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« Previous EntriesNumbers vs. meaning
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Forgive this less-than-well-thought-out post. I’ve been thinking a lot about assessment lately and the librarianly love of numbers in assessment, and I’m a troubled by the way that some academic libraries tend to measure how well they are supporting the academic mission of the institution.
Librarians keep a lot of statistics and measure a lot of [...]
Answers – and I thought that was our schtick!
Friday, June 26th, 2009As a new mother, I spend a a lot of time awake with Reed when most sensible people are asleep. Consequently, I’ve seen plenty of infomercials and commercials that are rarely if ever on television when sensible people are awake (my personal favorite is the Lee Majors Bionic Ear — “it won’t cost six million, [...]
Separate but not equal?
Saturday, January 10th, 2009When I read David King’s post about Ask-a-Librarian services last week, I didn’t have a strong emotional response to it. That was, until he wrote a follow up which brought my attention to some of the responses people had made to it. With email reference, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not a synchronous medium. We [...]
Internet Cool Tools for Physicians
Thursday, December 18th, 2008My friend, the incredibly awesome David Rothman, has co-authored a book (with another fantastic medical librarian and a physician) on Internet Cool Tools for Physicians. The book is designed to help physicians find the best medical resources on the web. Given the glut of medical resources online — some questionable, some excellent — this should [...]
Building 21st century librarians AND libraries
Sunday, March 9th, 2008There were three recent posts that got me thinking a lot about the growing necessity to have tech-savvy people in public services positions. The first was Dorothea Salo’s post about how many librarians outside of Systems see learning about (or doing anything with) technology as being something outside of their sphere of responsibility. The second [...]
We have wiki!
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Library Research Guides wiki
Originally uploaded by librarianmer
A while back, I wrote about the challenges I had in finding the right platform for our subject guides. Well, I’m pleased to say that I just linked to our subject guides from the front page of the library [...]
Don’t take what you know for granted
Friday, January 4th, 2008As liaison to all of the distance learning programs at our University, I frequently deal with our Interlibrary Loan Librarian. We can’t do traditional book interlibrary loan with our distance learners because the loan times do not allow sufficient time for us to ship the materials to the student and for the student to consult [...]
When are we doing enough?
Saturday, December 1st, 2007Since I got to Norwich, my main priority has been to ensure that the distance learners have access to all the information they need to do research through the library. I have information all over the place about our resources and services. I’ve created screencast tutorials, HTML tutorials and FAQs. Some of the tutorials are [...]
Pennvibes
Friday, November 9th, 2007The University of Pennsylvania sure has some pretty impressive library tech folks! First they create PennTags, now they’re working on Pennvibes, which, according to this abstract from the DLF conference, looks like an exciting new way to create resource guides:
Pennvibes is a framework for content delivery and organization inspired by Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes. It [...]
Reflections on Internet Librarian and LAUC-B Conferences (or 5 talks at 2 conferences in 1 week)
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007Today [Note: This part was written Monday] will be my first day back at work after the marathon that was Internet Librarian and the LAUC-B conference. I ended up giving 5 talks in one week, which is a record for me (and probably for most people other than Roy Tennant, Stephen Abram and other similarly [...]
The long road towards subject guide 2.0
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007When I finally got control over the library’s Web presence last year (a long process better discussed in a post of its own), the first thing I did was take down the library “subject guides.” You could hardly call these things subject guides; they were just a bunch of Web links in different areas. Some [...]
Fun with Elsevier
Monday, April 9th, 2007At my school, we used to subscribe to the Science Direct engineering package for our online engineering students. It worked well, but got very little use since most of the engineering classes do not require research. Last year, we were informed that Science Direct was getting rid of the package we were subscribed to and [...]
Whatever you do don’t use Google!
Thursday, November 9th, 2006After 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 [...]
Selling IM @ Your Library
Sunday, November 5th, 2006Last 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, 2006About 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 [...]
Zotero – is this what we’ve been waiting for?
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006I got my library a trial of RefWorks this summer (with the way our distance learners do school work — often at home and work — it makes much more sense for us to make a Web-based citation manager available to them), but it didn’t really meet with an enthusiastic response by the students and [...]
Why Google (or Ask or Yahoo!) is good for reference work
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006Google/Ask/Yahoo! is rarely the first place I will look for information when helping a student. If it’s a really current topic, I’ll try Academic Search Premiere and LexisNexis. If it’s something more scholarly and related to a specific subject, I will use subject databases, though I will usually try Academic Search Premiere as [...]
CIL Day 2: Two Views on Educating Librarians
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006Presenters: Jeanne Holba Puacz (University of Illinois) and Lynn Westbrook (University of Texas)
So I’m not sure I understood what this session was going to be about. I thought it was about how to educate librarians, but apparently, I was way off.
Keeping Up To Date with Technology – Jeanne Holba Puacz
Technology changes so [...]
Marketing @ my library: your input needed
Wednesday, February 1st, 2006OK, so I’m not a marketing expert by any stretch of the imagination. But I know that we need some serious marketing PR stuff to go on at my library. We have very low reference desk usage stats. I think part of it might be the population (over 50% military) but a [...]
Tick marks or high tech?
Friday, October 28th, 2005I have a problem remembering to keep track of my reference transactions on the little clipboard we keep at the reference desk. My office is three floors above where the reference desk is and, more often than not, I am answering reference questions from my desk (or even from home). By the time [...]
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