I recently had an interesting discussion with a librarian regarding the usability of OPACs. I, as usual, was arguing that there are lessons to be learned from Google, RedLightGreen, and Amazon in how information retrieval systems should be designed. He replied, “at some point don’t you think the responsibility should rest on the students? How …
I’ve never really been “up” on Canada. For one, I’ve never been there (not that I wouldn’t like to, but the opportunity has not presented itself yet). Two, I, like many Americans, sadly know very little about Canadian geography, politics, history, culture etc. But I’ve become very enchanted with Canada over the past few months …
FINALLY there is a thoughtful article on the entry-level library job shortage! Finally, there is an article that actually uses current research to describe the job market rather than statistics that are based on projections that are based on fallacies. I urge everyone to read this Library Journal article by Rachel Holt and Adrienne Strock, …
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 …
I have been wanting to write more about social bookmarking for a long time, but I had two job interviews last week and an all-day marathon interview to prepare for next week. So I decided I’d just link to other articles/presentations that I thought were interesting and hope to have more time for a mega …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, there …
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 …
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 …
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 …