The Institute of Museum and Library Services has released Sparks! Ignition Grants for Libraries and Museums guidelines.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This new grant program will provide one-year grants of $10,000 to $25,000 for innovative projects that respond to the challenges and opportunities facing cultural heritage institutions in a rapidly changing information environment. The submission deadline is November 15, 2010.

Successful proposals will address problems, challenges, or needs of broad relevance to museums, libraries, or archives, will test innovative responses to these problems, and will make the findings of these tests widely and openly accessible. Grant funding may include all activities associated with planning, deploying, and evaluating the innovation, as long as the expenses are allowable under federal and IMLS guidelines. Examples of projects that might be funded by this program include, but are not limited to:

• exploring the potential of highly original, experimental collaborations,
• implementing new workflows or processes with potential for substantial cost savings,
• testing new metrics or methods to measure the impact of promising tools or services,
• rapid prototyping and testing of new types of software tools, or creating useful new ways to link separate software applications used in libraries, archives, or museums,
• offering innovative new types of services or service options to museum, library, or archive visitors, or
• enhancing institutions' abilities to interact with audiences in new ways to promote learning or improve services, such as through the deployment of innovative crowd-sourcing techniques.

Sparks! Ignition Grant funds may not be used for:

• evaluation of an existing program or service,
• projects that are only for planning or research (as distinguished from experimentation),
• projects that are limited to existing and traditional approaches to exhibitions, performances, or other types of public programs,
• projects that involve mainly digitization, unless the applicant is proposing an innovative method for digitization,
• activities that will produce only incremental improvements in operational or business processes,
• support of conferences or professional meetings, or
• acquisition of equipment in excess of 50 percent of the total funds requested from IMLS.

I am sure that there are a lot more library innovation labs, but I am fascinated by the concept of offering individual library innovators' new developments and lab product and service development activities out there for use and public or peer comment. Sharing is a good thing.

These strategies are used in the private sector by vendors and we're seeing more in the pubic sector with libraries doing them too.

Check out these library ones:

Harvard Library Lab: Libraries need product development
http://dysartjones.com/2010/08/harvard-library-lab-libraries-need-product-development/

Harvard Library Lab
http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/liblab

DCPL Labs (DC Public Library)
http://dclibrarylabs.org/

Unversity of British Columbia Library Lab
http://www.library.ubc.ca/labs/

And this is a fairly good list site:

Directory of Experimental Library Tools

Links include:

Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) ACPLib2.0
Ball State University Libraries Web Laboratory
Brown University Library Software Development and Distribution
Deakin University Library (Australia) Experimental Options
District of Columbia Library DCPL Labs
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library Sandbox
Johns Hopkins University Library Betas
Jnkping University Library (Sweden) Library Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) MIT Libaries' Betas
National Library of Australia LibraryLabs
New York Public Library NYPL Labs RSS Updates
Ohio State University OSU Labs RSS Updates
North Carolina State University Digital Library Initiatives Projects
University of Alabama Web Laboratory RSS Updates
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign UIUC Library Labs
University of Jnkping Library Lab
University of Michigan MLibrary Labs RSS Updates
University of Minnesota Digital Library Development Lab
University of Nebraska Lincoln BetaZone RSS Updates
University of Pennsylvania PennLabs
University of Texas LIBwidgets
University of Viriginia Library Lab
Vanderbilt University Test Pilot RSS Updates

Check out these vendor ones:

The granddaddy model' is:

Google Labs
http://www.googlelabs.com/

Other Google Labs linked from the main page include:

Calendar Labs
Latest ideas from the Calendar team
Gmail Labs
Dozens of Gmail experiments
Google Code Labs
Experimental developer products
Google Maps Labs
Experimental Maps features
Google Wave
Real-time communication and collaboration
Search Experiments
Alternate search views and more
Toolbar Labs (IE only)
Language and location-based experiments
YouTube TestTube
YouTube's ideas incubator

Gale Labs

Gale Showcases Gale Labs During American Library Association Conference

Adobe Labs
http://labs.adobe.com/

OCLC launches Innovation Lab
http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/015/labs.htm

It would be great to see more. I've written in the past that we have an issue with od deas not difusing fast enough through library land. I worry that one source of this delay could be a reticence to share new projects before they're ready for prime time. These labs might be the right context for sharing good ideas and projects early without the expectation of perfection.

