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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 [...]
Assessing social technologies in libraries
Thursday, February 21st, 2008A Facebook friend messaged me yesterday with a library 2.0 assessment-related question that I didn’t have the answer to, but was curious about myself. So I thought I’d put it out to the hive mind: “[I was] wondering if you knew of any libraries who are doing a great job at assessing the impact or [...]
My FAQ and the expert versus the hive
Sunday, February 10th, 2008In the past two weeks, I’ve received around 10 emails asking for my advice on various topics. Sometimes these are questions that have easy answers. Some are asking for more involved advice that I’m happy to offer. Others are asking for things that would require an unreasonable amount of time and effort on my part. [...]
Marketing to bloggers
Sunday, February 10th, 2008Word-of-mouth marketing is a very powerful thing. When you can generate buzz for your product among the people who are using it, what they say about it will probably do more good than any traditional marketing campaign. So, it stands to reason that when you have a new online product or service, bloggers can be [...]
Flu trumps blogging (and pretty much everything else)
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008I probably owe a lot of people emails and I’ve been wanting to write up my tech trends and talk about some of the cool things I learned at the OLA Superconference last week. Unfortunately, I’ve come down with the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had, which has turned me into a coughing, [...]
Some great Library Technology Reports
Friday, January 25th, 2008As I’ve been spending more time than I would like in waiting rooms over the past few weeks, I’ve had the chance to catch up on some reading; namely Library Technology Reports. Michelle Boule wrote a terrific LTR called Changing the Way We Work, in which she covers tools for online collaboration. Michelle is really [...]
The essence of Library 2.0?
Thursday, January 24th, 2008I found John Blyberg’s post, Library 2.0 Debased, very interesting and in many ways, a breath of fresh air. I agree with him on a lot of levels. I agree that mistakes have been made. I think there has been a lot of confusing rhetoric about Library 2.0. I think a lot of people lost [...]
Getting ready for Building the Social Library Online
Saturday, January 19th, 2008Our classroom! Originally uploaded by librarianmer On Wednesday, the class I’m teaching for San Jose State University begins. It’s the first for-credit graduate-level course I’ve ever taught, so I’m really excited about it (and a little nervous). I spent the Fall developing the classroom and spent winter break finishing up the assignments and creating the [...]
Understanding the culture of social networking technologies
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008Andrea Mercado and Kate Sheehan have both written insightful posts about the importance of librarians being aware of the culture of the social technologies they’re getting involved in for outreach purposes. From Kate: It’s easy to become enamored of social networking sites and Web 2.0 toys to the point where they seem like a panacea [...]
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 website, so they are live! I ended up [...]
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 [...]
A personal ad for open source project help
Monday, December 24th, 2007For several years, I have used Feed2JS. It’s a great tool that makes it easy to display an RSS feed on any web page and to style the content to match the page. Many libraries are using Feed2JS on their own websites; some host it on their own server (that’s what I do), while others [...]
Want to teach some LIS students about social software?
Saturday, December 15th, 2007Starting in January, I’ll be teaching an online class on social software at San Jose State University. I am beyond excited about it! I’m really interested in having guest speakers in the class; people at libraries that are doing a lot with social software and can discuss the applications at their library as well as [...]
Massachusetts School Library Association Conference
Sunday, November 18th, 2007I spent last weekend at the Massachusetts School Library Association Conference in Sturbridge, MA. I didn’t get to spend much time there because I had to be back at work on Monday, but I still ended up having a wonderful time. The night before my talks on Sunday, I had dinner with the wonderful group [...]
CTO of America
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007I think I just decided who to vote for (from VentureBeat): The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has given VentureBeat an exclusive look at his technology plan, which he plans to unveil officially tomorrow (Wednesday) before a visit to Google’s headquarters. The full plan can be seen below. It contains several new proposals, [...]
Alternative ways to participate (or why I probably won’t be at Midwinter)
Monday, November 12th, 2007I’ve written some posts critical of ALA in the past and have had a number of people encourage me to get involved so that I can try to make a constructive difference (instead of just complaining). So, when I was asked to be on two committees whose missions I felt strongly allied with, I said [...]
Off to Massachusetts
Friday, November 9th, 2007This weekend I’m driving down to Sturbridge, MA for the Massachusetts School Library Association conference. I’m giving a workshop on wikis… twice. I’ve never given the same talk twice in one day, but it’ll be an interesting opportunity to immediately improve my talk based on my observations during the first iteration. My slides are already [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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