Ref Tech Rob

The issue with Picasa's embedded slideshows has been resolved--on this blog, anyway.

If you scroll down to earlier entries in my blog, you'll notice that the entry related to recarpeting has a sizable block of white space. This is where I had embedded a slideshow from Picasa and it hasn't been running for about three days now. I haven't seen anything on their group page apart from one similar complaint, but at this point there have been no responses. I'll check back in when I find out more.

Yesterday, Google added presentation software to their web based office suite. After an initial review, it seems that the focus of the software is web collaboration, as you can see in this short example . I'm not sure what happens if the presentation is left online with no moderation, though. The format is very basic so far, with limited export options and no ability to integrate sound. The most surprising thing to me was that I didn't see any evidence of the ability to integrate the presentations with other Google products, namely Picasa. The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds of presentation changes is a definite plus, however All in all, It's an interesting start and I am sure that they will add more features soon.

I read with interest Regina Powers' opinion piece--"A Plea for Respect"--in the August edition of American Libraries. Her plea is a common complaint among librarians today--"the public doesn't know what we do." Usually, it is suggested that we either stay the course or we add more features for the public at our institutions--game nights, in house movies, "coffee and Danishes".... The problem with both lines of thinking is that we need the public's attention to make either work, and we just don't have it. What we need to do is connect the information and resources that we have with the public at its point of need. We need to get out of our buildings physically and electronically and begin to push our resources the way other institutions do. We need to create partnerships with news media, local governments, public institutions, ISPs and others in order to connect the public with the information it needs at its point of need. For example, ou

We have new carpet at our branch! It looks great, but getting it done was a challenge and the final stage was a bit of a rush: