Happy Friday! I don’t know about your place of work, but at my library, it has been dead all week long (I mean, we still have people coming in but after the crush that was finals week, it feels like a ghost town). Granted I work at an academic library, and the term is over, and it is quickly nearing many holiday celebration days, and most of the faculty members have left on vacation, but I’m still here! Which means, faithful blog readers, that I’m still blogging.

This will be a much shorter post than usual because, as my colleagues know, I just finished about 7 hours of captioning a video to make with 508 standards. Want to see the labor of my hard work? I captioned the wonderful Fair(y) Use Tale Video from Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Thank goodness they made the video available under a Creative Commons License, and with this post I am trying to fulfill the Share Alike clause. And, yes, my eyes hurt from trying to sync captions that long.

Onward to other great things on a Friday.

How do you stay current about trends online? Are you interested in what people are tweeting about? Why should you care? Well, it is always a good idea to know what is happening out there in the Internet ether. You never know what might be super-important to you and your library. Plus, it is just fun to play with new stuff. Here is a great article about 21 sites to Find out What’s Hot Online by makeuseofit.com. Just don’t go overboard on the web surfing. Remember to back slowly away from the computer every once in awhile.

I love this article about students camping out in the library. Take that people who say libraries aren’t relevant! It also goes to show that furniture needs to be moveable so students can rearrange the spaces in ways that work for them. And, in my opinion, people designing library spaces or renovating spaces, could do well to talk with students about how they use the space and what they need before assuming they know best. In another library I was at, it was obvious someone had taken the time to figure out what the students did in the library. Why? Because there were tons of electrical plugs for laptops and wireless worked throughout the building. Not to mention, the chairs were fabulously comfortable. Think I’m joking about the importance of designing for laptops? Check out this post about laptop use from the Ubiquitous Librarian.

Best wishes for a happy weekend! Safe travels to everyone who is traveling this holiday season.

And, never fear, the Waki Librarian will be blogging until the 23rd and then be back again with techie, library goodness after the new year.