Do you know of any more library labs (libraries or library vendors)? Tell us in the comments.

Stephen

Quoting one attendee, it was indeed a great webbie about the virtual orientation program that Baltimore County Public Library (BCPL) has created to onboard its new staff and volunteers. This webinar, jointly sponsored by WebJunction and the Learning Round Table, was another project outcome of LearnRT's dynamic Emerging Leader Group N. They identified the topic and connected the presenters with the WebJunction webinar production staff.

Another attendee raved,
the most useful, informative webinar I've ever attended!

The superlatives are well deserved for the BCPL team. Even though you missed the live event, you can get plenty of the substance by watching the archive. Once you've launched the archive, listen to the first half to learn about the planning and design processes for the virtual orientation experience. The team's deliberative and thoughtful approach is clearly reflected in the final product (even if you secretly wish they had chosen the vending machine interface).

If you're in a hurry to see the real thing, skip down to the App/Desktop Share Start item in the Table of Contents window on the right. Although the actual site is part of the BCPL intranet, so not available to the public, the live tour gives you the flavor and range of ideas and strategies incorporated for orientation.

The landing page links to the five main sections, starting with What to Expectan introduction to how to navigate through and use the functions of the site. Throughout the site, there is a creative combination of media that avoids over-reliance on high-tech. There are some embedded videos, but there are also more low-tech approaches of voice recorded over still photos or a photo slide show with explanatory text below. And when a simple text document is the most effective way to convey the information, that's what you get.

The final section is What's Next for the new staff member. It includes links to training opportunities and the library training calendar, an interactive quiz on the staff handbook with immediate feedback, and a list of 15 ways to shine as a new staff member.

The 224 people who attended this webinar seemed to be itching to get back to their libraries to put some of these ideas to work. It's likely you'll feel the same way. Thanks Emerging Leader Group N! Thanks Learning Roundtable and WebJunction!

Fourth place may be a lousy position in a marathon, but looks to be a winning place for trainers, libraries, and all they serve.

Let's recap the initial places, as defined by Ray Oldenburg in his influential book, The Great Good Place: our first place is our home; our second place is where we work, and our third place is the treasured community meeting place where we, our friends, and colleagues come and go.

In listening to the comments made by a student who loves libraries, a group of us participating in one of Maurice Coleman's recent biweekly T is for Training podcasts realized that libraries are poised to help define, create, and nurture a new concept for a fourth place: a community gathering place for social learninga place onsite and online where communities of learning are developed and nurtured.

It makes so much sense, and speaks so well of the present and future of libraries, that a couple of us (including Jill Hurst-Wahl) immediately described the idea on two separate blogs within a few days of each other. And it didn't stop there: after all, we're trainerswe're supposed to know how to get an idea across when we're excited about it.

We have continued to think of all that this sort of fourth place means and could mean to libraries and library users. It builds off the existing pattern of library as third placea community meeting place that is at the heart of communities and community. It acknowledges the library as a center of learning at a time when those who do not engage in learning are quickly left behind. It combines the wonderful information and entertainment resources libraries continue to provide with the growing dedication all members of library staff have to helping others learn to utilize the resources available to them. And best of all, it gives libraries a chance to be at the head of the pack in meeting onsite and online community members' needs for first-rate lifelong learning rather than making the mistake we made years ago in not taking the leadership role which Google, bookstores, and others took while we were asleep at the wheel.

The idea of fourth places as gathering places for social learning seems to appeal to everyone who hears the concept. A colleague who runs a learning center here in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, immediately expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the concept and plans to write about it for the thousands of colleagues she has across the country. Which is both a tribute to the idea and a warning to those of us who hope that libraries will remain at the center of the concept. If we don't grab and run with this concept which sprang out of a conversation among a small group of workplace learning and performance practitioners who happen to be affiliated with libraries across the country, we'll only have ourselves to blame when the Google of social learning centers basks in the success of the vision we helped create.

Our choice here remains obvious: use it or lose it. I'm betting we can use it to help build community partnerships in ways we're only starting to imagine.

At yesterday's Gov2.0 Summit conference, "rogue archivist" Carl Malamud gave a great speech about what's wrong with government IT and what should be done about it.

