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 …
continue reading ...
Tags:
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 …
continue reading ...
Tags:
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 …
continue reading ...
Tags:
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 …
continue reading ...
Tags:
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 …
continue reading ...
Tags:
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 feed …
continue reading ...
Tags:
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 …
continue reading ...
Tags:
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 …
continue reading ...
Tags:
Ever since I first started screencasting almost two years ago, I’ve been really surprised how few people are talking about how cool it is. It can be so hard to teach students at a distance how to use databases, and screencasting is the only tool that allows you to concretely demonstrate how they work. Add …
continue reading ...
Tags:
Jennifer Macaulay mentioned today (at least I think it was today — though by the time you see it, it could be three days from now) that she’s noticed her feed isn’t updating very frequently in Bloglines: This is highly frustrating. But ultimately, I know I wrote a post, so I didn’t worry about it …
continue reading ...
Tags:
by Meredith Farkas on 10/29/2006 with Comments Off on Feed2JS – Always a hitch
Ken Varnum, of RSS4LIB, and I were both speaking at the Dartmouth Biomedical Library’s Fall Conference on Friday, and we were talking about Feed2JS (which I talked about with Paul Pival at IL2006). He told me about an experience he’d had with sploggers using his Feed2JS installation (and bandwidth) to do their dirty work. This …
continue reading ...
Tags:
Wow! What an amazing conference! I can honestly say that I didn’t go to a single bad/boring/irrelevant talk and, although I was sick and sidelined on Day 3, I got more out of this conference than any I’ve been to in the past. I didn’t go to a lot of the social software talks because …
continue reading ...
Tags:
by Meredith Farkas on 10/27/2006 with Comments Off on Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Wrapup
October Conference Wrap-up – Roy Tennant Roy discusses the salient points from each talk. Wikis: Creating Collaboration in Libraries Wikis are a low-threshold way to collaborate. Doesn’t need to be open to everyone to change. Search capability. Requires trust among a community (though it is easy to rollback changes). Many potential uses. Don’t even have …
continue reading ...
Tags:
Staying Informed by Bill Garrity, Dartmouth University “Being geeky doesn’t make us losers.” We all have personal requirements for how we get information. Bill doesn’t want to have to go somewhere to find info. He wants it pushed to it. He designs his browser environment to keep up. He has a tabbed browser and multiple …
continue reading ...
Tags:
by Gabriel Rios, University of Alabama, Birmingham Mobile devices are another way to get content into the hands of our patrons. Types of mobile devices – PDAs/Smart Phones, Cell phones, ipods, MP3 players, tablet PCs PDAs are often required in nursing and medical school programs. More and more doctors are starting to use the Blackberry …
continue reading ...
Tags:
by Meredith Farkas on 10/27/2006 with Comments Off on Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Podcasting Panel
Our Content, Their Device: Three Uses of the iPod – Sarah G. Wenzel, Columbia University The librarians at Columbia University have developed library content that can be used on an iPod. They created a call number guide (visual) that can be downloaded on an iPod. They made downloadable map photos of the stacks available. To …
continue reading ...
Tags:
Using RSS to Promote Scholarly Publications – Ken Varnum, Tufts University RSS stands for real simple syndication. It’s an xml-based data format for syndicating content. Way to send a title, URL and abstract to aggregators, websites, etc. How do you let the world know that your feed is updated? By pinging aggregators or by including …
continue reading ...
Tags:
I just got home last night from California around 8:30 PM and am now, at what was 6:10 am for me yesterday, sitting at Dartmouth at a terrific conference they give every year. This year’s theme is Cool Tools and New Technologies and I’m thrilled to be part of a terrific roster of speakers today …
continue reading ...
Tags:
Tom Ipri, La Salle University At Computers in Libraries in March, I had told Tom how excited I was about going to his talk and then I promptly went and missed it by having a way too long lunch. D’oh! So I gave him my solemn word that I would come and see him give …
continue reading ...
Tags:
Roy Tennant, University of California While I was very interested in all of the talks in the social computing track today, I really wanted to expand my knowledge of certain topics that I know very little about. I knew that Roy would be likely to give a very practical nuts-and-bolts introduction to developing institutional repositories …
continue reading ...
Tags: