Dang, those Ohio people are kicking butt again. Exhibit A: KnowItNow.

"KnowItNow is a live online information service provided free of charge for the citizens of Ohio by the State Library of Ohio and your local public library. Professional librarians are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to answer your reference questions and assist you in finding information....

Librarians around the state staff the KnowItNow service. During regular library hours staff working in Ohio’s public libraries (click here to learn if your local library participates) monitor the service and respond to your questions. After hours, the KnowItNow After Dark team of professional librarians provides high quality information service even in the 'wee hours' of the morning. Online tutors are also available and ready to assist students with homework from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week.

KnowItNow is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. General Reference assistance is available during all hours. Specialists in the subjects of business, foreign languages, genealogy, government information, health, history, law, literature, music and art, science, technology and the social sciences are available from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm Monday - Saturday. Questions in these specialties may be asked anytime but may be referred to specialists for next day response.

Tutoring service from online professional tutors is available from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. Some questions may be referred to the online tutors during this time."

I learned about this service earlier today when I talked with Brad Stephens from the NOLA Regional Library System in Ohio. We partner with Brad and NOLA for ListenIllinois (by the way, the third enrollment period is open now!), and I'm always intrigued to hear what he's up to. He and his staff have been central to getting this service up and running, and what a service it is.

Brad was justifiably proud to tell me KnowItNow has contracted with 62 librarians who basically telecommute to cover all of those 24/7 hours. They're the first such service to keep all of the hours in-house (so-to-speak) and not outsource them. They estimate they're going to handle 10,000-12,000 questions per month, which will make a great success story. It's heartening to see such cohesive, well-done statewide efforts such as this one, although it's a sad reminder of how splintered online reference has become in Illinois.

I also like how KnowItNow is the third piece of a trifecta that includes HomeworkNow (homework help) and ReadThisNow (reader's advisory). All of the sites are nicely done, too - attractive and useful. Big-time congratulations to everyone involved!

"Today, John Battelle mentioned Blender Prototype put out by the guys at Waypath (I think). Here's how it works. The user plugs in up to 5 RSS Feeds and chooses the degree of relatedness to the content from the feeds for books from the Amazon database (Here's where the ads come in). So, the ads come from Amazon, but they are semi-personalized.

I tried to create a feed, but Feed on Feeds didn't like the Feed URL (I used my site, Jenny's, Gary's, and Jessamyn's for my feeds with very close Amazon book ads). If anyone can get this to work, let me know in the comments (and mention what books show up). This could be interesting." [Library Stuff]

Indeedy it could be. Of course, it would be even more interesting if the books came out of your library's catalog and linked directly to request forms.

Wippit Begins Mobile Music Downloads

"Innovative UK digital music distribution service, Wippit, has begun beta testing a new wireless song download service, reports MacWorld.

'The service will let music fans download full-length audio and video tracks to their mobile devices. It will also offer truetones, polyphonic and monophonic ringtones and wallpapers.

Wireless Wippit currently allows customers to search for MP3’s to download to their PC with a simple SMS message or to bill any downloads direct to their mobile phone. The latest incarnation is completely mobile phone-based'. " [ringtonia.com]

Textual @traction

"Textual @traction is a new film about text messaging which has been selected to compete for Best Short Film, Best Foreign Film and Best Drama, at this year's Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, reports icWales.

The film centres on a young man who finds a lost mobile phone and starts replying to text messages from a mystery stranger.

What makes the film unique is that the audience does not actually get to see the messages on screen. Instead, by pre-registering, they receive the texts to their own phones at the same time as the characters on screen." [textually.org]

SMS Appointment Reminders

"My dentists sends me reminders of my appointments using SMS. They're generated automatically from his appointments software. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I thought this was a good example of the right message on the right medium." [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

I'm so proud! Check out the Midlothian Public Library's web site (one of my member libraries), where Andrew Belisle has implemented a couple of Movable Type blogs (which we installed for him).

• What's New
• Youth Services

Even better, he is using MagpieRSS, which we also installed for him, to display headlines from the blogs on the home page! He also maintained the "syndicate this site" links and added an orange XML button so patrons can subscribe to the news themselves. Andrew attended one of my RSS classes and immediately understood the implications, and now he's got everything up and running on his site. Way to go, Andrew!

Aaron's Library site is on the same server, so I'm sure he'll be looking into using MagpieRSS soon, too (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

Addendum: Wow, check this out - Andrew is aggregating headlines from four of my MLS blogs onto one page so his staff can quickly catch up on what is happening here. Dang, I had wanted to do this myself for the members, so I guess I'd better get my butt in gear!