I remember a few months ago, my friend Rochelle wrote a terrific post about the Second Life Library 2.0. She basically wrote about her first-time experiences in the Second Life realm and how confusing and off-putting it was for her. She voiced some criticisms of the Second Life Library project, which she made clear were …
Nintendo Wii: Meredith’s Mii Originally uploaded by SirStan. I have a Mii! I have to say, I thought I could wait until the summer or next Fall to buy a Wii, but after playing it at a friend’s house last night, I’m really starting to get the itch! Adam bought me a Nintendo DS Lite …
I am pleased to announce that, after much deliberation, we have chosen our participants for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course! They are a diverse group — geographically, in the type of population they work with, and in terms of their position at their library. Here is the list: Bayer, Dell – Sr. …
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 …
I got tagged by both Nicole and David, so I guess it’s my turn to share some stuff about me you may not already have known. I’m pretty open on my blog, so there isn’t a lot that I haven’t shared with you that I’d be willing to share in a public space. Here goes: …
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 …
I think I will second Jill Stover’s nomination of Ken Varnum for the title of “great guy”. In response to some comments on his blog regarding library marketing, Ken created WOMBLINK, a way for libraries to easily spread the word about their services (and for bloggers to easily spread the word for them). From Ken’s …
I just wanted to take a moment out while slogging through my book galley (more on that at a later date) to congratulate my friend Casey Bisson on being awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for his development of the WPopac, a groundbreaking catalog with WordPress as the front end. Casey deserves a ton …
Last summer, I was talking with someone from the planning committee of the Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries’ Fall Conference. Their theme was “Cool Tools and New Technologies” and I asked her if they were going to have someone speak about screencasting. Her response was “but everyone knows about screencasting already.” Really? Maybe I travel in the …
I just wanted to remind folks that December 1 is the deadline for applications to participate in the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. You can find the application instructions here. We have gotten an incredible number of applications for the course from people all over the world — from all different types of …
A few months ago, David Rothman asked me if there was any tool for searching the biblioblogosphere. At the time, there really wasn’t much. I told him about LISFeeds, but explained that its search functionality was very limited. And that was the last I heard on the subject from him until a few days ago …
I’m out here in Lansing Michigan at The Library Rebooted conference, offered by the Michigan Library Consortium. I just talked about wikis and Jessamyn West is now talking about blogs. You can find my presentation here on my Website (PPT). For those of you who were here at the conference, here are some more wiki-related …
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 …
While at Internet Librarian, I learned about the Maintain IT Project. This three-year Bill and Melinda Gates funded initiative is designed to identify best practices for maintaining public access computers. Right now, they are collecting stories from library folks about working with public access computers and keeping them running. From these stories of success and …
This is what we have needed in the biblioblogosphere for a long time. Have you ever been looking for a blog post you read a while back, but you don’t remember who wrote it or exactly when? All you remember is the topic and that isn’t going to get you too far. Well, things in …
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 …