Many thanks to those of you who have written to tell us about your new media resources or applications. Today we are highlighting a few of these on this page. Feel free to share more applications by leaving a comment below.

Communications and Alumni

• Advanced Organizational Communication is a team blog by Walter Carl’s class at Northeastern University. This semester, the class is collaborating with John Cass from Backbone Media to better understand the reasons, conditions and factors it takes to make a successful corporate blog. Student involvement consists of helping to design questions for the interview protocol, conducting interviews with corporate bloggers, transcribing the interviews, performing a thematic analysis of the interviews, and contributing posts to the class blog that articulate the initial findings and what they learned from the project. Blog and description submitted by Dr.Walter J. Carl.
• “What’s hAPPening!” is the blog of the Appalachian Alumni Association (Appalachian State University) consisting of links to news articles, photos, alumni profiles, campus news and other information relevant to our alumni base. Submitted by Rob Robertson.

Library and Information Resources

• The FLICC/FEDLINK Environmental Scan wiki is a collaborative project to describe external trends and issues that could affect FLICC/FEDLINK’s strategic planning. We describe, annotate and link to societal, information use, library, publishing and government library trends that will help set the stage for a Business Plan being created by FLICC/FEDLINK, a Library of Congress-sponsored consortium of federal library and information centers (http://www.loc.gov/flicc/). Site and description submitted by Cindy Boeke.

Teaching and Learning

• The collegiate education experience becoming increasingly reliant on technology. Yet our high schools and universities have failed to educate their students with the means to take full advantage of the tools available. College v2 aims to arm students with the tricks, tips, and knowledge to put them ahead of the pack. College v2 will also post an occasional news story or photograph that will help you in you everyday life. My aim is to help you take over the world, or at least get out of taking 18 credits alive, and intact. Site and description submitted by Sean Blanda.
• Jason Heath, bass instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Trinity Intenational University, maintains Jason Heath’s Bass Page, a blog for players and enthusiasts of the double bass and electric bass as a way to communicate with both both personal students and for the Chicago bass community in general, providing double bass concert news, lesson schedules, recommended repertoire, lesson summaries and assignments, and the like.
• Skate of the Web highlights new tools for learning by Dr. Antonio Vantaggiato at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón.

Patrons in the Drivers Seat: Giving Advanced Tool-sets to Library Patrons
John Blyberg
Ann Arbor District Library

Building a Wall of Books
Edward Vielmetti
University of Michigan School of Information

Google Maps and You: Five Steps To Including a Google Map On Your Website
Chris Deweese
Lewis & Clark Library System

Go Where the Patrons Are: Outreach In the Age of Library 2.0
Jason Griffey
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Today’s presentations focus on how libraries can make information/functionality independent of a particular application so that it can be manipulated and reused in a variety of creative ways. An API exposes a set of functions that make up an application and can be used in the creation of other applications. RSS is an XML-based format for syndicating content on the Web. Structured blogging and microformats are ways of creating structured data that computers can understand. The following presenters are using these tools in order to put more information in the hands of patrons, allow patrons more control over information, and allow librarians to disseminate information in novel ways and only to those who would want it.

John Blyberg is the Network Administrator and Lead Developer for the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan, and was largely responsible for their Web site redesign, widely hailed as a model for all libraries. John did a lot of hacking at his library’s catalog and content management system in order to put more information into the hands of his patrons. John will talk about the tools and interfaces he has made available to his patrons and how he has built a true online community on his Web site.

Edward Vielmetti, researcher at the University of Michigan School of Information, is a passionate advocate of libraries and is on the Technical Advisory Board at the Ann Arbor District Library. He has designed several applications for libraries, including his “wall of books” display. By exposing the structured data in the catalog through RSS, Ed has transformed the new books feed into a visual display. See how he did it and how you can do the same at your library.

Chris Deweese is the Internet Applications Developer for the Lewis and Clark Library System in Illinois. There, he works to develop Web applications to enable member libraries to provide better services to their patrons. In his presentation, Chris will teach attendees how to use the Google Maps API to put a Google Map on their own library’s Web site using JavaScript and XSLT. Don’t worry; he does all of the hard work!

Jason Griffey is a Reference/Instruction Librarian at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He has been working with his colleagues to develop a way of using Wordpress and the Structured Blogging plugin to create a “catalog” of new books and then to disseminate that information to academic departments. Jason will discuss how structured blogging creates machine readable data that can then be manipulated and presented in a variety of ways.

Here are links to the topics from earlier this week:

April 10: Blogging In Libraries
April 11: Podcasting in Libraries
April 12: Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies
April 13: Issues In Libraries