Ref Tech Rob

There are so many formats and protocols for information these days. I think it would be a good idea to develop some guidelines for evaluating and developing new information tools. People want information to be free. People want information right this instant . People want information to be ubiquitous. People want information to be accurate. People want information to transfer easily to other devices or formats. People want information to come from one tool. People want information to be free. I think that this is the case in so many ways. First of all, nobody really wants to pay for anything . Secondly, we have gotten so used to free information from the library and the internet, it is especially galling for the majority of the public to pay for it. People want information right this instant. Technology should be shortening the distance between our information need and our information acquisition. If I'm hiking in the wilderness and I think that I hear a bear, I will want to know ...

Anyone who has a web page may want to take a look at this recent entry in the Official Google Blog about Google Sitemaps . The Google Webmaster Help Center lays out what they are looking for in a web page. Google has also included a robots.txt tool.

Hello! My name is Rob, and I'm a reference librarian at a public library somewhere in Ohio. I'm starting this blog with the purpose of exploring the role of new (popular) technology in the traditional library setting. I may discover that the two are incompatible, or that the two go together like peanut butter and jelly, or that I'm totally out of my depth (highly probable). In the coming weeks, I want to take a look at, among other things, the Web 2.0 phenomenon, AJAX, the Semantic Web and SPARQL, social software, tagging, blogs, wikis, podcasts, vlogs, digital rights, web development, the open source movement, and the giant that is Google. It's just a small amount of information to cover, but I think we could probably stretch it out into a few posts.