Last 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 …
Ever since I first started screencasting almost two years ago, I’ve been really surprised how few people are talking about how cool it is. It can be so hard to teach students at a distance how to use databases, and screencasting is the only tool that allows you to concretely demonstrate how they work. Add …
Jennifer Macaulay mentioned today (at least I think it was today — though by the time you see it, it could be three days from now) that she’s noticed her feed isn’t updating very frequently in Bloglines: This is highly frustrating. But ultimately, I know I wrote a post, so I didn’t worry about it …
Ken Varnum, of RSS4LIB, and I were both speaking at the Dartmouth Biomedical Library’s Fall Conference on Friday, and we were talking about Feed2JS (which I talked about with Paul Pival at IL2006). He told me about an experience he’d had with sploggers using his Feed2JS installation (and bandwidth) to do their dirty work. This …
Wow! What an amazing conference! I can honestly say that I didn’t go to a single bad/boring/irrelevant talk and, although I was sick and sidelined on Day 3, I got more out of this conference than any I’ve been to in the past. I didn’t go to a lot of the social software talks because …
October Conference Wrap-up – Roy Tennant Roy discusses the salient points from each talk. Wikis: Creating Collaboration in Libraries Wikis are a low-threshold way to collaborate. Doesn’t need to be open to everyone to change. Search capability. Requires trust among a community (though it is easy to rollback changes). Many potential uses. Don’t even have …
by Gabriel Rios, University of Alabama, Birmingham Mobile devices are another way to get content into the hands of our patrons. Types of mobile devices – PDAs/Smart Phones, Cell phones, ipods, MP3 players, tablet PCs PDAs are often required in nursing and medical school programs. More and more doctors are starting to use the Blackberry …
Our Content, Their Device: Three Uses of the iPod – Sarah G. Wenzel, Columbia University The librarians at Columbia University have developed library content that can be used on an iPod. They created a call number guide (visual) that can be downloaded on an iPod. They made downloadable map photos of the stacks available. To …
Using RSS to Promote Scholarly Publications – Ken Varnum, Tufts University RSS stands for real simple syndication. It’s an xml-based data format for syndicating content. Way to send a title, URL and abstract to aggregators, websites, etc. How do you let the world know that your feed is updated? By pinging aggregators or by including …
I just got home last night from California around 8:30 PM and am now, at what was 6:10 am for me yesterday, sitting at Dartmouth at a terrific conference they give every year. This year’s theme is Cool Tools and New Technologies and I’m thrilled to be part of a terrific roster of speakers today …
Jason Clark (Montana State University) and Karen Coombs (University of Houston) Incorporating Web 2.0 into Library Websites by Karen Coombs Web 2.0 concepts – Radical decentralization – usually you have a Web manager who puts the content online. The University of Houston’s library has 1500 pages, so responsibilities for Web development needs to be decentralized. …
Michael Stephens, Jenny Levine and Helene Blowers Yes, I know I’m not a public librarian, but I thought this would be a really interesting talk. I’ve never actually heard Michael and Jenny speaking together before (am I like the last person on earth?). Michael Casey unfortunately couldn’t make it, but I was extremely excited that …
I am in beautiful Monterey now, having left the Wine Country this weekend to head to Internet Librarian. The vacation was everything I needed it to be and I’m here at the conference, refreshed and excited to learn new things. Sadly, wifi is a bit hard to come by around here, so I’m blogging on …
I have been ridiculously busy getting ready for the five talks I have coming up in the next three weeks. I have to have the slides for them all totally done this week because I’m going on vacation from the 13th until the start of Internet Librarian. And, for the first time in a long …
I’m so pleased and excited to see how Five Weeks to a Social Library is shaping up! We have a terrific group of presenters involved in the course who will help to teach participants all about social software and how to successfully implement social technologies in their library. You can see a very preliminary preliminary …
I had really wanted to go to Library Camp East since some of my favorite people would be there as well as people I have been dying to meet for ages. It also sounded like a great opportunity to share ideas with other folks who are passionate about innovation and libraries. However, in early September, …
I’m starting to get excited! Internet Librarian is coming in one month!!! Ok, maybe I’m a little bit more excited about the week before that which I will be spending in the Wine Country with Adam. But I am really excited to see my librarian friends, meet some people I’ve been dying to meet, go …
Friday is the deadline to submit a proposal to provide content for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. While we have gotten a lot of proposals on certain topics, there are others on which we have not gotten any (or have gotten very few). If you have experience using or know a lot …
Today, I got an e-mail from a reader of this blog. She told me that she reads my blog through Bloglines and that every time she clicks on a link, she gets pop-ups for adult entertainment. Very weird, huh? So I went and looked at the feeds (there are like 6 or 7!) available for …
Today is Blog Day, ostensibly because the date sort of looks like the word blog (3108) if you squint or perhaps are a really creative-minded person. It’s a day where lots of bloggers will will highlight five blogs that they think we should know about. I was thinking of highlighting some of the new blogs …