Contributors Michael Stephens

4147 posts
Presentations

Travels around Indiana: ILF Meeting

I was tickled to be on the docket for the Indiana Library Federation Reference Division meeting last Friday with Jessamyn West and some most cool Indiana Librarians. Thanks to Kerry, Scott, Evan and everyone who helped make it such a wonderful experience! Here’s Scott’s take on the day too! In the drama of the day I didn’t really get to blog, but Marydee Ojala did! Here are some of her posts: Jessamyn in Indiana: http://www.onlineinsider.net/2005/09/jessamyn-west-in-indiana.html Hot New Communication Tools for Reference: http://www.onlineinsider.net/2005/09/hot-new-communication-tools-for.html This is where it got interesting. Flickr seemed to engage the audience. I clicked, tagged, noted and uploaded […]

TTW Ephemera

A Sad Day in the Info Science Community

My colleague and cohort chum Joyce Valenza sent me a message this morning: Dr. Laurel Anne Clyde, a professor of Social Science at the University of Icelandin Reykjav?k, Iceland, suffered a fatal heart attack on Sunday, September 18, 2005. I have read many of Dr. Clyde’s scholarly papers, presentations and articles on social software. She authored Weblogs & libraries last year, the first scholarly work on the topic! I had hoped she and I would meet at some future info science conference because I she was certainly a source of inspiration for my research and writing. Here is her page […]

TTW Ephemera

Putting a Face on with IM

Christina has a great post about IM, some recent research and setting expectations here: http://christinaslibraryrant.blogspot.com/2005/09/more-on-im-at-reference-desk.html Good stuff: And I was thinking that besides the fact that we?re afraid we?ll scare the customer away? we still need to properly negotiate the question if we?re going to successfully use this service with people we don?t know. The point is that we?re in an unequal power relationship: we have the info the customer needs (customers aren?t known to appreciate the fact that we need to keep ref stats to justify our existence). What?s preventing the IM reference staff from asking more questions? Is […]

Web 2.0 & Library 2.0

Embrace & Experience Web 2.0

I was so happy to see Sherri post about Meebo and include this little phrase: “Hello Web 2.0!” with a link to wikipedia as a definition. (And WOWZA is that some good reading!) So yes, greetings to Web 2.0! Are you ready for it? Has your library looked at blogs? IM? Flickr? And while we are saying hello, take a look at: http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=11257 for WebJunction’s overview of public libraries and online community, brought about by new social tools: A new generation of “social software” tools is coming on the scene, and they’re making it easier than ever for people to […]