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TTW Guest Post: Love thy Luddite

The Importance of the Non-Techie or How I Learned to Stop Pulling Out My Hair and Love my Luddite
by: Mick Jacobsen

My wife mocks Twitter thoroughly, “You don’t even know these people,” she repeats. She thinks Facebook/MySpace is weird. She considers online gaming to be silly.  She wasn’t sure about this whole “Blog Thing” and [...]

Building a Community: Create Your Own Social Network

 

I’ve always been fascinated by social interaction online, all the way back to 1994 when I started a discussion list for Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks fans on my old Mac with a dial-up connection. I didn’t know it then, but I was attempting to bring together a community–to make some connections [...]

Jessamyn Joins CIL

Jessamyn Joins CIL

Originally uploaded by mstephens7

WooHoo! Jessamyn West has taken over writing “Tech Tips for Every Librarian” at CIL with Rachel. Her first article “Data and Desires: What Users Really Want” is great!

Tech Tips for Every Librarian

A big Thank You to the folks at Information Today for granting permission to me to reprint the articles I wrote as part of the “Tech Tips for Every Librarian” department, that Rachel Singer Gordon and I took turns writing in 2006 and 2007 for Computers in Libraries magazine. I enjoyed every one I wrote [...]

Embedding a Librarian in Your Web Site Using meebo

Did last year’s “FASTER IM” article fire you up for on-the-cheap virtual reference? Have you launched your own instant messaging “ask a librarian” service and added it to your workflow? Are you ready for the next step? Then read on. And don’t worry, you can use these tips to start IM in your library now [...]

Putting Wikis into Play

This weekend marks the conclusion of one of my classes this semester at Dominican University’s GSLIS. Internet Fundamentals & Design traces the history of the Net, features some simple Web page coding, and covers a whole lot of Web 2.0 exploration, including group presentations on how to implement new technologies in libraries. Yes, group projects, [...]

Creating a Librarian’s Info-Portal with Netvibes and RSS

What Web page comes up when your staff members open their Web browsers on the service desk or at their own desks? Is it the library’s Web site? That’s a good choice, especially if you have constantly updating news on the front page of your library blog. Perhaps you have your catalog, [...]

Priceless Images: Getting Started with Flickr

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Some images are priceless, capturing a moment, a person, or an event in time. One of the most important things we can do with our online presence is to take advantage of the graphical nature of the Web and the interactive nature of many Web [...]

Ten Tips for Technology Training

Technology training in libraries is more important than ever. New tools and systems require new training and new methods of instruction. How many librarians have found themselves the “accidental” tech trainer for their organizations in recent years? Whether you chose the job, or the job chose you, you have work to do. Library staff and [...]

IM = FASTER Virtual Reference on the Cheap!

Remember the wave of virtual reference talk a few years back? Remember how virtual reference services were supposed to change the very foundations of what we do? Remember how some librarians discovered that those systems required users to navigate into a slowly loading chat queue inside their browsers so you could send, or “push,” [...]