My home library unveiled a new web site today and the home page is now a blog (powered by Blogger). Happy, happy, happy dance, happy, happy, happy dance!

Of course, my favorite part is the sidebar on the right-hand side where you'll find links to Ask a Librarian (their email and VR service), Find It Online (their database section), ListenIllinois (my statewide group purchase!), the new Homer Community web site (funded by a library the grant received - more on that in the future), and ........drum roll, please....... an RSS feed!! Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy! Subscribed!

Of course, this will change my RSS class because I always show how I can't find my library's feed in Bloglines or Yahoo as a way to prod attendees to get their own feed. Now that will change when the feed does appear!

Oh, and one of the blog posts mentions a LibraryLookup bookmarklet for their catalog!

Did I mention I'm happy?  :-)

Aaron presented the topic of spyware (or the removal and prevention of spyware to be specific) at the MLS Tech Summit today. I heard he was quite good and that the response was most positive. Good sport that he is, Aaron has put his presentation online and he encourages other librarians to steal it for use in their own patron training.

"The Tech Summit at the Metropolitan Library System went well today. Many people were excited to have a disc full of spyware removal programs and a few said that there were going straightaway to use them....

Here is the presentation in powerpoint form.
Here is the presentation in low-bandwidth text file form."

worldcat bookmarklet - get it

"Thanks to Steven Cohen and Michael Fagan and Andrea Mercado [and me, and Michael and Andrew whose emails with similar code I didn't get til this morning], the WorldCat Lucky Bookmark lives! While I agree with Sarah that we can't expect our patrons to grok the bookmarklet thing, as much as we might like them to, this one is [nominally] for staff. Go nuts team!

Lucky 'Cat [in same window]
Lucky 'Cat [in new window] " [librarian.net]

And as always, Jon Udell provides more help:

"I could have switched LibraryLookup over to this technique, but never did because it only works with Amazon. I've always liked the idea that LibraryLookup can also work with isbn.nu and All Consuming and other book sites. (It'd be cool if they all emulated Amazon's metadata pattern, but they don't.) Still, in the context of this excellent new WorldCat hack, I thought the non-ISBN-dependent solution might be useful. So here it is:

Amazon/Google/WorldCat bookmarklet: A/G/W (drag to linkbar) "

Most excellent - nice work, everyone! Another ringing endorsement for open, web services-based back-ends for library catalogs.