University of Florida Event on October 4, 2011, 6pm: Jane McGonigal: Author and world-renowned gaming expert Jane McGonigal, PhD, is an expert on alternate reality games and a renowned game developer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She has appeared at TED, the New Yorker, and the Web 2.0 summit, among others. Business Week has named her “one of the top 10 innovators to watch.” Watch Jane McGonigal on the Colbert Report. Text above from the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and available directly from theRead More →

I saw this announcement and it sounds great. I hope to make it (if finishing an article doesn’t prevent me), but it’s especially wonderful because this will definitely be a smart, aware, contextualized discussion of feminism like the kind found in Bitch Magazine articles which interrogate popular culture in a way not done elsewhere, or done as well or at least not as humorously. ……………………………………………………… The University of Florida’s Center for Women’s Studies & Gender Research & The Friends of Wild Iris Books invite you to join a participatory discussion with Debbie Rasmussen, Publisher of Bitch: Feminist Responses to Popular Culture about how—and whether—feminism canRead More →

The University of the Netherlands Antilles is hosting a Seminar for Libraries in the Dutch Caribbean this week and it will include a session on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). The full program is online, and Brooke Wooldridge (the dLOC Coordinator) and I will both be attending and we’re excited to share about dLOC and to further develop connections and representations of the Dutch Caribbean in dLOC. Currently, dLOC already includes a number of maps like the one here, travel books, and many other items related to the Dutch Caribbean with many more materials in process to be added. Please see the materialsRead More →

On Monday morning, Val Davis (from the University of Florida Marston Science Library) and I presented on “Bioactive: A Library Game” (currently online here) that several UF librarians made as an alternative to the standard 40 minute library intro tutorial to increase student engagement with the actual work of learning about using library resources. Bioactive was originally designed in Inform and it’s now moved to a web quest design, which is an even greater simplificiation from the earlier text-based Inform format. The simplicity of the design is for sustainability and ease of maintenance, but it’s more importantly used to ensure that the interface doesn’t getRead More →

I’m at ALA (still today and through some of tomorrow before a red eye flight home) and this morning I attended and presented within the OCLC Sponsored “Microfilm to Digitization Roadshow.” This included presentations from Kelly Barrall and Joan DaShiel on the ins and outs of their microfilm and microfilm digitization processing and Katherine Walter from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on her work with the Nebraska Public Documents project. Katherine is the Co-Director for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Chair of the Digital Initiatives & Special Collections Department, and my presentation on digitizing from microfilm for the Digital Library of theRead More →

In my last post on the Digital Library of the Caribbean presenting at ACURIL, the title for Brooke Wooldridge and Marilyn Ochoa’s presentation was incorrectly listed as “dLOC Toolkit and Usability Testing: A User-­Centered Approach to Improve Electronic Resource Design” when it should have been “A User-Centered Approach to Improve Electronic Resource Design.” More importantly, I failed to list (or even realize) that Mark Sullivan from the University of Florida presented twice on the dLOC Toolkit, “dLOC Toolkit: Create Your Own Electronic Resources.” Mark’s presentation will soon be online within dLOC here and an earlier presentation, “dLOC Technical Overview,” is already online within dLOC here.Read More →