Bibliotheque 2.0

The future is now

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Google Indoor Maps for the Library / Museum

thatblondelibrarian:

My local library consortium is hosting a webinar on using Google Indoor Maps for the public library.

Here’s a part of their blurb: 

In November 2011, Google launched Indoor Maps, an exciting addition to the award-winning Google Maps. Indoor Google Maps will enhance your building’s overhead or satellite view by replacing that with a floor plan of your building’s public areas. This innovation helps visitors find their destination in large or unfamiliar spaces.

I have a big lack of knowledge about indoor maps, but for those also unaccustomed you may be interested in how some museums and libraries have utilized it:

The Smithsonian -

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American Museum of Natural History - 

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pussreboots: californiastatelibrary: Women not only make history, they catalog it From 1913-1920, the State Library had its own library school. The library students in this photo were among the first to collect and categorize information from California newspapers and county histories. The index cards they created became the basis for the California Information File, which now has over 720,000 cards. It’s still regarded as an essential research tool for California history. See our Women’s History Month calendar for more inspiring stories of California women. Although the typewriter and cards have been replaced by RFID tags and a computer with an off site catalog… the desk is the same. :)

pussreboots:

californiastatelibrary:

Women not only make history, they catalog it

From 1913-1920, the State Library had its own library school. The library students in this photo were among the first to collect and categorize information from California newspapers and county histories. The index cards they created became the basis for the California Information File, which now has over 720,000 cards. It’s still regarded as an essential research tool for California history.

See our Women’s History Month calendar for more inspiring stories of California women.

Although the typewriter and cards have been replaced by RFID tags and a computer with an off site catalog… the desk is the same. :)

51 notes

Libraries, Hackspaces and E-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution

thelifeguardlibrarian:

Well look what we got here. (Hey, pcsweeney.)

Working at a library is an unparalleled opportunity to witness the full range of human curiosity, from excited students working on school assignments together to wild-eyed entrepreneurs pursuing their dreams to careful senior citizens researching where to invest their personal savings to supplement their pensions (and lots more besides). All these people were using the library as a place, a resource, and a community. Because that’s what libraries are.

And we’ve never needed that more than we need it today. We’ve run out of places. What used to be public squares and parks are now malls. Places that used to welcome kids now prohibit them (in England, where I live, some smart-aleck invented a device called “the mosquito,” which plays a shrill tone only audible to young ears, used to drive children away from semi-public spaces like the benches in front of stores).

What’s more, we’re *drowning* in information. Pre-Internet librarianship was like pre-Internet newspaper publishing: “select, then publish.” That is, all the unfiltered items are presented to a gatekeeper, who selects the best of them, and puts them in front of the rest of the world. Now we live in a “publish, then select” world: everyone can reach everything, all the time, and the job of experts is to collect and annotate that material, to help others navigate its worth and truthfulness.

That is to say that society has never needed its librarians, and its libraries, more. The major life-skill of the information age is information literacy, and no one’s better at that than librarians. It’s what they train for. It’s what they live for.

But there’s another gang of information-literate people out there, a gang who are a natural ally of libraries and librarians: the maker movement. Clustered in co-operative workshops called “makerspaces” or “hack(er)spaces,” makers build physical stuff. They make robots, flying drones, 3D printers (and 3D printed stuff), jewelry, tools, printing presses, clothes, medieval armor… Whatever takes their fancy. Making in the 21st century has moved out of the individual workshop and gone networked. Today’s tinkerer work in vast, distributed communities where information sharing is the norm, where the ethics and practices of the free/open source software movement has gone physical.