One thing I have loved about the whole Library 2.0 movement is the push to stamp out the “but we’ve always done it this way” attitude. I am a strong believer in questioning the common wisdom. So often we do things because of tradition, not because it’s the best way to do it. I think …
Bad news, folks. 🙁 Apparently the printer of my book screwed up big time and the book is going to have to be completely re-printed by another company. According to the Editor-in-Chief at Information Today Books, John Bryans, the cover is too dark and at least 60% of advance copies have defective laminate. They are …
I was beyond thrilled to see the Wired article featuring Helene Blowers’ amazing Learning 2.0 project and model. You know when you make it into something like Wired, you’ve MADE IT. 🙂 It pleases me to no end to see so many libraries replicating the program to provide accessible and fun technology education to staff …
The book is here! Originally uploaded by librarianmer. My day started off pretty badly. I woke up and my neck was so stiff and painful that I couldn’t turn my head or lift my left arm. I ended up calling Adam around 1 pm to pick me up from work because I was in so …
I’ve got a long list of things I’d like to post about, but I’m just feeling crabby and unable to focus on them right now. I’m not feeling down about my own life. Other than the folks in IT doing something horrendous to our proxy server, my life’s pretty good. It’s just the state of …
If you have any interest in implementing social software tools at your library, you may want to check out some of the amazing proposals created by our participants for their libraries. I have organized the proposals by the technology they want to use and by library type. It’s obvious looking at proposals by tool that …
In this post, I’m going to talk about the decisions we made in creating the course and what I would do differently next time. Hopefully this will be useful to those of you who wish to replicate the course. I’m sure my fellow organizers will have other insights to add from their perspective. Certain decisions …
Last Spring, while Chairing the library track of HigherEd BlogCon and feeling like it was not an engaging enough online conference model, I had a crazy idea to create a free online conference with more synchronous and asynchronous pieces to really draw people in and build a community. I refused to believe that the only …
Rachel Singer-Gordon has been thinking about what bloggy influences we have from outside of the library world. I read a bunch of non-library blogs in the other areas I’m interested in. Being a distance learning librarian, of course I’m interested in education and educational technologies. I’m also really interested in knowledge management because I get …
I’m back from Florida, but am probably about to fall asleep since I got up before 3 am to make my flight. I just consider myself lucky to have gotten here with relatively few problems in terms of air travel (though we did have a bird fly onto our plane as we were getting off …
I received this e-mail from Rachel the other day. If you are a librarian and consider yourself to be in an alternative career, please do consider helping her out. You could be part of what will certainly be another very cool book by Rachel Singer Gordon: I’m working on a book on alternative careers for …
Wow! I can’t believe we’ve just finished Week 4. It’s definitely a bittersweet feeling. I can’t imagine waking up in a little over a week and not finding new posts from my friends in this program. I have gained so much from my interactions with them, more than I could have ever imagined. I only …
Every day, I see something amazing and creative that people have done online with photos, audio or video content. Whether they are creating something totally new or remixing things to develop something that the original creator had never envisioned, I am just blown away at what the Web now allows us to do creatively. Since …
Update: I received an e-mail from one of the creators of Ask Dr. Wiki stating that they are now requiring folks to prove that they have medical credentials before they are allowed to contribute to the wiki. I hate barriers as much as the next person, but in the case of a medical wiki, there …
As you all know, I’m a big fan of wikis, such a big fan that I often cannot gauge how other people will respond when they are introduced to wikis. Well, imagine my surprise to discover how incredibly enthusiastic our participants were this week about implementing wikis in their library; probably more so than any …
Could you ever have imagined a couple of years ago that a candidate for ALA President would have a campaign video on YouTube??? 🙂 This isn’t why I personally endorsed Jim Rettig for ALA President. Nor is it his very cool blog. I think Jim is a librarian who has not lost touch with the …
Social Software in Libraries cover Originally uploaded by librarianmer. I just heard from the folks at Information Today that my book is heading off to the printer tomorrow! I think it’s going to spend some time there, because I was told that it will be available at the end of March or the very beginning …
Week two of Five Weeks to a Social Library is now over. RSS and del.icio.us really generated a lot of excitement for our participants and many could see the personal and professional benefits of using these tools. We have people spending 16 hours per week on the class because they want to play with these …
I never thought I’d say this… but I want to go work for the Pentagon! Lewis Shepherd sent me this Computer World article about some of the cool things they are doing in the intelligence community with wikis, RSS, AJAX and Mashups. In particular, they mention the Intellipedia which was launched in 2004 and seeks …