Photo: Amanda Mills As our economy continues to change, it's becoming more and more important for libraries to offer resources to help people who are looking for new opportunities. As companies continue to shed jobs, replacing them with automation, it is becoming increasingly necessary for workers to rely on their own efforts. Providing co-working spaces is one way libraries can support people who are taking on roles as contractors, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. So what is co-working? According to David Lee King and Michael Porter in “Create a Library ‘Tech Shop’,” ( American Libraries Magazine , March/April 2012, p. 57) co-working “...brings together independent workers, freelancers, small business owners, and others who need workspace. These folks regularly gather to brainstorm ideas, team up on projects, and work in a more social setting.” It can also be described as “...a recent movement of independent ‘workspaces’ that are created for remote workers, location neutra...
By GlacierNPS [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Working together, even to change the world, doesn’t have to involve a great deal of effort. In the spirit of the “work smarter, not harder” mantra, platforms for problem solving demonstrate that mass collaboration can result in successful projects while reducing each participant’s workload. Anthony D. Williams, PLATFORMS FOR GLOBAL PROBLEM SOLVING: How Online Platforms are RevolutionizingSocial Change One of the benefits of Globally Distributed Creative Problem Solving is this ability to share the work of changing the world. In the face of a never-ending cycle of bad news, our natural reaction may be to turn away in defeat, thinking that the problems are too big for us to do anything about. What could we possibly do in the face of environmental and cultural inertia, a billion dollar lobbying industry, and years of poor education? Well, hundreds of pe...
Our inaugural Cool Tool of the Week (CTOW) is IFTT (If This Then That). With IFTTT, you can schedule actions for your favorite web services--kind of like a macro for the web. You create "recipes" on the site by selecting an application "Channel" that will act as a "Trigger", then you select another application to perform an "Action." Pieces of data from the Trigger are regarded as "Ingredients" in the recipe. For example, one of my Recipes checks my Pocket account for recently read items. It then takes those items and adds them to my diigo account as public bookmarks, along with any tags I may have added in Pocket. It performs this action every 15 minutes. I can chain together a number of recipes to automate a good chunk of my PLN. IFTTT is, at this time, a free service, though it looks like there are plans for a premium service in the future. Give it a try!
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