"If our government is to do the jobs with which we have entrusted it, the machinery of our government must first be made to work properly."

Malamud describes a government IT landscape that is a vast wasteland of contracts that lie fallow inside this beltway because of agency capture by special interests and proposes three steps to fix government IT:

• Finish the opengov revolution create and enforce bulk data standards, release more government data using those standards, and update the Freedom of Information Act for the Internet age to require that any data released in response to a FOIA request is also posted online for anyone to access (others have already taken up this cause)
• Create a National Scanning Initiative Spend at least $250 million per year (a third of what the Smithsonian currently receives from the Federal government) for a decade to put all of the works housed at the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the Government Printing Office online
• Create a Computer Commission with authority to conduct agency-by-agency reviews and change projects from relying on over-designed custom systems to ones based on open-source building blocks and judicious use of commercial off-the-shelf components

O'Reilly's Jim Stogdill believes that Malamud's speech is an implicit recognition that Federal IT projects are just too big for the typical top-down IT development process and the better approach is structuring incentives, policies, and ecosystems to encourage the complex to emerge from the simple. This approach is basically the Unix philosophy, which is best summarized as "Design programs to do only a single thing, but to do it well, and to work together well with other programs."

One big problem with most government software projects is that they're developed without any thought of having those systems interact with other systems. As a result, data files are typically proprietary and importing and exporting data is impossible. But if federal IT projects were developed more in line with the Unix philosophy, as smaller, modular, interoperable systems, they would be more manageable and problems with a specific component would not jeopardize other systems.

And as Stogdill points out, there are only a few companies able to deal with the complexity of the Federal Aquisition Rules and the scale typical of most government projects. Breaking things into smaller components and open-sourcing the code developed on all new projects will enable many more companies to compete for these contracts.

The Obama administration is the first presidency to have a Chief Information Officer. I only hope he was listening to Malamud's speech.

San Antonio Express In a sign of changing times at academic libraries, Trinity University is offering buyout packages to prompt seven employees to leave its Coates Library. With the digitization of books, journals, newspapers and other materials, there simply isn't enough work shelving and cataloging to keep all 19 classified staff members busy, said Dennis Ahlburg, Trinity's president. The library is not just a place for books anymore, it is a place for information, Ahlburg said. In terms of running the university, we want to use students' money and donors' money responsibly rather than have people sit around with nothing to do.

USA Today With another summer ending, the time has come to ask the perennial question: Could this be the year higher education finally embraces the e-book?

AP It weighs in at more than 130 pounds, but the authoritative guide to the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, may eventually slim down to nothing. Oxford University Press, the publisher, said Sunday so many people prefer to look up words using its online product that it's uncertain whether the 126-year-old dictionary's next edition will be printed on paper at all.

Chicago Tribune A service through which libraries in Illinois can share books and other resources is at risk of disappearing due to lack of state funding. But nine library systems throughout the state are making a last-ditch effort to save the delivery service, which many patrons have come to rely on when they can't find something at their hometown library. Five of the systems, primarily in the northern part of the state, may merge into one. Four downstate systems are discussing doing likewise.

Harvard News In a move designed to inspire a new generation of library services, the University's newly created Library Lab is inviting students, faculty, and staff to collaborate with the Harvard Libraries and serve as co-creators of the information society of the future. In announcing the Lab, Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, states that the Lab will develop a wide variety of digital innovations that will ensure Harvard's leadership in the burgeoning and increasingly collaborative world of information technology. Thanks to support from the Arcadia Fund, Harvard's Library Lab will enhance knowledge and library services through a striking balance of innovation, cooperation, and entrepreneurship.

I was thinking about writing a post reflecting on recent posts about the myth of the graying of the profession (and the coming librarian shortage) and Peter Brantley's post about involving young'uns in discussing the future of libraries, but Colleen Harris beat me to the punch. And because she really knows how to tell-it-like-it-is, I feel no need to comment further on this topic. Take a look at her post, On Great Myth of the Librarian Grays. While I do have a tremendous dislike for these AUL or UL-only-type organizations and meetings, I have equal dislike for the idea of meetings that purposely exclude library administrators. We should be able to come together as professionals, all equally passionate about creating a great future for libraries (whether we'll be working in that future or not). We all bring something different, unique and useful to the table. Those who should be excluded are those who think that people below or above them in rank have no place in the conversation.

