4.12.2009

Favorite iPhone apps

I do not know what I did before iPhone. Apparently many others feel the same as Apple is approaching a billion app downloads. In honor of the impending milestone I am making a list of my faves. Here they are - not in order...

Tweetie - one of many Twitter apps available. It is straightforward and easy to navigate.


Shazam - not only can it listen to songs (on the radio, cd's, etc.) and identify them, but then you are linked to performances on YouTube and links to iTunes to purchase.

SnapTell - take a picture with your phone of any book, DVD, CD and within get a rating, desription and links to Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. Handy for comparison shopping and for remembering items that you see.

iNeedStuff - My favorite shopping list. Add items that you need to the list. When you use it to shop the geolocator feature of the iPhone identifies the store where you are and the application learns what items are where in the store. There is a desktop application so you can sync your phone to that master list.

NowPlaying - what movies are on? Also geolocates.

Games - Drop7 and Wurdle - I was completely addicted to Drop7 (described as tetris meets sudoku) until I played Wurdle. I have spent countless hours trying to beat my scores on both games.

Amazon Kindle - Book reader for the iPhone. I can access all of my Kindle books from my iPhone and it syncs to the last page I read on my Kindle! And vice versa.

Tipulator - figures tip amount on a check and can split the check, too.

Evernote - Helps you remember anything in your life. Notes, photos, recordings. I use it to capture web snippets, tweets, wine labels, where I left my car at the airport, directons, loyalty program numbers (who really carries all of those cards), emails, receipts, recipes, restaurants. Makes my life searchable. Syncs to the cloud and to my desktop. Word recognition makes all searchable. In conjunction with the Griffin Clarifi case you can get good photos of business cards (for instance) and have them all searchable in Evernote.

Apple FTW

4.05.2009

Taiga Provocative Statements

I received a tweet last week with a link to the 2009 Taiga Provocative Statements that came out of the Taiga Forum held in January in Denver. The Taiga Forum is a group of Library AULs and ADs. The statements all begin with "Within the next five years...". The draft version has an item about Google meeting virtually all of the information needs for both students and researchers, but is item was struck before the final version was released.

You can find links to this year's statements as well as the 2006 list. Information about the process can be found in the press release located here. This is a list that all librarians should sit up and pay notice to. Very interesting.

Examples:

2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron driven. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.

6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation,instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.

9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia.

10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession.