Categories TTW Ephemera

472 posts

The default category. For uncategorized articles or articles that don’t fit elsewhere.

Still More Work to Do

Michael Casey, who JUST STARTED BLOGGING in September — wooohoo — commented yesterday on a post from 2004, 10 Things A Library Can Do to Boost their Techie Stuff* (*without breaking the bank), and I wanted to put that comment here because it’s way back in the TTW archives. I couldn’t agree more with what Michael says: “Looking at this more than a year after posting causes me much frustration and angst when I realize that so many libraries — libraries that can and should have embraced all of these long ago — have yet to adopt more than one […]

Plugged in and iPod’ed Up

From Beatrice at edifice ref comes this gem of a post, looking at the start of a new semester at Providence College Phillips Memorial Library : “Just coming up for a bit of air after 3 solid weeks of back-to-school activities. This is my first full ?fall? semester and it has been a doozy. I haven?t done a tally, but I have to believe the early indicators that our new IM service is a big hit. We launched on the first day of classes, sent campus-wide emails the following week, and we?re now receiving several IMs a day. Lot of […]

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 […]

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 […]

Virtual Visit to Australia

Last night, from 6pm to 7pm, I gave a talk with a group of 60 librarians at the State Library of Victoria, Australia. It was 9am today for them… so as I was nearing the end of my day, sitting in front of my Mac with my boys on the floor beside me, those folks were at work, probably enjoying coffee or tea and planning for the day’s activities. ( There was actually a test of the fire alarm system about halfway through!) We used a combination of Skyp and Jybe to do the “Virtual Visit,” which was planned by […]