Joe and I IM after class. Dale, our Web Developer, made his custom icon! This is cool. I just spent an hour with our branch heads teaching them how to use AIM on their Mac PowerBooks to communicate with each other from wherever they find themselves. With all the talk about IM: at CIL, in blogs and in SLIS classes (a recent email from a student/SJCPL colleague reported that an IU SLIS professor stated that IM will be the way to communicate by 2007!) — it is good for the branch librarians to be aware of what IM is, how […]
Contributors Michael Stephens
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CIL Highlights included all I’ve written in this category before and the following: Meeting Rachel Singer Gordon before Friday?s keynote. Her book came out the same time as mine and we were reviewed together a few times. Her writing has inspired me ever since, especially her well-thought views on where our profession is heading. Our Bloggers Dine Around (WE missed you Steven!) where 12 people fell in for great Thai food, some yummy cocktails and some darn fine chat: blogs in the library workplace, PDAs, the wireless world, evil PowerPoint presentations and of course a recap of the Dead and […]
One of the highlighhts of this Conference was seeing Jenny Levine at the Wednesday night Dead and Emerging Technologies session. She made some great points. This stuff is spot on. She gratefully shared her notes with me, so here’s a bit that really hit home for me: (Jenny’s words are in bold!) THINGS THAT SCARE ME – Library web sites with email reference forms that say ?We will respond to your email within 48 hours? Uh Oh – SJCPL is guilty! – Libraries that don?t provide wireless access for patrons, librarians that don?t understand why they will need to OH […]
And so is Hansel. But really, take a look at http://libraryrfid.blogspot.com/. I lost track of my source for this one… probably LISBlogsource. Please forgive me!
I have not mentioned the biggest thing happening in my life yet because I wanted to give a little time to thinking about new directions and life changes. My big news though, which came to me the day I got back from CIL: I have applied to and been accepted into the first distance independent PhD program for Information Science out of the University of North Texas. The program will begin in June with a few days on campus and then will be Web-based with cohort meetings a couple of times a semester for 2 years. I thought long and […]
Yesterday was our annual Open Book Festival at SJCPL. There were activities, authors and fun! The coolest thing was the appearance of spooky author Jonathan Rand, who resides Up North. He even wrote a book set in Traverse City! This is an excellent example of what libraries can do to promote reading of course but also to promote the library as meeting place and social center. Well done Open Book Committee!! Here’s Dana and Lori with the Man himself!
Via YAHOO News Feed: “Noticed those little orange boxes on the Web lately with the letters “XML?” Nice little article that says a lot about RSS gaining ground in the mainstream. Does your library web site have a feed for news and info?
One of the posts that got lost when my previous blog software crashed mid-conference was about Tuesday March 9, the day before the conference started when many of my colleagues and I were teaching preconference workshops. I started the day by swinging by the Cabinet Room and giving my best to Jenny and Steven who were doing their Blogging 101 program. Then, Scott Brandt and I spent the morning fine-tuning our 5-Star workshop I wrote about here. Lunch was provided by InfoToday, offering a chance to have some good food and see old friends from previous conferences. A group of […]
Barbara Quint’s wit and writing send me everytime! I was so happy to be on the panel with her at IL (even though she was just on a speaker phone, she captured the room with her words!) Read this: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/feb04/voice.shtml Looking forward, Quint theorizes that digital libraries (huge digital libraries..) will allow 24/7 access to huge amounts opf easily published materials. How do librarians fit in? “The trick for the future of the profession,” she writes, ” lies in finding new tasks that need doing, new ways to do them, and ways to convince clients everywhere that they need us.”
http://www.lib.unc.edu/house/im_a_librarian.html I love this! (And I was quoted at CIL giving my opinion on Virtual Reference software so this just supports my idea that IM ref could work!) Why not get on a standard system that is deeply ingrained in our techno-culture instead of making our users wade through java-enabled Web pages and chat environements that sometimes do not work the way they should? Give em something they already know. How do we best serve our users? (the PEOPLE part)