Invisible Yet Necessary

Co-creator of Blogger, author and software developer still finds time for Oregon blog directory

Blogger, MySpace, Facebook and Livejournal are words that have become popular on campuses around the country. Corvallis resident Paul Bausch contributed to the development of the technology that made blogs and social community a reality.

Bausch studied journalism at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. But he quickly got disillusioned by the broadcasting industry. He felt that local news was dictated by national agencies like The Associated Press and that only national events mattered. The role of local or campus news outlets was basically to republish whatever story was provided to them.

“Find a local angle and rewrite it … ,” said Bausch of his college journalism experience. “This was extremely discouraging to me.”

While working on his degree, Bausch also did programming on the side. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco to work for an e-commerce company. Not long after, two of his classmates asked him to become the first employee of Pyra Labs, the company they had just created. The company’s goal was to develop new project management tools. While the tool itself never found a sizeable audience, one of its components generated a lot of interest. The component was an application that will list notes in reverse chronological order. Pyra Labs decided to shift its focus to develop the component. Bausch, along with Pyra Labs co-founders Meg Hourihan and Evan Williams, ended up writing most of the code for the new application, a Weblog tool named Blogger.

Weblog was not a novelty by then and Bausch was already maintaining one to find connections with other people through the Internet. But Blogger would participate in the blog revolution by easing the process of creating and maintaining a blog. The Blogger service took off on its own and the usage exploded once the company started Blogspot, a hosting service for blogs.

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Messaging service offers live help from library staff

Initiative is part of larger project to bring more library services online, accessible to students

By Riad Lemhachheche

“The primary target is the OSU community. We want to be able to provide real-time help wherever someone needs it,” said Ruth Vondracek, head of Reference and Instruction at OSU Valley Library.

The live reference service enables patrons to exchange text messages with librarians. The system also enables the user and the librarian to share a common browser window. Librarians can use the window to point to a location from where the resource researched can be accessed. Librarians can also display particular pages on the patron’s computer.

While the service has not been widely publicized yet, this option has proven popular to help patrons navigate through menus to locate the article or resource they are looking for.

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A workshop at CHI 2006 in Montreal that matches my research topics. Submission deadline of position papers has been extended to Jan 16th.

IT@Home: Unraveling Complexities of Networked Devices in the Home
CHI 2006 Workshop

Call for Participation

The home is becoming a complex and hard to manage collection of
computers and digital lifestyle devices. The work to setup and
maintain a network of digital living devices in the home is similar
to the work of IT professionals. Indeed the growing complexity of
interconnected digital devices results in more and more time spent
solving problems with those devices and their configurations, an
important part of computer use that we call “IT@Home”. The workshop
will be structured to consider four areas of focus:

• Perspectives – How should we consider IT@Home? What theories
  apply to IT@Home?
• Problem Framing – What are critical problems in IT@Home?
• Empirical Study – Case studies and examples of effectively
  studying home IT.
• Design – What are some critical design issues for IT@Home?

Contributions to these conceptual areas that are illustrated through
data and case studies will be valued by researchers, designers,
product teams and market analysts through the coming years.

Individuals interested in participating in this full-day workshop
should submit a position paper on IT@Home that addresses one of the
four areas listed above. Position papers should be limited to 4
pages. Submissions in PDF or Word should be sent to David McDonald
dwmc at u.washington.edu by Monday, January 16, 2006. Notifications of
acceptance to the workshop will be made in early February 2006.

For more information on the workshop please visit:
IT@Home: Unraveling Complexities of Networked Devices in the Home
CHI 2006 Workshop

This is a difficult week for social software systems!

Typepad, one of the blogging tool from Six Apart , was down for several hours on Friday (approx 15-20 hrs)
Now, it is the turn of Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking manager, that just got bought by Yahoo!
Del.icio.us has been down since 8pm PST yesterday and was back online early today.

More info on the Del.icio.us blog

What you need not flying off the shelf? Try the library’s catalogs

OSU’s Valley Library has many ways to get the books you need

By Riad Lemhachheche

The OSU Valley Library owns about 1.9 million monographic volumes (books, videos, maps and government documents). Yet, OSU patrons may not find all the items they need for their research or classes in the shelves of the Valley Library.

Indeed, while the OSU collection is substantial, it is nowhere near the Library of Congress with its 130 million items spread over 530 miles of bookshelves. Additionally, OCLC WorldCat, a worldwide library cooperative, reached one billion holdings this August.

The Valley clearly pales in comparison with it’s 1.9 mil. But, as the saying goes, it’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it.

So, what are the options left to OSU patrons if items they’re looking for isn’t on the shelves here in fair Corvallis?

In the case of articles, the library subscribes to several online publications accessible through the online catalog.

Another resource is the Summit Alliance Web catalog. Summit is the catalog of all the holdings of the 33 partnering academic libraries in the Pacific Northwest and was created by the merger of Orbis, the Oregon Academic Library Association, and Cascade, its Washington Counterpart. The catalog contains more than 20 million items of which 8 million are unique titles.

Any search done on the OSU catalog, OASIS, can be repeated on the Summit catalog and OSU patrons can borrow items available from any of the Summit Alliance member institutions.

Turnaround time is around three to five days for Summit borrowing.

“The interesting thing is that of this database, 65 percent of the books in the database are owned by only one of the Alliance members. That heterogeneity really increases the value of belonging to the Alliance,” said John Pollitz, the associate university librarian for public services and innovative technology.

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