Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

Is this something we need? Or is this one step away from being a Saturday Night Live mock commercial (remember the Adobe car?)?

Gale * Apps * Home via kwout

Well, you can get smartphone apps from Gale that are pretty amazing because they sense your location and then direct you to database content licensed by the nearest library (eerily fabulously helpful).

Buffy Hamilton tells you about the school library edition in this video (particularly useful to Michiganders because Gale supplies many databases to us via the Michigan eLibrary (or MeL):

But what about our core collections? I don’t know of folks who have figured out how to put their OPACs on mobile devices yet. (Oh, Follett, are you listening?) It would be awesome if we could easily do this — and my hunch is that it wouldn’t take very arduous programming work. Imagine if kids could access the collection — including links you may have been adding to your MARC records — from anywhere.

Our university library just announced a mobile interface, along with a rather, uh, cheeky ad campaign popping up all over campus:

MLibrary Mobile | Mobile Technology | MLibrary via kwout

What if we could start this 24/7 pocket access and build those habits with younger patrons?

Did I mention that my old laptop died right before ALA, while I was on a writing retreat? Those who know me know that I have phantom limb syndrome without my laptop near at hand, so I bought a new one — a rather expensive California souvenir.

I had no choice but to get Vista, and I admit that while it is pretty, it has some weird “hang-ups.”  But one of the things that it does have that I missed from my Mac days is the “Snipping Tool,” which lets you choose which part of a screenshot you want to copy.  (Like Snag-It — but free!).

You might not find this feature unless you know to look for it, because it isn’t automatically installed by Windows.  Go to your START button and start typing “snipping tool” in the search box.  If you have just the right version of Vista (it doesn’t work on the most basic version of Vista), snipping tool will come up in the menu above.  Make sure you are on the page from which you’ll take the screenshot, then start up the snipping tool.

Here are some tricks for using the snipping tool.