A few items from today's meeting

Another great TechTalk meeting today! This post includes links to stuff I talked about. I hope others who presented or mentioned sites will post their links too, so we have a record of what was covered. Here's mine:

• Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California, the final report of the UC Bibliographic Services Task Force
  
• Meebo, web-based instant messaging (with widgets)

And one last thing: The first e-mail I read when I returned to my office after TechTalk was American Libraries Direct. It contained a link to an amazing story from the LA Times about a Mississippi Delta librarian's last day on the job. I am struck by the contrast between what he dealt with every day and the fascinating technology discussion I just left. I feel very privileged to do what I do, but I also feel very privileged to be part of a profession that includes this man and his library. Read it for yourself and realize how much libraries matter.

Mashup Awards

Talis, British library vendor and recent purveyor of all things Web 2.0, has announced the first winners of the "Mashing Up the Library" competition, which is "intended to openly encourage innovation in the display, use, and reuse of data from and about libraries." Check out this announcement from ALA's TechSource.

LJ article on Library 2.0

The current issue of Library Journal includes an article on Library 2.0 that's worth a read. John Blyberg's comments on ILS vendors and the lack of open standards are of particular interest. We have recently purchased some 2.0-ish products from Innovative, but they are, of course, proprietary and -- as far as I know -- cannot be accessed except via Innovative's ILS. That's quite different from the leading Web 2.0 sites, most of which offer a variety of ways to interact with content outside of their own interfaces (e.g. APIs, RSS). Isn't it ironic that these private, for-profit companies can open their systems, but many nonprofit libraries can't?