Welcome to The Wide Window.

"The Wide Window is the new SLS blog with a focus on news and features of particular interest to school and youth services librarians. Those gentle readers with a taste for the slightly bizarre in children's literature may recognize a familiar note in the title, which is also the title of the third in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

'The Wide Window' will reflect the amazing breadth and depth of knowledge, information and wisdom of interest to school and youth services librarians that we'll feature here. We'll include news on a variety of topics, including (but not limited to) grant opportunities, professional development, bibliographies/webliographies, innovative uses of technology in libraries serving youth, news around SLS, the Chicago metro area, the state of Illinois, national trends, and international news, all of it with a focus on the professional interests of school and youth services librarians.

For those of our readers unfamiliar with the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans, characters in Snicket's darkly hilarious series (first introduced to me by Tess, a 10-year-old who is an avid reader), in The Wide Window (Book 3), the Baudelaire orphans are off to meet the third distant relative to take them in.

Stay posted, as we look through the wide window of youth services and school librarianship." [The Wide Window]

SLS continues its march towards blog domination! This one is authored by our own Merri Monks. She's already addicted to blogs, so this should be a fun one! RSS feed here.

Information Literacy Weblog

"The focus of our Information Literacy Weblog as always is to facilitate the dissemination and sharing of relevant items and information relating to information literacy worldwide.

This will be the place to visit if you want to find out about what's going on in the world of information literacy, including upcoming events, recent publications, or new websites on the topic. As well, there will be news about our own information literacy project (see the link on the weblog home page), including reports and commentary from the three of us, and from other people who have something interesting to say about information literacy.

We will be involving people from different parts of the world, and with different perspectives--librarians, educators, administrators, and policy makers--with an aim to building a constructive community of interest." [via Peter Scott's Library Blog]

Not sure why I haven't seen this site before, but luckily there is an RSS feed for future reading.

Point: Wireless Networks Still Work in Blackout
"Even though lights went out Thursday throughout much of the Northeast, wireless networks and Internet connections allowed companies with backup strategies and people with battery-charged cell phones and laptops to keep communicating." [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]

Counterpoint: Wireless Useless in Blackout
"Pay phones, flashlights and even a trumpet prove more useful during the East Coast power failure than all the latest technology on God's green earth." [Wired News]

I should have known that Andy Rhinehart was busy implementing reader-submitted photos over at GoUpstate.com, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal's web site. Check out the "From Your View" column on their front page, a different picture every day. You can view the archives or readers can create an account to upload their own pix.

"We began a couple of weeks ago with a note 'Send us your best photos from the summer of 2003', and that's what's online now. We're going to try to make it a permanent thing.

We've done this once before, but only as a one-shot effort  - we had a snowstorm last winter and we asked readers to e-mail photos in for both online and print. We had a flood of submissions then. We're hoping that this will catch on and eventually lead to us becoming the first destination any time someone in our community has a newsworthy photo as well as a feature shot.

What I hope to do, if we see the interest, is  eventually set up categories for the submissions. Little League, pets, vacations, etc. And that's when I think we also start urging users to send us photos from events they attend."

Of course, the next step would be letting readers moblog by emailing pictures to the newspaper directly from their cell phones, similar to the service the BBC provides. And of course, Andy is working on making an RSS feed available for "From Your View."

There's a larger strategy at work here that will inspire some great partnerships and interactivity between the newspaper and its community. I hope to inspire the folks at my local newspaper by showing them GoUpstate.

"Surf the Net With Kids now has an RSS 0.91 feed. 'Guide to the hidden educational gems of the Web, written for kids, parents and teachers by syndicated columnist Barbara J Feldman.' " [Scripting News]

Barbara runs a top-notch site with which every parent should be familiar, but this type of service SCREAMS librarians. If your library is already providing newsletter articles, online pathfinders, or a link directory for your patrons, why not syndicate your content and let the rest of the world take advantage of it!

As I keep noting in my presentations, blogging software makes this incredibly easy by providing you with RSS feeds right out of the box.

a bad case of the zippies

"I instant message more than I email. Is this true for you? Email seems like too much work for me. I use only webmail accounts, so it involves navigation, logging in, and writing. I send many emails a day, but I find myself wishing that there was an app that would let me send IMs to people that aren't signed on, and deliver them when they do.

This may seem very trivial to many people, but that's how integreated IM is in my life. I feel that emailing is like having to upload a digital image to my computer from a digicam, resize it, and FTP it. It feels ancient.

Camera phone and IMing are so different from their archaic predecessors." [Lazyitis]

Aaron is a tech-savvy, twenty-something librarian. Do you really think his friends are going to wait 24-48 business hours to receive a response to their email reference requests?

I'm with Aaron on the instant messaging thing, too. I use it over email as much as possible, and I'm beginning to rely on the "presence" aspect of it to see where everybody is. One thing you note in so many of yesterday's blackout stories is the number of people commenting that their IM buddies in New York all went "silent" at the same time - no presence. They knew something was up because of it.

Last week, Kate's 18-year old daughter Clare realized she could now AIM from her cell phone on Sprint's service. It was interesting to note in the AIM client that there was a small cellphone icon next to her name on Kate's buddy list. AIM knew she wasn't at a computer, but she still had presence.