someone else whose post flew through my aggregator when I had nowhere to blog it). In skimming it, I came across a checklist on page 102 that assesses your organization's preoccupation with failure. The authors use the term failure in a postive way - do you learn from your mistakes, do you improve your services as a result. I've been pre-occupied with this idea for the past few days because I'd like to see us highlight our successes more effectively and implement what we learn from our failures more consistently. I'm one of those people that would rather try and fail than sit and watch on the sidelines, always second-guessing. A digital dashboard might help with the first part, while publish and subscribe (blogging + news aggregation) as an additional form of communication might help with the second.

More on this next month.

Today, Stacey Kimmel posted a list of RSS resources on the WEB4LIB mailing list. I was familiar with all of them except for the Sophos Virus Information Feeds. Sophos provides two great RSS channels you can subscribe to - one for notification of new viruses and one to view the top virus hoaxes. You can register to subscribe to their feeds in an aggregator or to display the notifications automatically on a web page. Cool!

Today I came across the web site for The Streamium, a boombox for listening to internet radio, CDs, and MP3s from your PC. Here's the description from the press release:

"...the world’s first micro hi-fi system capable of connecting to multiple online music services at the touch of a button."

But that doesn't come close to doing it justice. I'm thoroughly intrigued by it, which means the marketing folks did their job well. Some choice quotes from the site's home page:

You only have two ears: don't waste them on dumbed down music chosen by focus groups.
Plug into your DSL or cable modem and unplug from mass music.
Plays CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs or MP3 & mp3PRO CDs. And AM/FM radio if you must.
100 Watts total power. Share it with your neighbors.
wOOx technology = bass that doesn't bother knocking before it beats the door down.
Song title and artist displayed before you can say "Who is this?"

Now that's market research! Every one of these hits a home run with me. Over at the full Streamium page on the Philips site, we get new slogans such as "Don't dream it. Stream it!" and new nouns such as "streamies" (folks that own the Streamium). It should be available nationally any day now, and it looks like this sweet little puppy will retail for $399, which is very tempting. Tempting, indeed. Make it $299 and Streamium, I'm yours.

Today I heard about a library that doesn't want to use Mozilla on its public workstations because a dragon is a satanic symbol. *sigh*

In addition to my letter that you can modify and send in to your elected officials to note how the CBDTPA legislation could affect libraries, you can also add your name to the list of a Response Letter to John Ashcroft. In it, Rafael O. Quezada covers a broader range of issues related to the DMCA, including Rep. Howard Berman's proposed legislation that would allow copyright holders to attack the computers of individuals suspected of  violating copyright law. I encourage you to send both in to your legislators, because they give the most weight to signed paper letters from their constituents.