reference

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Building 21st century librarians AND libraries

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

There 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, 2008

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 […]

Don’t take what you know for granted

Friday, January 4th, 2008

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 […]

When are we doing enough?

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Since 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, 2007

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. It […]

Reflections on Internet Librarian and LAUC-B Conferences (or 5 talks at 2 conferences in 1 week)

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

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 […]

The long road towards subject guide 2.0

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

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 […]

Fun with Elsevier

Monday, April 9th, 2007

At 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, 2006

After 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, 2006

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 […]

Do they care what they’re looking at?

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

About 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, 2006

I 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, 2006

Google/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, 2006

Presenters: 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, 2006

OK, 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, 2005

I 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 […]

Public speaking and wiki-evangelizing

Sunday, October 16th, 2005

I 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 […]

Chat interoperability

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

My 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 instant […]

Jybe: Take Two

Thursday, April 28th, 2005

I 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. […]

More from Google Maps

Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

A 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 […]

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