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The Center City District and the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau, in conjunction with GeoSim Systems, have recently released Virtual Philadelphia, a richly textured 3-D model of the city. The model covers area of the Center City District – roughly Locust to Race and Front to 20th Streets – in great detail. Every building, street, alley, dumpster, and manhole cover is included. You can even click on any building and retrieve its address, history, and current business tenants. It’s just like the real Philly, except the streets are spotless, all the people are skinny, and it’s totally quiet.

One caveat: the Virtual Philadelphia application is a resource hog; make sure you have a high-speed internet connection, a decent graphics processor, and lots of memory. Even with these, it can be crash-prone – please save anything you were doing before you start the exploring! (If you don’t have a computer that will run it, check out this early promotional video; it’s a good demonstration of the model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxk0Xm0fRFw) Even with these problems, Virtual Philadelphia is a very exciting achievement.

Philadelphia, high and low.

Drexel University has purchased a license to Burton Group’s IT Research Reports. These are tactically focused to keep IT managers ahead of the curve on new tech and marketplace developments. Used by Drexel’s IRT, Burton Group reports are part of a proprietary knowledgebase built on their research and real-world experience from hundreds of global enterprise consulting engagements. Their reports ranging from 25-50 pages with loads of practical advice - much more in-depth and technical than Gartner or Forrester reports with which you may be familiar.

BurtonGroup’s content is based on something they call “Reference Architecture” that describes the underlying principles of a particular technology. Then they supplement the core document annually with more formulaic “if-then” logic pieces to help an IT manager make planning decisions that are up to date with technology and marketplace developments. You can read more about it (here).

Due to publisher restrictions, only full-time Drexel Faculty and Staff may sign up to view BurtonGroup content directly HERE.
Students and adjunct faculty may view the index of content on their website (see links below) and request full-text of individual reports through Tim Siftar, the IST Librarian.

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Video is the brave new world of web content. Who handles it well? Well let me ask you - how satisfied are you with the results of your YouTube search? Do you think it searches every word spoken in the video? I don’t think so. But imagine some day not too far in the future, you’ll be able to search every word spoken in every home-made YouTube video, along with every Hollywood blockbuster, every recorded faculty lecture and every newscast or radio program. Then just >click< and watch the video clips. It's inevitable...but we're not yet there.

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Some of you may have noticed how I’ve added a browser-based Meebo widget to my IST Research Guide pages recently. I really enjoy being able to offer quick, informal assistance this way. Users type in the bottom area and then the dialog appears up above. No IM client is required on your part - it happens all in the browser! One downside though, is that it’s not obvious to patrons when I step away from the monitor. And if I’m not here when you IM me … so much for the instantaneous aspect! So what are your options for getting a quick answer?

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While I typically don’t republish newsbits from beyond Drexel, I wanted to call attention to this announcement from the American Libraries Assn “Library Info Technology” division. The kind of value this one entrepreneur was able to provide by serving up low-cost shared services really illustrates the opportunities that are continually opening up as web-based services evolve. I think if more iSchools were operating “clinics” with low-cost consulting to support these services, I think that would be even better! ( I hope to have more to say on that topic in the near future….)

“2008 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award winner announced
CHICAGO - Glenn Peterson is the 2008 recipient of the LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award for his development of EngagedPatrons.org. Engagedpatrons.org provides low-cost and free Web site services for public libraries. The site went live in May 2006, enabling even small- and medium-sized libraries the ability to offer high-quality Web services to their patrons, services that most would otherwise be unable to provide.”

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Here’s the link to the full text.

So it might obvious from the dates on my recent posts that this blog has been undernourished lately. Considering all that’s going on at Hagerty Library this year, I’m lucky to do one posting per month! (Changes here will be the subject of another blog posting coming soon.) On the bright side, the benefit to you is I can batch the news and choose my words and instructions a bit more carefully.

My previous post was on new services. This one will focus on products. I’ll get up the outline first and then come backfill with more detailed instructions later. What I really enjoy sharing are anecdotes supplied by users who go ahead and experiment with the new toys. Feel free to email me any comments along those lines. The “comment” feature on this blog gets hit with so much robo-spam that real replies can get lost in the shuffle. But if you email, I’ll include them in an update. So… on with the show!

NEW PRODUCTS

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Instant Messaging:
Hagerty Library and your IST Librarian now offer browser-based instant messaging reference services using the Meebo widget, 9-5 weekdays. Why is this special? Because for anyone who just wants to ask a quick question, IM is perfect. Besides, according to an unscientific survey of teenaged acquaintances “email is for old people.” On my site, see the box on the far right hand side. No client or IM account needed on your end! Check it out!

To get your own Meebo account, and enjoy IM access across all other IM platforms, go to www.meebo.com. Just fyi - our Reference Desk service uses “Pigeon” - (formerly GAIM) on account of its nice features for capturing the “log files” of IM interactions with patrons, and storing them in one place on the departmental shared drive.

CRC Evening Office Hours
Your IST Librarian has begun holding office hours in the iSchool CRC from 5-6pm, one evening per week. The plan is to rotate between Tuesday’s, Wednesdays and Thursday’s. Monday’s I’m usually on the Reference Desk at Hagerty, and Friday’s… well let’s just say there’s other business to attend to. I’ll do my best to update my Twitter microblog as soon as my office hour plans are set for the next week. Thats the bit of text that shows up underneath my photo on all the Library Research Guides I edit - with the headline “Where’s Tim now?” Let me know if you think that page loads too slow with all these gadgets plugged in. I still consider all of this experimental and I may have to change things around if it bogs everything down.

What is Twitter? Aside from loads of hype about it helping to track friends via text messages, it also seems to be an easy way to update my webpage. And it keeps me to 140 characters!

As always, you are also welcome to contact me about scheduling a F2F or phone meeting for less serendipitous encounters!

Best,
Tim

My postings on Second Life have not exactly reflected the growth of this project that the Library started back in …June? Our Library “Second Life Task Force” has been on a tear lately. Last week I hosted my first hands on training session for a group of neophyte colleagues about how SL is being used by librarians. It included an overview that borrowed liberally from Penn State IST’s Bart Pursel who I heard a speak at LeBow the previous week (see his site for slides). My talk also highlighted work being done on InfoIsland, but in two hours couldn’t hold a candle to the course they taught in-world.

Ours was more of a quick and dirty start-up session. We walked attendees through the avatar-creation process via the NMC.org portal, then toured Drexel’s Island and some other library-oriented sites in SL. I’ve had some good feedback from my colleagues, some of whom are already fielding requests for library collaboration on SL projects from their patrons.

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This is a perennial project for the INFO 520 class. And I always wonder how far to go in responding to the questions I get about it. Aren’t all these librarians-in-training just overflowing with ambition and creative ideas for research projects like this? Well… I guess for those full of verve, they don’t need my help and this posting won’t hurt them. And for the ones that can use the encouragement, at least they’ll have to wade through my sermonizing to get to the useful advice, and hopefully be better for it.

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