My new friend, and fellow Wesleyan alum, Stephen Francoeur, wrote: Wouldn’t it be cool if your patrons could use an IM client to chat with your web contact center software (such as the versions of eGain offered by Tutor.com and 24/7 Reference or Docutek’s VRLplus)? We know huge percentage of our users are already using …
I still have not been able to install the Jybe extension in Firefox without my computer melting down, but I have been successful in getting it to work in IE (not that I really want to be using IE). Yesterday, I did a test run of Jybe with Stephen Francoeur, The Teaching Librarian. We co-browsed …
It has been interesting to observe how people have approached the wiki I created. I’ve been thrilled to see that people are contributing to it and have added some great tips! However, I’ve gotten several emails and comments suggesting topics, instructions, and other things that could go into the wiki. That’s nice that people are …
Last year, I went to my first ALA Conference, which was also my first library conference ever. Before going, I really had no idea what to expect. So I had to make my own mistakes – going to the wrong room when the location of a session had changed that very day, not bringing a …
I’m sure there are people who think that technology is the be-all-end-all and that every bleeding-edge technology should be implemented in libraries. But I don’t happen to know any of those people. The “tech-savvy” librarians I know are interested in better meeting the needs of their patrons with technology. Apparently, Chuck has met a whole …
George at It’s all good just got back from giving a presentation at the New Jersey Library Association where he was asked a difficult question: This was an excellent audience, full of questions, comments, and well-considered opinion. But one question stopped me in my tracks. One public library director explained his frustration in seeing the …
The Open Archives Initiative develops interoperability standards with the goal of developing easy ways to access digital content and improve scholarly communication. They have developed a protocol for harvesting XML-formatted metadata from text repositories. If all e-content providers used open metadata standards, libraries could harvest metadata from a variety of places so that it could …
Link Resolvers allow users to move from a citation to the actual article (so long as the library has access to it), regardless of which database the article happens to be in. Joy Moll, who has a nice post on the topic, writes “a “resolver” program does all the work for me. I find a …
Sorry for the delay in posting the rest of this, but we were flying to Florida yesterday to visit family. Nice to be in consistently warm weather for a few days. 🙂 When library catalogs were first developed, all of the electronic needs of a library system were fulfilled by the ILS. At the time, …
A few months ago, Google had purchased Keyhole, a program that allowed you to look at satellite photos of anywhere in the U.S. They allowed users to download it for free for a week or so and play with it. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t until today that I got to see what Google …
Next, our fictional student is going into RedLightGreen to find resources for her paper. RedLightGreen, a union catalog, is an excellent tool for resource discovery as the user only needs to enter one search query, and then can easily narrow or broaden her search by subject, author, or language. It combines searching and browsing in …
So now that we know what our population wants, we can see how our OPACs measure up. I created a screencast using my alma mater’s OPAC to illustrate some of the challenges users have when using catalogs. Obviously some catalogs are more sophisticated or offer more flexibility in searching, but some are even more difficult …
The first thing anyone designing a website or a search engine should ask themselves is how can we meet the needs of our users? In the case of academic libraries, those users are faculty and students. This year’s first-year college students were eight-years-old when Yahoo! was born. Technology is ubiquitous to them and they approach …
In many libraries, we see collections that do not meet the needs of their users. This problem can affect small rural public libraries with limited budgets and prestigious academic libraries that have comprehensive print and electronic holdings. It’s easy to understand the problem of limited funds, but if a library has an excellent collection why …
I’m going to be doing a presentation on information literacy in a few weeks, and I’m planning on looking at how new technologies can be used in information literacy instruction. I was thinking of looking at screencasting/flash tutorials (using camtasia, captivate, etc.), podcasting, wikis, blogging, rss, social bookmarking (del.icio.us, FURL, etc.), or anything else that …
Looking at my alma mater’s library website, I noticed that they are implementing a new federated search tool that searches eight resources (a mix of A&I databases and full-text). It’s powered by Metalib from Ex Libris, a company I think is pretty great. I was really excited at first, until I decided to test it …
Two bloggers from whose writing I get a great deal of food for thought were just named “movers and shakers” by Library Journal. Congratulations Aaron Schmidt and Michael Stephens! You two really should be proud — not of some mention in Library Journal, but for all you’ve done for your libraries and for librarianship. Rock …
So this week I’m all alone in the big chilly city of Chicago (hubby’s in New England on business). When, on Monday, I heard that there was a free conference being offered by the North Suburban Library System that week, I decided it would be a great to go and meet some fabulous Chicago-area librarians. …
I think Podcasting is cool, but not for me. I’m a visual learner, so listening to my favorite bloggers takes more mental energy to absorb than reading their blog entries. In graduate school, I hated listening to real audio lectures from my professors unless they were accompanied by lecture notes, powerpoint, or something visual. That’s …
When I wrote my first post on how excited I was about Google Maps, I had no earthly idea what the broad capabilities of the application were. I don’t think Jon Udell even did at first, but he quickly discovered some really amazing stuff and illuminates these possibilities for us with fantastic screencasts (using my …