Probably the post that has inspired me most recently is Olivia Nellum's Reserves, Newsletter, Instruction where she discusses how she created a textbook reserves collection with basically no money and a heaping helping of moxie. She also discusses some of the difficulties and unintended consequences of undertaking a project like this.

If you're a new grad, LIS student, or are just thinking about becoming a librarian, you must check out Bobbi Newman's post So You Want to be a Librarian? She has pulled together some of the best advice around the web on the profession and job searching into one easy resource. Also worth taking a look at is Andy Burkhardt's Library School To Do List. In it, he lists some of the important things LIS students should be doing to make themselves marketable in the profession.

Isn't it fun when you work hard to create something in social media and then the provider makes a change that forces you to redo everything? I'd created a nice Facebook page for my liaison area using StaticFBML and Boxes and then Facebook gets rid of boxes, changes their layout, and I had to totally rebuild the page. Grrr And of course right after that, I find this great post from TechCrunch on the 12 Best Ways to Customize Your Facebook Page. Grrrr But hopefully you can get something out of it!

In Evernote, Cloud Computing and Reality, Iris Jastram reminds us of the dangers of having complete faith in the cloud.

I have always felt strongly that librarians cannot come up with creative solutions to problems without having time to just reflect. And sadly, in most libraries, staff are stretched so thin that there's barely time to get the basic work of libraries done. Learn More, Do Nothing by Peter Bromberg at the Learning Roundtable reminds us of the importance of taking that time to let things sink in and reflect.

While Sarah Houghton-Jan was writing about training in this post (also from the Learning Roundtable Blog, I think all library instructors struggle with The Tension between Learn It Fast and Learn It Well. We want to cover as much as we can in a single session, but we also want to make sure that the people we're teaching actually absorb the material. I know that I, myself, have moved from one end of that spectrum to the other in my years of teaching information literacy and I'm getting much more comfortable with the notion of teaching less in order to ensure greater impact.

For those interested in eBooks and wanting an answer to the question why can't all eBooks work on all eBook readers??? check out Jason Griffey's detailed explanation at Pattern Recognition.

I'm starting to see more and more posts from librarians looking at how they iPad could be used professionally. The Great iPad Experiment from Tiffini Travis provides some useful advice for those looking to use the iPad for teaching. At Not so Distant Future, Carolyn Foote talks about Piloting iPads in Library Settings, specifically at her school library.

Selling vs. solving and supporting. I read two posts that make it clear that the focus in marketing can't actually be on selling. David Lee King looks at how to Support Your Community and provides some valuable advice for libraries. In Solving vs. Selling, David Armano reminds us that people don't want to be sold to and that the focus of selling should be on solving problems that people have.

Lots of food for thought here. Hope you find it all as interesting as I have!

The Helmholtz Association, a group of 16 German scientific-technical and biological-medical research centers, has signed an agreement with SpringerOpen to support its researchers' open access publishing efforts.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Helmholtz Association has signed up for open access membership with Springer scientific publishing. The agreement means that the research centres in the Helmholtz Association will pay the fees charged to authors for articles published in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals. The Helmholtz Open Access Project assisted in the proceedings.

SpringerOpen journals are peer-reviewed open access journals in new, future-focused and interdisciplinary fields. They supplement Springer's existing portfolio and that of BioMed Central, which offers over 200 open access journals from the life sciences and biomedicine. SpringerOpen journals appear exclusively online and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which enables free dissemination of copyrighted content. The license does not give Springer exclusive rights to published content.

Authors pay an open access fee for articles they publish in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals, and their articles immediately appear in the relevant publication at www.springerlink.com. Dr Bernhard Mittermaier, head of the Central Library at Forschungszentrum Jlich, is enthusiastic about the agreement: "We believe that the open access journals offered by Springer are a good fit for the six research fields pursued by the Helmholtz Association. We are excited to be embarking on a partnership that will open up new possibilities for developing an open access forum for the findings of our researchers. This agreement is a step towards our goal of establishing sustainable mechanisms for ensuring fair publication fees for open access journals."

Gather up a group of people who make their living through web design, and they'll probably all agree on at least two things: A) touchscreens aren't going anywhere, and B) designing web stuff for touchscreens sort of sucks. Native apps have, in a sense, spoiled users; with things like drag-and-drop and basic touch gesture recognition almost laughably simple to implement in native apps, web app developers are left to hack in such features themselves or risk having their app seem dated from the get-go.

Today Yahoo! is looking to make things a bit less painful with the latest release of their open-source User Interface library, YUI.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

The YUI team is pleased to announce the GA release of YUI 3.2.0, a significant update to YUI's JavaScript and CSS components. This release features a host of performance improvements and major new support for mobile devices with touch UIs.

The Gesture module in YUI 3.2.0 brings touch support to a wide range of YUI-powered interactions, including Drag and Drop and Slider.

There are two ways to get started with the new release:

• Use from the CDN: YUI 3.2.0 is available on the Yahoo! CDN via the 3.2.0 version tag so you can reference the new release content via filepaths like http://yui.yahooapis.com/3.2.0/build/yui/yui-min.js. Switch to the seed file for the new release and all subsequent use() statements will load YUI 3.2.0.
• Download the release: Download YUI 3.2.0 from YUILibrary.com, including source code and examples for all components including those new to this release.
• Explore the examples: YUI examples are a good way to get a feeling for how the library works and the range of functionality it covers.

Noteworthy Changes in YUI 3.2.0

George Puckett has rolled up the high-level list of changes in YUI 3.2.0; you can also check in on our progress addressing issues in the bug database. Here are some of the new and updated components featured in the 3.2.0:

• SimpleYUI has been introduced as a convenience module in addition to rolling up a variety of YUI's most essential features, it creates a global instance (assigned to the global Y) that's available for immediate use. This isn't a watered-down YUIjust a convenience for those who want to have a common rollup with standard Ajax-kit functionality.
  
• Intrinsic support for touch events has been added (mynode.on("touchstart", function(e) {});). We've also added a Gestures module with two bundled gestures flick and move that work with both touch- and mouse-driven devices. Check out the Gestures documentation and examples for ideas about how to start using Gestures.
• YUI's loader now supports capability-based loading. This allows us to segregate, for example, IE-specific code into separate submodules and allow the Loader to bundle that code only for browsers that require it. We're leveraging this new feature to avoid shipping IE-specific code in the Dom module to non-IE browsers, a performance/k-weight boost that will benefit all users of modern browsers with no code change required.
• YUI 3's animation portfolio now supports transitions via the Transition module, providing browser normalization for this powerful, hardware-accelerated (where available) technique for handling transitions; check out this example for sample code. The Animation module, in its most basic form, has a streamlined dependency tree for modern browsers, significantly reducing the k-weight for simple animation in better browsers.
• YUI 3.2.0 debuts a new beta version of YUI's CSS Grids component, and you can begin exploring this new approach to Grids in the preview release. The examples are the best place to start.
• We worked with Michael Johnston of the Yahoo! Mobile Engineering team to bring a new (beta) ScrollView widget to YUI 3.2.0. ScrollView provides a scrolling pane implementation familiar to users of native Apple iOS applications, emulating the elasticity of the element's constraints when scrolled to the beginning or ending limit. You'll see in the 3.2.0 examples for ScrollView that this component is device-neutral, working well with a mouse as well as with touch events on your Android or iOS device.
• The Uploader component from YUI 2 is now part of the YUI 3 family as well, debuting as a beta in 3.2.0.
• Editor (beta) for YUI 3: Editor debuts in YUI 3 as a base utility layer providing a foundation on which you can create a rich text editing control. This version of Editor does not contain a GUI of any kind widget chrome will debut in 3.3.0.
• The History module that debuted with YUI 3.0.0, which was a port of the YUI 2 version, has been deprecated (it remains available in YUI 3.2.0 as history-deprecated). A new beta History utility debuts in 3.2.0, based on Ryan Grove's History Lite module from the YUI 3 Gallery. A preview-release example from the new component is a good starting reference.
• The JSONP and YQL Query modules from the YUI 3 Gallery have become canonical components, debuting as beta in this release.

More to Come

We're excited about the coming months in YUI development:

• YUI Conf 2010 takes place Nov. 8-10 in Sunnyvale. As usual, there will be a Crockford keynote, talks by some of the brilliant contributors to the YUI 3 Gallery (including Nate Cavanaugh and Eduardo Lundgren of Liferay), and sessions from the YUI core team.
• New components and features: We're hard at work on YUI 3 versions of tools like AutoComplete, DataTable, Button, Charts and Editor, as well as some all-new projects. Expect a preview of 3.3.0, with all new work completed thus far, when you're here for the conference in November.
• Yeti, YUI for Node.js, and more: The team continues to push the envelope with projects aimed at the most promising frontiers in frontend engineering. Reid Burke's Yeti was just launched, allowing command-line cross-browser testing for anyone using YUI Test. Dav Glass's work to make YUI 3 work seamlessly with NodeJS has been documented on the blog and will be an official YUI offering soon. And there's more to come.

Feedback

Let us know what you think of the new release in the forums or @yuilibrary on Twitter.

On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time.

I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily. This, despite efforts like the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (which, incidentally, is kept in a shipping container).

William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this:

If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture.

Which struck me pretty hard, that bit about atemporality, and the flatness of digital memory, but particularly our lack of awareness of this situation. I talked about the Library of Alexandria, and the Yo La Long Dia, and the National Libraries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraqall examples of cultural destruction caused in part by neglect and willful disregard for our shared patrimony.

These losses, despite their horror, will always happen: but what can we do to mitigate and understand them? In a world obsessed with facts, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth, whether it concerns the evidence for going to war, the proliferation of damaging conspiracy theories, the polarisation of debate on climate change, or so many other issues. This sounds utopian, and it is. But I do believe that we're building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.

One of the ways to do this might be to talk more not only about history, but about historiography. History not as a set of facts, but as a process, and one in which, whether we agree or not with the writers, our own opinions and biases are always to be challenged

I talked about Wikipedia because for me, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.

As is my wont, I made a book to illustrate this. Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples' attention on.

This particular bookor rather, set of booksis every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article's inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes Saddam Hussein was a dickhead.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.

More photos of the books are, as ever, available on Flickr.

UPDATE: You can listen to the whole talk, and me saying um a lot, over at Huffduffer.

Facebook has been quietly adding a Likes in Common link to personal profiles in recent weeks. Located in the Likes box beneath Friends and above Photos in the left sidebar, it pops up a window showing which Pages both you and another user are connected to.

Visibility of the Likes panel can be controlled in the Privacy Settings->Basic Directory Information, meaning you are able to see your Likes in Common with non-friends if they allow it. The feature is important to Facebook because it gets users to interact with the Likes panel, increasing the probability that they'll form new connections with Pages

The Likes panel link states [#] Likes in Common, but graphically only shows one or zero of these mutual Likes. This prompts the user to click the link to learn of the others, increasing engagement with the panel. By placing a mutual Like in the far left slot, Facebook creates a trusted recommendation for the as-yet-unliked Pages in the right two slots. Since you already share one Like, you're inclined to think their other Likes might be of interest as well.

When two people have mutual Likes, there is about a 65% chance that one will be shown graphically in the far left spot. More than one mutual Like is only shown graphically if a user has no other non-mutual Likes.

What's interesting is the order in which Pages are shown in the All Likes and Mutual Likes tabs of the pop up. While there isn't an exact hierarchy of how Page categories are ordered, they appear to be grouped into five types which divide the list into regions. At the top are civic categories for Park, Museum/Attraction, and Library/Public Building. Next are brands, products, and services such as categories for Technology Product/Service, Consumer Products, Food/Beverage, Health/Beauty, Professional Service, and Sports/Athletics. In the third region are smaller business categories such as Local Business, Online Store, Store, Restaurant, and Bar. Near the bottom are organization categories including Education, Religious Organization, Politician and Non-profit. At the end of the order are the media categories for TV Show, Movie, Game, Musician, Website, Page, and Application.

These may be ranked to surface Pages from categories like Product/Service which weren't supported before the interests-to-Likes profile conversion, while demoting categories like Musician of which many users converted multiple interests into Likes. Alternatively, the ranking could simply favor Facebook itself, as the site's various product and official Pages fall into the preferred second type/region.

Likes in Common offers users interesting data about their similarities with other users while encouraging them to find new Page to connect to. Along with helping to grow Pages, the feature may inspire third-party developers to create a more sophisticated way of determining with whom you have the most overlapping or differing interests.

