Contributors Michael Stephens

3983 posts

MSG:Your hold items are in at the Library

Aaron discovers and moblogs a very cool thing: http://www.thebizz.org/archives/001233.html and ponders “I wonder how many years it’ll be until libraries are offering text notifications to patrons. PC to phone messages are cheap or free…staff training would be the only issue, and probably not that big of one.” Sounds good to me. Steven Abrams words at CIL keep coming back to me in various ways: are the young adults who are texting now going to want to get a e-mail from their librarians?

Organizations & Tech Training

Sharing the slot with Bob and I was Angela Ballard, Information Technology Training Librarian at NCSU. Her talk was titled “Ahead of the Curve: Insuring Success of a Technology Training Program for Library Staff” and it really hit home some very important points. To insure a successful Technology/IT Training program: The library must take responsibility and devote time and resources The library must provide a training reesponse to every library-wide technology implementation The library must provide tools for on the job tech training The library must distribute training responsibilities. They do about 50 classes a year at NCSU. AND adminstrators […]

User Centered Instruction

Scott Brandt and I did our pre-conference workshop Tuesday afternoon. “Make Learning Stick: Creating 5 Star User Centered Training & Instruction”featured a DVD presentation about Bob, a harried trainer faced with training his entire staff on Web mail. We outlined 5 factors to insure training is user-focused and successful everytime! We had 23 participants and a lot of fun. It was an afternoon session and I must confess by 3pm were were all a little bleary eyed but Scott provided chocolate and we sailed through the rest of the session. Thanks to all who participated! Here are the workshop leaders […]

Top Tech Trends @ CIL Friday Keynote Session

One of my favorite parts of this conference: lisdtening to some forward-thinking speakers outline what the future may hold for library services… What follows is an annotated congrunt… Roy Tennant Theme: Digital Libraries XML — Standards must improve Harvesting data University faculty are realizing the crisis with scholarly communication Also: Storage!“As somone who has recently landscaped his house, I can officially say that storage is cheaper than dirt.” – Roy Tennant (Quote from theshiftedlibrarian.com) (I roared!) Mary Kennedy Theme: Getting Personal ?It?s all about me!? The personal experience is the most important! Space is a community space (That?s what I?m […]

Federated Searching Session: Federated Searching & OpenURL

Frank Cervone, Assistant University Librarian, Northwestern University Our users don?t know what DB the results came from, journal title is important?they just want the info. What can you link to: OPAC DBs What is federated searching? ?Squishy at this point? Metasearch: searches that use metadata to make decisions Megasearch: Dogpile, AlltheWeb, etc. Can be combined into a superset of federated searching Why is this so complicated? Not all protocols are supported by vendors: Z39.50 Tips for implementation: Select software Select hardware Gather provider info Gather holdings info Input the two (lightweight cataloging of the resources) Configure the connection information

LITA Top Tech Trends

It’s always good to check in with these…. Top Tech Trends January 2004 I like the listing by conference because you can see what’s hot (“…that RFID is so HOT right now…”) and what’s not (“…virtual reference is dead…”) (which I’m still trying to figure out.)

Welcome to TTW 2.0

After a huge crash of my iBlog software that left me stranded blogless at Computers in Libraries, Tame the Web is back — running on Movable Type thanks to the hard work of Aaron and Blake! It is now housed at the TTW domain as well! The old Tame the Web content is here! UPDATE: Still some DNS stuff to work out… please keep checking in and be sure to update links or feeds. I home with a cold/ear thing today… more to come.