Library IT News

The recent issue of _Journal of Web Librarianship_ is devoted to the topic of library intranets. Journal of Web Librarianship, 1932-2917, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2010 Excerpt from the Editorial: For more than a decade, e-mail has been the preferred method of internal communication and information sharing in many libraries. However, relying on e-mail for organizational knowledge management seems a bit like keeping your birth certificate, car title, and deed to your home mixed in a pile with grocery store fliers and bills: the important pieces of information are mixed with items of only fleeting or minimal importance. The solution to organizing library policies, procedures, meeting minutes, and other documents that ultimately preserve an organization's history seems easyall it takes is an intranet. Developing library intranets, on the other hand, has left many Web librarians scratching their heads and wondering, I built it; why didn't they come? Why are intranets such a challenge, even for information professionals?

For the past week and counting, I've been using a best practice for IT security and administration: not being an administrator. It's never been a secret that I oppose making individuals administrators at their request. It makes things much more involved to troubleshoot and usually just leads to more complicated work in resolving the problem. Admin rights can also make a malware infection so much worse since the entire computer can get infected instead of just the responsible person's profile. Given the state laws that require even free software to have campus approval, individuals do not have the knowledge available to know whether they can install a particular software title. In most cases, that removes what Admin rights are requested for.

An article written a year ago at IT World titled 'Four Telecommuting Security Mistakes' received a response at a blog I subscribe to yesterday and both proved to be interesting reads. Although the articles are discussing telecommuting, it really seems to apply to any of the library-issued devices including our loaner laptops, projectors, and Blackberries.

Interesting development regarding cataloging data in Europe. It is in the right direction, not sure how many years it will take for something like this to happen here.

I read an interesting article on the Internet Storm Center that poses the question of whether Green IT and IT Security are mutually exclusive. Powering off computers versus the traditional patching at night do seem at odds. The short article is copied below:

Happy New Year and congrats on having more than a month already down in 2010! (Yeah, it's late. Hopefully the tie-in pays off.) January 30, 2010 marks 3 years since Office 2007 came out. The question I propose, can we finally stop forcing the default for users to be the 2003 format?

In studying for my next certification, I read about this IT Code of Ethics from SANS. Although it's a bit dated coming from 2004, it still seems relevant and eye-opening.

Following the last RTG event for the extended Library IT Family, I removed the web form in my Library Directory listing and substituted it with my full e-mail address. Three and a half weeks later, the experiment has concluded. Do the web forms protect us from spam?

I've recently started using Log4Perl library more extensively, for both version 2 of the New List and to a more limited extent in the data feeds. It's useful enought I thought I'd describe how I'm using it here.

This is poor man's visualization (Remember the plasma screen at grainger? http://www.library.illinois.edu/discover/visualization.html). The data is updated every minute. These are recent OpenURL full text requests sent to the SFX server. The SFX data gets transformed into a rss feed and then the javascript in the webpage displays it in the scrolling format.

Stemming from a meeting where individuals started complaining, Robert Slater and I began throwing some ideas out about how we might correct the issues that were aired regarding LibNews. After the initial brainstorm, we included Jason Strutz for his perspective and I think we all came to the conclusion and agreed that LibNews has issues and we should be able to do something about it. The question remains though, how should it be corrected? We'd like to gather your feedback on issues that you'd like to see corrected and any suggestions as to how you would fix things. We'd appreciate feedback for the next two weeks (12-24) at which we can synthesize all the complaints and solutions and propose a remedy.

I recently got a new workstation with Windows 7. I thought I would share a few issues I have run into in switching my Visual Studio development environment over to the new workstation. As I run into interesting new problems, I might post more about them.

How can we get ahead of the curve to prevent our users from causing their own troubles? The solutions are often simple but time consuming processes, multiplied by the number of users. Some of the recent pandemic problems we've encountered that are completely preventable include malware infections and installing software incorrectly.

You may have heard that the illinois.edu/toolbox services now support AD groups...

Hi Everyone! I've been working on making the New Titles Virtual Bookshelf a bit spiffier for LIS...

I can't be 100% certain, butt I don't remember seeing this just a few days ago when I was working on...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Marita LaMonica Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 8:59 PM Subject: News from JSTOR: U. Illinois Press joins CS Program To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu PRESS RELEASE The University of Illinois Press signs agreement with JSTOR, joining a new effort to improve access to current scholarship for faculty, students, and librarians.

We have several units around the library using Google Analytics to track their content (which is great, because GA is such an awesome free tool). But I've been toying with the idea (as has the Web Content Working Group) of trying to deploy GA in a more across the boards way. A single GA account for _all_ library web sites/servers, etc.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Public access to research is "inevitable," but it will be a slog to get to it. That was the takeaway message of a panel on the role libraries can play in supporting current and future public-access moves. The panel was part of the program at the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, held here yesterday and today.

We'll be getting updates from the various Library IT RTG Working Group today.

Stop by Grainger Commons today to talk about the future of IT communication.

one more test--cannot comment either

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new subscried post

hmm, not skinned correctly