Category Archives: tools and technology

OAIster

By Iris | Published: Friday, March 5th, 2010
For those of you who don’t know OAIster, if you have any reason to search for digitized primary sources, you should check it out. It’s a union catalog of digital library holdings. It’s chief asset is wonderfully descriptive metadata. And like with other collections of collections, I recommend searching OAIster to find which digital collections [...]
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Seeing Search Boxes

By Iris | Published: Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
We’ve all heard that single search boxes are the only way to go when it comes to building search interfaces. We’ve probably also seen students who will bypass all relevant information or links on a page and zero in on whatever looks like a search box. But I never put these two pieces of knowledge [...]
Also posted in search and discovery | 7 Comments

Dear Facebook: Leave Me Alone

By Iris | Published: Thursday, December 10th, 2009
My friends know that I have a complicated relationship with Facebook. Simply put: I hate it, but I can’t leave. The interface never made sense to me, the multiple audiences made participation hard for me, the quizzes cluttered everything up, college friends flaunted their perfect lives in my face (without meaning to, but it still [...]
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Hashtag Contexts

By Iris | Published: Saturday, October 31st, 2009
I wouldn’t have expected a thing like a hashtag in Twitter or FriendFeed to become a rhetorical device as well as a functional one, but that’s exactly what I see happening. (For those of you that just asked “Hashtag? What now?” here’s a nice summary of how it works on Twitter.) Looking back, I can see [...]
Also posted in social web | 1 Comment

Report from SirsiDynix on Open Source ILS Platforms Leaked… Oops

By Iris | Published: Friday, October 30th, 2009
Stephen Abram has lived a bit of a charmed life. He’s somehow managed to be the Vendor That Everyone Kind Of Thinks Has Our Best Interests At Heart Even If He Is A Vendor. Meanwhile, he’s also headed up the Special Library Association. Meanwhile, he’s also been a sought-after voice in the library community. And [...]
Also posted in catalogs, news | 2 Comments