David King is in the middle of a terrific series on his blog about inviting participation in Web 2.0/social software tools. Here are the ones he’s come out with so far: Inviting Participation in Web 2.0 Part 2: Passive Invitations Part 3: Active Invitations Check out the comments too where people are making some great …
I remember when I got my job at Norwich, but before I started, I wondered what the new job would mean for my blog. How would my writing reflect on my organization? Would people ask me to censor myself? Fortunately, it has not changed what I write in the least. My blog is separate from …
I have a confession to make: I do not use my local public library. I have been in there twice. The first time I went in to get a library card and browsed around to see if there was something I might want to take out. I discovered that the selection of new books was …
Loyalty, foolish consistency or whatever you wish to call it I am an incredibly loyal person. When I find a product, person or service I like, I will stick with it/them for as long as I can. Although I haven’t lived in Florida for two years, I still get my hair cut by the same …
This morning, I received an e-mail from a librarian who is applying for a position as a distance learning librarian. She asked me what a distance learning librarian does. I would guess that every single person with the title (and some without it who work with online learners) have somewhat different job responsibilities. I’m the …
I went to an arts magnet school for high school (and yes, it was a bit like Fame with people dancing and singing in the halls — not exactly the typical high school experience, thank goodness). My “talent” was creative writing. In 9th grade, Frank Cerabino, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post came to …
It’s been almost a year since I wrote some posts about gripes I had with ALA and suggestions of how the ALA could do better. At the time, I was seriously considering letting my ALA membership lapse in the Fall of 2006. Yet last week, I put $200 on my credit card to renew my …
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 …
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 …
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 feed …
Michelle Boule by Etches-Johnson I want to wish a hearty congratulations to my good friend (and “wing man”) Michelle Boule, for being chosen by LITA to represent them in the ALA Emerging Leaders program. There are few people in this profession with such passion and enthusiasm as Michelle, and she is someone who is really …
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 …
by David King, newly of the Topeka and Shawnee Public Library David showed a whole bunch of library Websites that give users a really bad experience. There was one where they actually asked users whether they wanted a Flash or HTML Web site before they could get to the front page. Crazy! Then he showed …
Judi Briden, Katie Clark and Isabel Kaplan from the University of Rochester. They did a two year project to determine what undergraduates really do when they write research papers. They had a multi-disciplinary team including an anthropologist who taught the team about ethnographic methods. The findings from this would inform their Website design, instructional design, …
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 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 …
My dad (Jody Gorran) is a crazy entrepreneur. He has had more businesses (and business ideas) since I was born than years that I’ve been alive. From a hair salon, to treasure hunting, to water beds and gel matresses, to solar panels, to a housing development, to home security kits, to online scrapbooks and many, …
Let me preface this by saying that when I first started my job over a year ago, I was a big fan of EBSCO. Students found their interface easy to use, they were always improving their interface and offerings, and our local Rep was really responsive to our e-mails and questions. But something has changed. …
Library Journal is looking for nominations for their 2007 Movers and Shakers issue. They have an online nomination form that makes it wicked easy to nominate someone whom you think is an emerging leader in the profession. I was really touched to have been chosen last year (still not quite sure who nominated me and …