Contributors Michael Stephens

4147 posts

I am a Librarian

http://www.iamalibrarian.com/gallery.html I Am a Librarian My name is Cynthia Wilson. I received my Masters Degree in library science from Clarion University and I am a photographer. I have been looking for librarians and library school students in the United States who would be willing to get their picture taken, and answer a short interview for a book that I am working on, titled ?I am a Librarian!? Cynthia took my picture one sweltering day in Orlando last June with my beloved PowerBook. Here’s the image, which is one of many on display at the University of West Florida, Fort Walton […]

SMS Reference at SLU

http://www.teachinglibrarian.org/weblog/2005/03/early-adopter-of-sms-reference.html I apoligize if this made the rounds back in March — maybe because I was at CIL I totally missed it! But this is intriguing. I wonder what their numbers are? How the librarians feel about it? And what the student perception of the library might be because of this innovative service? Take a look at their info page for the service: http://www.selu.edu/Library/ServicesDept/referenc/textalibrarian.html

UK Study: Messages Lower IQ

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/index.html?section=cnn_tech CNN piece about a study out of the UK that finds folks are too distracted by email, messaging, etc. Bit that resonated the most with me: “Companies should encourage a more balanced and appropriate way of working.” Heck yeah! I need to ponder the implications here of the IQ stuff, but here’s another vote for balance in our library and information lives. Handle only the information you are comfortable with and know when to unplug. With that, dear readers, I am UNPLUGGING for the weekend.

IM Survey Responses at schwagbag

I am loving this! A respondent says: “Kudos to linking to the Instant Messaging deifition in the Wikipedia from the Library’s website. It’s nice to know that UNLV’s librarians are up-to-date on things such as the Wikipedia. The idea of Instant Messaging for help sounds wonderful. If it isn’t a nuisance and is setup that a librarian at the help desk runs AIM in the background as she/he helps in-person patrons and then additionally helps online patrons, this could become a successful way to reach and help students.” Read all about it…http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/schwagbag/archives/2005/04/imers_not_digit_1.html

Are You being Served?

And guess what? Your library sounds the same way if you tell patrons (of any age) that they can’t IM from your library because that’s not a valid use of your public computers. You’re basically telling people that their choice of communication channel isn’t allowed and that they should go elsewhere because you won’t be serving them today. ROCK ON!

Jybe Set

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelsphotos/sets/249806/ We meet with Brian again today: our Staff development Librarian, our Web developer and yours truly for another demo. The implications for training intrigue me. Here I’ve set up a session to run through a PPT on the Reference Interview.

Jybe 2.0 is Here (RIP VR)

I’ve had an ongoing dialog with Brian at Jybe and today (Sunday) he asked me to take a look at Jybe 2.0 with him. Amidst my parsing of XML and pondering a paper on iPodder, Brian and I spent about 30 minutes looking at the new plug in and discussing how librarians might use Jybe to co-browse with users or each other (I see a big future for training and staff development this way- I could conduct a brief tutorial on a databse from my desk with a librarian at a branch! Our most cool staff dev librarian at SJCPL […]