Archive for November, 2006

Random and cold medicine-induced thoughts on screencasting

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

Last summer, I was talking with someone from the planning committee of the Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries’ Fall Conference. Their theme was “Cool Tools and New Technologies” and I asked her if they were going to have someone speak about screencasting. Her response was “but everyone knows about screencasting already.”
Really?
Maybe I travel in the wrong [...]

Application Deadline: Five Weeks to a Social Library

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

I just wanted to remind folks that December 1 is the deadline for applications to participate in the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. You can find the application instructions here.
We have gotten an incredible number of applications for the course from people all over the world — from all different types of libraries [...]

LibWorm: Searching, syndicating and aggregating the bibliblogosphere

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

A few months ago, David Rothman asked me if there was any tool for searching the biblioblogosphere. At the time, there really wasn’t much. I told him about LISFeeds, but explained that its search functionality was very limited. And that was the last I heard on the subject from him until a few days ago [...]

Talkin’ wikis in Lansing, MI

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

I’m out here in Lansing Michigan at The Library Rebooted conference, offered by the Michigan Library Consortium. I just talked about wikis and Jessamyn West is now talking about blogs. You can find my presentation here on my Website (PPT).
For those of you who were here at the conference, here are some more wiki-related [...]

ALA through my eyes: One year later

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

It’s been almost a year since I wrote some posts about gripes I had with ALA and suggestions of how the ALA could do better. At the time, I was seriously considering letting my ALA membership lapse in the Fall of 2006. Yet last week, I put $200 on my credit card to renew my [...]

Whatever you do don’t use Google!

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

After we teach our students how to distinguish between authoritative and unauthoritative resources, we need to actually show them how to find such authoritative resources. While our databases are great, they sometimes aren’t the most user-friendly things to search (LexisNexis anyone?). And frankly, these students won’t have access to the databases once they graduate and [...]

MaintainIT

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

While at Internet Librarian, I learned about the Maintain IT Project. This three-year Bill and Melinda Gates funded initiative is designed to identify best practices for maintaining public access computers. Right now, they are collecting stories from library folks about working with public access computers and keeping them running. From these stories of success and [...]

LISZEN is the path to library blog search nirvana.

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

This is what we have needed in the biblioblogosphere for a long time. Have you ever been looking for a blog post you read a while back, but you don’t remember who wrote it or exactly when? All you remember is the topic and that isn’t going to get you too far. Well, things in [...]

Selling IM @ Your Library

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

Last year, I was very nervous about pushing the idea of IM Reference at my library. If anything, I totally over-prepared before even broaching the subject. I actually created a formal proposal on the Web with links to information about IM Reference (studies and good examples at other schools) and showed specifically how we could [...]

Do they care what they’re looking at?

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

About a week before I left for my vacation, Paul Pival, Ken Varnum and David Rothman had an interesting distributed discussion about how students are perceiving the research literature and are evaluating the quality of documents given that, online, everything looks virtually the same (and even more so when you’re looking at an RSS [...]

Michelle Boule is an emerging leader!

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

Michelle Boule by Etches-Johnson
I want to wish a hearty congratulations to my good friend (and “wing man”) Michelle Boule, for being chosen by LITA to represent them in the ALA Emerging Leaders program. There are few people in this profession with such passion and enthusiasm as Michelle, and she is someone who is really willing [...]

Firefox 2 is my new best friend

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

Can I just tell you how much I love Firefox 2? I’m usually the last person in the world to download an update, but I’d heard such good things about it that I threw caution to the wind. And the hype was definitely warranted. Some cool features include:

Spell-checking in forms (it’s doing it right [...]