D-Skin

"Every library in the country should get a supply of these for their DVD collections, which are, invariably, the most scratched up set of media in existence." [Gadgetopia, originally from undisclosed location]

This is a great suggestion if we can get a bulk purchase price.

D-Skins

"Just snap one of these onto your music, movie, game or data CD’s and consider them protected. The amazing Liplock Seal snaps onto the edge of any standard size disc and holds tight. Leave your d_skin Protective Disc Skin on while you play away — outside and inside your media players. Seriously. Your discs are totally readable right through the Skin."

View the [loud] demo. Slick!

Cellphones: Once a Status Symbol, Now a Necessity

"The notion of the cellphone as necessity may not be universally agreed, but if you're in doubt about whether the device is transforming American life just try wresting one away from a teenager you know.

With a popularity and versatility that spans continents and generations, the cellphone may be on its way to becoming mankind's primary communication interface and a lifestyle tool that exceeds the personal computer in ubiquity, say watchers of technology culture....

'The cellphone has moved from a helpful service appliance to a necessity,' says Tom McPhail, a professor of media studies and communication at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. 'Older Americans are realizing they are needlessly cut off without one, and for youth it has become a part of their persona and identity without which they feel naked, shunned, or isolated.'...
Voicing an oft-heard observation, CEO Silk says he recently crossed the Ohio State campus and couldn't find a teenager without a mobile or music headphone in their ear. As in decades past, the students did not congregate and share stories, he says, but rather remained connected to others solely by cellphone. Other sociologists worry that teens use all their free time messaging or talking to friends so that they no longer spend enough time in mental solitude crucial to understanding a separate self, problem solving, and allowing space for creativity and intuition." [Christian Science Monitor, via textually.org]

Couple this excerpt with the news that mobile phone subscribers around the globe totalled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population [CNN], and ask yourself if your library is prepared to serve these folks via cell phone in ways other than voice (instant messaging, texting, searching, etc.). Other interesting statistics from the CNN article:

• "The ITU said the growth in mobile phone subscribers had outpaced that for fixed lines, who totalled some 1.85 billion today against one billion at the start of the century, and was also outstripping the rate of increase in Internet users."


• "And by the middle of the year developing countries as a whole had overtaken rich nations to account for 56 percent of all mobile subscribers, while accounting for 79 percent of growth in the market since 2000."


• "By July this year, China was reporting 310 million users -- about one-quarter of its total population and more than the entire population of the United States, the ITU said."


• "By the end of this year, the report said, global revenues from mobile networks were likely to exceed those from fixed-line networks for the first time."

Bloggers Beware: Debunking Eight Copyright Myths of the Online World

"Kathy Biehl addresses eight 'myths' about copyright law with factual responses, resources and guidelines that are of special relevance to bloggers and website owners." [LLRX.com]

I live for lightbulb moments when I'm teaching or presenting. Christine Peterson made my day by letting me know that she has started her own blog after attending the blogging/RSS preconference Steven and I gave at the Internet Librarian conference last month! You can find her blog, "Library Technology in Texas," at http://libtechtx.blogspot.com/, while her Atom feed is at http://libtechtx.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

There's already some great information on her blog, including this that I hadn't seen posted elsewhere:

Just 20% of Your Time

In a posting from a Google employee, he said that 'Google allows their employees to devote 20% of their working hours to any project they choose.' In his case, he has been working on Google Suggest.

Just think . . . what project(s) would you work on if you had 20% of your working hours to devote to it? A book? A re-write of the web site? A new service? More outreach? Reading? Learning new technologies? Attending college classes?

Like Christine, I love this idea, and I think it's a great one for librarians. I know how hard it is to find 20% of your time to devote to something other than the five hats you're already wearing, but when I've stolen time out of my schedule in the past to "play" with something unexpected, something good always comes of it. I've been doing that here and there with the new calendar I'm working on for MLS, and I think it will show in the details.

I'd also encourage library vendors to allow their employees this luxury, because it's probably the closest they would get to something like Google Labs. I know some of the vendors do encourage creative thinking and brainstorming from their employees, but this would give them the chance to implement the resulting ideas. Maybe then they would come up with stuff like LibraryLookup for their customers and maybe, just maybe, we'd have native RSS feeds from our catalog by now.