So taken was I by William J Mitchell's comments on the impact of the network and mobile communications on space that I have quoted it here a couple of times already ;-) Here it is ...

The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is "a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces" such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously "a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces". This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures--offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles. [The new oases | Economist.com Behind a paywall]

As we are more connected we are better able to 'micro-coordinate' our activities, postponing arrangements until they need to be made, conferring with others about what to do next or where to go up, arranging ad hoc rendezvous, checking on a detail or request. This is now routine, and as Mitchell suggests it can change the way in which we think about space. In fact when we talk about the social use of space, it is likely that such uses are also shaped by the network and mobile communications.

I have come across several examples of this recently ....

• Groupfinder is a service provided by NCSU libraries. It helps students 'micro-coordinate' their activities across several communications environments ..

  GroupFinder is a tool designed to help students let group members know where they are studying in the library. In a building with high use and uneven cellular service coverage, it is often difficult for students to locate a space to work in a group, and it is also challenging for groups to let latecomers know where they are working. GroupFinder is an attempt to solve these problems by providing a low-barrier method for students to broadcast their location in the building. Once an activity is posted to GroupFinder, it is displayed in a number of places:

  • The GroupFinder kiosk in the main lobby
  • The library's e-board system
  • Any computer with an internet connection
  • The Libraries' mobile site

  [Groupfinder]

• The redevelopment of library space is aligned to the "huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces" that Mitchell notes. The Guardian recently discussed changing university architectures and the interaction between space and teaching and learning.

"The most convincing new university buildings", says Neary, "are those where students are given real responsibility for managing and supervising the spaces within which they learn, as well as acting as support for other students' learning. The Learning Grid at the University of Warwick is the most developed form of this new kind of space."

Neary was at Warwick before Lincoln. Designed by the university library with architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, the Learning Grid is, according to its manager, Rachel Edwards, "a technology-rich, flexible and informal learning environment, open 24/7 with a capacity for 300 people". Essentially, this is a fusion of a library and a common room. It allows disciplines to cross. It encourages students to help one another as well as themselves. It is generating fresh lines of research. "It's been breaking down the gap between students and teachers," says Neary, "with students becoming part of the academic project rather than consumers of dispensed knowledge." [University architecture shapes up for a revolution]

• I noted Andy Walsh's talk at Emtacl10 a while ago. I notice that he has a selection of presentations and papers available in the University of Huddersfield repository. Together, they provide a nice overview of various ways in which library spaces and the network experiences of their users can be usefully tied together with QR Codes, mobile communications, and social network services.

There is a new issue of Information for Social Change, on the theme of information ethics. This issue is edited by Mikael Bk. It's a very international collection of articles, some of them a little odd and all of them interesting.

Using Technology in Library Training with Paul Signorelli

In these two ALA TechSource online workshops, Paul Signorelli provides hands-on, interactive instruction in using current web technology to enhance in-person training sessions or conduct remote training sessions for employees in multiple locations.

Session 1: Using Technology to Enhance In-Person Training

• Incorporating YouTube, Google Docs, and SlideShare into onsite learning
• Making PowerPoint effective and interesting
• Using technology as a tool while focusing on learners

Session 2: Using Technology for Remote Training Sessions

• Using Skype, Google Talk/Yahoo! Messenger, LinkedIn discussion groups, and other tools for learning
• Adapting your onsite skills to provide effective online learning
• Building online communities of learning

And much more!

Sign up today and engage in 90 minutes of discussion and interactive learning that you can't get anywhere else!

About the Instructor
Paul Signorelli is a writer, trainer, and consultant who explores, uses, writes about, and helps others become familiar with Web 2.0 and smartphone technology to creatively facilitate positive change within organizations. He has participated in the ALA Learning Round Table, and written for ALA Learning blog, American Libraries magazine, and ALA Editions.

About ALA TechSource Workshops
ALA TechSource Workshops are focused, small-group online discussions that give you the opportunity to learn from experts who offer authoritative answers to your questions, as well as to interact with colleagues who have similar concerns. Workshops are recorded and, along with other materials, are made available to attendees for future reference.

Read more and register at ALA Tech Source.