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« Previous Entries Next Entries »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 lot of it [...]
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 I get [...]
Public speaking and wiki-evangelizing
Sunday, October 16th, 2005I am not one of those people — like Steven Cohen or Jessamyn — who is very comfortable giving talks. No matter how well I know the material, I still get insanely nervous when I have to get up in front of people to talk. I’ve never had a talk go badly, but it doesn’t [...]
Chat interoperability
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005My 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 [...]
Jybe: Take Two
Thursday, April 28th, 2005I 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 [...]
More from Google Maps
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005A 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 [...]
Screencasting? Finally something I can get behind!
Monday, February 28th, 2005I 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 [...]
Google Maps: Oh the possibilities!!!
Monday, February 28th, 2005When 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 [...]
Google Movies!
Thursday, February 24th, 2005Yes, another new Google search tool (it seems like there’s been a new one every day over the past few months!). Google Blog reports that Google has come out with Google Movie “just in time for the Oscars.” It’s not a whole new search engine, but an operator that you can use to search for [...]
Fabulous maps
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005Ever since I started this blog, I’ve made a big effort to post regularly. Unfortunately, I slacked off last week. Well, I don’t know if packing, putting our junk into storage, and moving to the other side of the country is considered slacking, but I do feel badly about falling out of the loop and [...]
What a wonderful Wiki world
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005If 2004 was the year of the blog, I think 2005 will be the year of the Wiki. Wikis first came to my attention in 2003 in the form of the Wikipedia, which I thought was a fascinating and fabulous idea. What I didn’t know at the time was that Wikis have been around since [...]
The cool yellow pages
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005If you haven’t already, go check out A9.com, a yellow pages for the future. More a reference work than simply a “phone book”, A9 allows users to not only search the yellow pages but it lets you leave notes on the places they find, it shows you what else is in the neighborhood, and sometimes [...]
Giving the patron what s/he wants
Monday, January 31st, 2005Steph at TechnoBiblio wrote about an interesting observation at a recent panel discussion she attended: The final panelist came forth with a statement that seemed to take the audience by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have… “Users don’t care.” They don’t care that the subject specific databases will bring back more relevant hits. They don’t [...]
The future of virtual reference services
Sunday, January 30th, 2005I’ve been reading a lot of great articles and posts about the viability of virtual reference and how we can make it better for our patrons. The Library Journal article, Virtual Reference: Alive and Well, by Brenda Bailey-Hainer, talks about how virtual reference services will only be cost effective when done as cooperative ventures between [...]
Questioning information literacy
Sunday, January 9th, 2005Here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that has been causing some controversy on the library-related listservs. Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions rails against the traditional ideas behind information literacy curricula. While I disagree with much of what the author has written, he does raise some interesting points. I’ve never [...]
GuruNet now offers Answers.com for free!
Tuesday, January 4th, 2005According to Gary Price at Resource Shelf, GuruNet has become Answsers.com and is now offering a ready reference search engine for free. Answers.com culls its information from a variety of free and pay sources, including Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, Merriam Webster, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, SparKNotes, Who2, and Wikipedia. The user submits a query and [...]
Are we mainstream or invisible?
Monday, January 3rd, 2005I know blogging is getting bigger. Blogs seem to have been featured in every magazine and newspaper lately. Everyone keeps saying 2004 was the “year of the blog” yadda, yadda. But the Pew American Life Project recently came out with actual stats on blogging and its effect on mainstream America. They found that blog readership [...]
Free reference websites
Monday, January 3rd, 2005RUSA has come out with its 2004 list of Best Free Reference Websites. They cover a variety of subjects and come from academia, government, industry, non-profits, the media, libraries and librarians. One of my personal faves is The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams, definitely one of the coolest reference librarians in the universe. If you’re [...]
An Introduction to Feeds
Thursday, December 30th, 2004From Resource Shelf, I have found An Introduction to Feeds, which does an excellent job of describing what RSS is and how to use aggregators. I will definitely send this on to my dad, who I recently got set-up with Firefox, Bloglines, and del.icio.us. What is Christmas for if not to work on family members’ [...]
Bringing LexisNexis to the masses: LexisNexis Ala Carte
Wednesday, December 8th, 2004LexisNexis is now offering its articles ala carte, which allows regular folks who are not affiliated with an institution of higher learning to search LexisNexis and buy the full-text if they so choose. You have to register to search (though the search itself is free), and then any article you wish to read costs only [...]
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