Steampunk Challenge is on, Greater Victoria Public Library

The Greater Victoria Public Library has issued a Steampunk Challenge, an online scavenger hunt designed to test your information literacy skills. It's for middle and high school students, but looks like a lot of fun, so anyone into Steampunk and puzzles ought to give it a try.

Smoking out the wrong stuff at Library and Archives Canada

Ian Milligan, writing for ActiveHistory.ca back on May 22, 2012, provided a great overview of the immediate and coming cuts to Library and Archives Canada programs and services, including the elimination of the National Archival Development Program (NADP) and the axing of the interlibrary lending (ILL) service. He called his essay "The Smokescreen of ‘Modernization’ at Library and Archives Canada".

MakerBot, 3D printing on the cheap

This looks pretty cool, 3D printing using ABS plastic with a robot design from MakerBot. Not that I'll be rushing out to get the plans, but there's a cool video on YouTube I saw through Robert L. Balliot's Ocean State Librarian blog's Research Link of the Week. Request for you Robert, please provide a permalink for the current research link, not just the past ones. While he suggests public libraries invest in this technology, many libraries such as my own can't even afford to buy books and other resources due to cutbacks. So I don't think something like this will be at the top of their list. This seems to be something that would currently be of more interest to an artist coop.

Attending OCLC WebJunction online conference

I'm attending a two-day OCLC WebJunction online conference on technology essentials for libraries. The conference is being broadcast through Cisco's WebEx platform. The conference sessions will be archived at http://webjunction.org/conferences. The Twitter hashtag is #wjconf. I'll post this as well on my Ten Thousand Year Blog and you'll see tweets from that source.

Created OCLC WebJunction group Google Wave for Libraries

Update for August 5, 2010:

In the wake of Google's announcement that Google Wave has broken over the boulders of public apathy, I'll be investigating future support options for my OCLC WebJunction group.

I set up an OCLC WebJunction group called Google Wave for Libraries on January 21, 02010. Come join me and help your colleagues discover what all the Waving's about.