joy at moll projects dot com
This post, So I tried a little experiment… needs some link love to get the distribution I think it deserves. A student at my alma mater compared the responses from several web-based answer services to a question. She posted it on lisstlouis, a group blog that the St. Louis based students of the University of Missouri library school share.
Labels: reviews
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Something to do the last twenty minutes of the evening reference shift. Via Walt and Jenica (I just made a new rule for myself: I can do the high schoolish first name thing for memes).
You. Can. Only. Type. One. Word. No. Explanations.
1. Yourself: warm
2. Your spouse: sweet
3. Your hair: yellowed
4. Your mother: missed
5. Your father: missed
6. Your dream last night: startling
7. Your favorite drink: cola
8. Your dream car: mine
9. Your bedroom: swampy
10. Your fear: irrelevance
11. What you want to be in 10 years: queen
12. Who you hung out with last night: R
13. What you’re not: pessimistic
14. Muffins: bran
15. Time: night
16. The last thing you did: answer
17. What you are wearing: fall
18. Your favorite weather: fall
19. The last thing you ate: orange
20. Your life: rich
21. Your mood: jazzed
22. Your best friend: R
23. What are you thinking about right now? utilities
24. Your car: Subaru
25. What are you doing at the moment? helping
26. Your summer: flashed
27. Your relationship status: lasting
28. What is on your TV? HDDVD
29. What is the weather like? warm
30. When is the last time you laughed? minutes
Labels: memes
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The IAG bloggers are writing about their favorite childhood books in honor of Children's Book Week (see here and here, maybe more later).
We had a small collection of Dr. Seuss books at home, so Cat in the Hat is a special favorite.
As a voracious young reader, I loved series--even ones that were completed before I was born. I read the entire run of the Bobbsey Twins and the Boxcar Children in third grade and the summers surrounding it. It took some careful coordination between the school library and the public library to read both series completely and in order.
In fourth grade, our teacher read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books aloud (this was several years before the Little House on the Prairie television series) after the lunch recess. So, of course, I read all of those books that year.
Then I graduated to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, the Williamsburg Series by Elswyth Thane, and Louisa May Alcott's books. Reading all those series made a pretty big dent in my small hometown library.
Labels: memes
# (0) commentsDemoing at Kirkwood Public Library.
Labels: presentations
# (0) commentsI haven't seen this blogged anywhere, yet, but a coworker was talking about it and a former professor put it up on the library school's student list server--compact-shelving moves to music in the video Interval Library.
Labels: fun
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I just installed IE 7 on my home computer. We were asked to not install either IE7 or Firefox 2 at work. Security issues. A problem I'm finding in a big organization is that the Systems people will say "don't do this--security issues." But they have no motivation to get the problem resolved, so it's generally up to someone else to push the matter. Well, I'll wait a few weeks or a couple of months for the initial glitches to get ironed out before I push.
In the meantime, I thought I needed to see the new browsers to be caught up professionally, so I said "yes" to Microsoft's installation update.
After the update, I was asked: what do you want to set up as your default provider. When I responded with "let me see what ya' got," I got a list--and I could use the list for both the default provider and the ones that show up in the drop-down box.
I selected Clusty for the default. Using the recent spate of comments Walt Crawford received to the question "What's on your Firefox search dropdown?" as inspiration, I also added:
I couldn't get the Creative Commons search to add to the list. To add search providers to the search dropdown box in IE7, you do a search in the search engine on the word TEST. Then paste the results URL into the Create Your Own box. Creative Commons appears to be using some kind of AJAX software, so the URL doesn't change and IE7 doesn't recognize it as a results page that it can use.
Labels: reviews
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After lunch, we got a presentation from Brad Whetzel of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and a current library school student, about library toolbars. He's just past the playing with the idea phase, which is one step farther along the path than we've achieved in our library, so it should help speed us through that.
For playing around with things, he used Conduit. BizBar looks quite similar. Best Tool Bars has more complicated offerings including a deskbar that shows up at the bottom of the desktop instead of the top of the browser window.
A related but different sort of beast is the LibX extension for Firefox. It offers a customizable toolbar, OpenURL support, and library logos that indicate in Amazon or other on-line bookstores that the library owns that book.
It doesn't look like these are customizable, but I imagine some patrons would be interested in the Ebscohost toolbar and the OCLC toolbar.
Labels: conferences, toolbars
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Our second session was "A Few Seconds a Day Keeps the Tech Guys Away," given by Tom Bell of John A. Logan College.
He shared an idea that has proven very successful at his institution--emailing a 30-second tutorial to faculty each Friday morning. Each one has four or five screen shots and a little text. It covers one small thing like how to get a signature in your Outlook email or how to burn a CD. Each tutorial takes an hour or so to prepare, but only thirty seconds (or maybe a minute or two) to understand. Tom designed a nice graphic logo banner so that the Friday tutorial is easily recognized from the branding.
He says that he gets a remarkable amount of positive feedback--more than a dozen thank-yous for the first couple and two or three from different people each week even after several months of sending them.
He uses SnagIt for the screen captures, Photoshop to optimize the size of the graphics and add arrows and text, and Microsoft Word to put it all together.
I don't believe that sending tutorials out to faculty from the library would be possible in our environment, but we could do something similar that goes to library staff.
Labels: conferences, instruction, screen capture
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Session 1 at the SILRC (pronounced Silrock and standing for Southern Illinois Learning Resources Cooperative) Retreat was mine: Social Networking Software in Libraries. I doubt that anyone blogged it....But I talked from a wiki that is publicly viewable. There's also a handout with definitions that I should probably throw up on the web sometime.
This is the third time I've given this talk as a 90-minute overview of web-based social technologies--wikis, blogs, instant messaging, sharing sites, and community sites (although the last two seem to be blending). People seem to get a lot out of seeing lots of library examples in conjunction with short definitions--it helps them understand the similarities and differences.
I'm giving it again on Friday for the Kirkwood Public Library's In Service Day. I'll probably change quite a few of the links to focus on public library examples. Suggestions welcome: joy at moll projects dot com. Also, I think I only get to talk an hour, so if anyone has ideas on what to cut, I'd love to hear it.
The difference between a retreat and a conference seems to be that there are fewer people (about 30) and only one track of sessions. With no choices to make, no room changes, and a reasonable number of people to meet, I found a retreat to be a much more relaxed atmosphere than a conference. I stayed for a couple of more sessions (and lunch) so I'll blog those in the next two blog posts.
Labels: conferences, presentations, social software
# (0) commentsI was interviewed, along with a freshman and a professor, for an article about Wikipedia in the student paper, Student Life. We all cautioned against citing the articles in academic work. I'm pretty sure I said that one should cite scholarly sources, not primary ones--oh, well. I also wish I had managed to highlight the many great alternatives we have for obtaining background information--including the online Encyclopedia Britannica and our print reference section, including an amazing selection of subject encyclopedias. I might have even mentioned one of my favorite methods for getting an overview of a topic: children's books--we can get them through Mobius (our state-wide consortium) or students can utilize one of the local public libraries.
# (0) commentsBlogging from beautiful Rend Lake--SILRC Retreat.
Labels: presentations
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Thin Clients: The Spin on Thin
Helene E. Gold, Eckerd College
This was a fun presentation that I went to mostly because I had a good time hanging out with Helene earlier in the conference. I don't anticipate that we'll be seeing thin clients anytime soon in our library, but one of the points Helene made was that generally librarians are told that this is going to happen, not brought into the decision-making process. It was nice to hear the experience of someone who was distressed, at first, but was able to ultimately see the advantages.
Thin clients are what those of us who are old enough to remember the pre-PC days would call dumb terminals. The public side is a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The computing side is a shared server on a computer in a secure location. Modern thin clients support USB flash drives so a user can access his or her own material.
The primary advantage to a thin client system is cost. There is a high initial cost, but a savings in the long run. More than equipment cost, there is a substantial savings in maintenance cost, particular the labor. With fewer moving parts and a lot fewer holes for students to try sticking food into, the thin clients are very robust, making them ideal for recreational and dining areas. There is also a nice bonus in savings on energy usage and costs--thin clients use about one-sixth the power of a PC.
It was something of a comfort to realize that Eckerd College is teaching their students one at a time about the system, just as we are about printing. It seems like there ought to be a better way, but just because we put out signs and put up websites, doesn't mean that anyone is going to read them. And why should they? They don't need to know until they encounter a problem, so it's a good thing that I get paid to solve problems.
Helene has a nice site up with links to her handouts and her slides. An advantage of actually being there is that I got to see the fun video clips.
Labels: conferences
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