Andrea 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 …
Library 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 …
As 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 …
For 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 …
Starting 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 …
I 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 …
I 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, …
I’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 …
This 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 …
The 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. …
Today [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 …
When 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 …
Pfew! All done publishing the results of the 2007 Survey of the Biblioblosophere! To refresh your memory, here are all of the posts about this year’s survey: 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Demographics 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Blog Demographics 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Attitudes and Behaviors 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Results from …
Before I lost my Survey Monkey pro account, I created a bunch of results filters and exported them as PDF files. They allow you to see how a group who answered one question a certain way answered all of the questions in the survey. I think they add richness to the results and I’m sure …
For comparison to the 2005 results (though some questions are new) visit Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Attitudes and Behaviors 23. What is the primary way that you read blog content? ResponsePercent ResponseCount I visit each blog individually 15.1% 118 I read blogs in a Web-based RSS aggregator (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc.) 71.1% 557 I read …
no more training wheels Originally uploaded by shadycat I’ve been reading a number of interesting posts on the “training-wheels culture” from Dorothea Salo, Nicole Engard, and Emily Clasper. As I’ve been doing a lot of teaching — both online and in-person workshops — it’s an issue I’ve also been thinking a lot about on my …
I didn’t end up blogging the rest of the conference, because I was too busy listening. There were some really interesting talks on topics I don’t usually hear about, like digital public history, so I kind of wanted to just take it in instead of typing out what someone was saying. It was also a …
The Top 10 1. Annoyed Librarian 2. Librarian in Black 3. Information Wants to be Free 4. Librarian.net 5. Tame the Web 6. Free Range Librarian 7. Library Stuff 8. Caveat Lector 9. Walt at Random 10. The Shifted Librarian (for the rest of the results, see just below the commentary) What can we learn …
In three days, I’ll be on a plane, flying to Copenhagen, Denmark. I lived there for almost a year in college and I haven’t been back in nine years. I’m speaking at a conference on Sociale teknologier i fremtidens bibliotek 2.0 (Social Software and the Future of Library 2.0) on September 27. I absolutely can’t …
Then consider taking this survey on group blogging that my friends down under developed. They will be presenting the results at the VALA2008 Conference. The survey looks at motivations for contributing to a group blog, getting started, and how you keep it going. Considering that well over 200 people in the Survey of the Biblioblogosphere …