Why do people like Michael Gorman and Blaise Cronin (and note that I will not link to any of their articles, but you can find critiques at Free Range Librarian and Pattern Recognition) write these controversial rants about blogs and bloggers? Is it because they want to change people’s minds and make them stop blogging …
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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. We co-browsed …
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It has been interesting to observe how people have approached the wiki I created. I’ve been thrilled to see that people are contributing to it and have added some great tips! However, I’ve gotten several emails and comments suggesting topics, instructions, and other things that could go into the wiki. That’s nice that people are …
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I’ve gotten very excited by the reviews I’ve read about Jybe, but I had never actually given it a try myself. Until today. For those who don’t know, Jybe is free co-browsing software that lets a user browse the web with another person on another computer. It’s great for showing people cool websites, doing web-based …
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Last year, I went to my first ALA Conference, which was also my first library conference ever. Before going, I really had no idea what to expect. So I had to make my own mistakes – going to the wrong room when the location of a session had changed that very day, not bringing a …
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Note: This review is from 2005 and is not relevant to current versions of Camtasia and Captivate. A few years ago, my husband bought Camtasia 1.1 so that we could create software demos for his business. While there were certainly a number of problems with the software, it gave us what we wanted, and we …
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I’m sure there are people who think that technology is the be-all-end-all and that every bleeding-edge technology should be implemented in libraries. But I don’t happen to know any of those people. The “tech-savvy” librarians I know are interested in better meeting the needs of their patrons with technology. Apparently, Chuck has met a whole …
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George at It’s all good just got back from giving a presentation at the New Jersey Library Association where he was asked a difficult question: This was an excellent audience, full of questions, comments, and well-considered opinion. But one question stopped me in my tracks. One public library director explained his frustration in seeing the …
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The Open Archives Initiative develops interoperability standards with the goal of developing easy ways to access digital content and improve scholarly communication. They have developed a protocol for harvesting XML-formatted metadata from text repositories. If all e-content providers used open metadata standards, libraries could harvest metadata from a variety of places so that it could …
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Link Resolvers allow users to move from a citation to the actual article (so long as the library has access to it), regardless of which database the article happens to be in. Joy Moll, who has a nice post on the topic, writes “a “resolver” program does all the work for me. I find a …
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Sorry for the delay in posting the rest of this, but we were flying to Florida yesterday to visit family. Nice to be in consistently warm weather for a few days. 🙂 When library catalogs were first developed, all of the electronic needs of a library system were fulfilled by the ILS. At the time, …
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I have been wanting to own a dog since I moved away from home — and our family dog — to attend college in Connecticut. This desire has only intensified as the years have passed. I have frequent dreams about owning a dog and I’ve even named him/her (Riley). All of my close friends and …
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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 what Google …
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Next, our fictional student is going into RedLightGreen to find resources for her paper. RedLightGreen, a union catalog, is an excellent tool for resource discovery as the user only needs to enter one search query, and then can easily narrow or broaden her search by subject, author, or language. It combines searching and browsing in …
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So now that we know what our population wants, we can see how our OPACs measure up. I created a screencast using my alma mater’s OPAC to illustrate some of the challenges users have when using catalogs. Obviously some catalogs are more sophisticated or offer more flexibility in searching, but some are even more difficult …
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by Meredith Farkas on 4/4/2005 with Comments Off on The Failure of Middleware, Part 2: Who are our users?
The first thing anyone designing a website or a search engine should ask themselves is how can we meet the needs of our users? In the case of academic libraries, those users are faculty and students. This year’s first-year college students were eight-years-old when Yahoo! was born. Technology is ubiquitous to them and they approach …
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In many libraries, we see collections that do not meet the needs of their users. This problem can affect small rural public libraries with limited budgets and prestigious academic libraries that have comprehensive print and electronic holdings. It’s easy to understand the problem of limited funds, but if a library has an excellent collection why …
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When I was talking to my dad and he told me that he had a copy of Adobe Acrobat’s PDF Writer, I realized that not everyone is up on the wonders of open source software. I wish I’d told him prior to his purchase that there is a great open source alternative that creates PDFs …
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I got back early Saturday morning from my interview trip and slept on-and-off all day. Travelling across time zones and the time change have really messed up my sleep cycle. The interview went quite well! I feel like I developed a good rapport with everyone I met and nothing disastrous happened with my presentations. Of …
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