joy at moll projects dot com
Via Paul Pival, The Distant Librarian, Brian Mathews at Georgia Tech monitored student blogs on LiveJournal and Xanga and interspersed librarian-style advice in the conversations. Cool!
Brian had some negative reactions to using gt_library as his username, as if it were the institution hanging out on LJ. When he used his own individual persona for interactions, he got nothing but appreciation. His post on the project includes a link to his Institutional Repository entry (how cool is that?) that contains a pdf with preliminary findings and a Quicktime movie that was very helpful in helping me understand the concept.
How does this scale? I already monitor a group blog of WashU students on Live Journal. There's over 400 just in that group. Occasionally, I can offer a librarian perspective on the group blog but it's mostly used for event announcements. From Brian's paper it looks like I would be more effective monitoring their individual LJs. That's a lot of subscriptions to set up and a lot of feeds to monitor--although the search feed in Bloglines would definitely help.
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The eastwikkers blog is reviewing 33 wikis. They are on their fifth day now. You can read those entries all together using the category link. I've subscribed to the feed because real life examples of how people are using wikis may help me figure out what it takes to develop one that people will really use. Via David Lee King.
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Demonstrating at WU Libraries.
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I went to a Technology Expo on Tuesday and the best thing I came home with was...Google tips! These came from Melissa Belvaldi, systems/reference librarian at Maryville University. Here are my favorites.
Ranking. Repeat one of the keywords in your search and that word will be weighted more highly in the ranking. I can't think of an example now, but I know I've done searches where I wanted to pull certain results to the top based on one of my keywords. This will do it.
Number range. Two periods between two numbers is like typing all the numbers into the search box. How do you search for the role of women in work in the 20th century prior to World War II? This gave me some nice results: women work 1900..1941.
Definitions. The search for define:keyword will return definitions. I've used the technique of putting definition along with my keyword which works, but this gets nicer looking results.
Calculator and Converter. The Google search box is a calculator--try typing 2+2. Even better, it's a converter--try 10kg in lbs. It does monetary conversions, too (with a disclaimer).
Synonyms. A tilde in front of the keyword tells Google that you want to search for synonyms of that keyword. One use that will come in handy for me is to use ~St. Louis instead of St. Louis because you never know whether a website will spell it out or abbreviate it.
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I've been checking our periodical shelves for Library Journal most of the week, since Greg spilled the beans about the selection of Meredith Farkas as a 2006 Mover and Shaker. Not there yet....I can't wait to take the issue around the office and say "I know her!" In the meantime, there is the online version.
Meredith, and her blog (Information Wants To Be Free), and the wikis she started have helped me more times than I can count, as a student, as a job seeker, and as a new librarian.
Congratulations, Meredith!
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I received a lot of help as a result of my How to Choose Wiki Software post on January 24.
My best sources for what questions to ask came from these sites:
It's been two weeks and a day since Student Life printed an article about my involvement with LiveJournal, Facebook, and AIM. It's spring break here at Wash U, so this seemed like a good time to provide an update on the results of that publicity.
In Facebook, I have been "friended" by 3 students, 4 WU library staff, and 4 librarians around the country. The librarians found out about my Facebook presence via this blog or a discussion that I contributed to on the AcademicPR email list server. Oh, and I "friended" the Bunny--a rather bizarre statue in the center of campus, The Thinker recast as an anorexic rabbit. I'm not quite sure how the Bunny got a *.edu email address....
I have yet to receive a reference question through Facebook, but one of the other librarians did. I suspect that is because when you do a search in WashU's view of Facebook on "librarian," she is the first non-student to pop up.
I have one student friend in LiveJournal, but friending doesn't seem to be as big a deal in LiveJournal. I have started updating my LiveJournal page as a kind of second blog. I direct the entries to students because those are the people who are most likely to find me. I'm not harboring a fantasy that anyone will read it regularly, but when students do find me through the Washington University Students group or some other way, I want them to have something more entertaining to look at than my profile.
I had a number of friends in MySpace before the Student Life article--other librarians who have been experimenting with social software this year. Since the article and subsequent events, I've been friended by 5 more librarians, only one of which was a previous acquaintance.
Two students contacted me via IM.
The campus Career Center requested an appointment with me next month to discuss how to reach out to students using technology. That's very cool, because I had been looking to the Career Center for outreach ideas. Looks like we might be able to help each other.
So far, I'd have to say this has all been better for my professional networking than for making contacts with students. But I think it has potential. The article in the paper was a terrific start, but I'm going to have to build on that if I want to have an on-line presence that's visible to students.
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I think today's Unshelved comic strip may be my favorite ever.
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