Bibliographic turf

Tue 6 Nov 2007, 4:54 pm

Trying to unpack my thoughts on Zotero vs. RefWorks and how librarians support bibliographic software.

Comments? 12

Small victories

Tue 1 May 2007, 9:53 pm

A lucky win on a reference question.

Comments? 5

Don’t just go where your users are: go where your users are complaining about you -OR- This is now less broken!

Fri 3 Nov 2006, 11:03 am

When I last posted about this thread at This is Broken, it was devolving into something of a flame war between myself and a few others who seemed to think that the main role of a library in society is to test one’s virtue, maturity, and responsibility when it comes to overdues and fines. </snark>

For [...]

Comments? One

It is, too, broken!

Tue 17 Oct 2006, 10:16 pm

I probably shouldn’t comment any more on this because (a) this is a public library issue and I have never held a real position at a public library (shelving books in the children’s section for 8 hrs/week doesn’t count); (b) after commenting in two separate locations earlier today I shouldn’t beat a dead horse; and [...]

Comments? 2

More on research, writing, and what they have to do with one another

Wed 11 Oct 2006, 11:44 pm

“Law library studying” by zalgon on Flickr

I received two thoughtful comments on my last post (including my first comment from a Colorado College faculty member; welcome, Laura!), and I thought I might continue the conversation in a new post. So here we are.

Jessy comes at this question of how to help students better use the [...]

Comments? One

Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Unless he has no idea how to clean and cook the stupid fish.

Fri 6 Oct 2006, 10:08 am

Here is a little story I have told a few times lately since I recently remembered the event:

When I was a college student, I spent a fair amount of time in the library. I wasn’t really burning the midnight oil studying (I was a theatre major, after all!), but when I had some time to [...]

Comments? 3

DVDs yok

Sat 23 Sep 2006, 2:52 pm

My friend Dan is in Turkey, coordinating the Global Partners study abroad program there. He is keeping his stateside friends up to date with a blog and Flickr account–guess who suggested that? :)

I thought y’all would enjoy this from Dan’s latest post, where he runs down a list of things he has been able to [...]

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Helping students. It’s what we do.

Fri 25 Aug 2006, 12:09 pm

I just got back from a quick talk to upper-class students who are leading New Student Orientation trips. They will be in charge of small groups of first-year students, taking them either out into the Southwest to do community service, or on camping trips in the Rockies. It is the kind of thing that would [...]

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Library lessons from unlikely places

Fri 2 Jun 2006, 2:52 pm

I have a bunch of posts cooling their heels in The Long Queue. Posts that will change the way you think about conferences, library catalogs, signage, etc. (Well, maybe they won’t change the way you think about those things. But I have high hopes for them.)

But today, I have two little observations of library lessons [...]

Comments? One

A Library 2.0 skeptic’s reading list

Fri 26 May 2006, 8:34 pm

Walt Crawford recently offered an “apology” of sorts on his blog Walt at Random for being the only person that the Library 2.0 proponents tend to cite as a Library 2.0 critic or skeptic. His January 2006 survey of the state of “Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0′” (link to pdf or html; it’s long, so [...]

Comments? 5

A friend of the devil is a friend of mine (on Flickr)

Fri 24 Feb 2006, 10:53 pm

…or how keeping up with social software might help with your actual job.

A little while back, my friend and colleague Sarah, the Academic Technology Specialist for the Humanities here at CC, asked me if I had any ideas for an art history professor who was looking for software that would enable her students to annotate [...]

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Meme 2.0

Wed 22 Feb 2006, 10:43 pm

I was in the virtual peanut gallery at this morning’s SirsiDynix Institute Conversation: “The 2.0 Meme – Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0.” The panel was the Library 2.0 Gang of Four, i.e., Stephen Abram, John Blyberg, Michael Casey, and Michael Stephens.

All four men were in good form, sounding the themes that are familiar if [...]

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Designing user experiences

Wed 8 Feb 2006, 11:31 pm

A slide from Ardhana Goel’s presentation at the “Designing Library Experiences for Users” webcast.

Tuesday, I attended the Blended Librarian webcast “Designing Library Experiences for Users.” The session was a look at how Maya Design approached a major overhaul of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. [Note: I haven't been able to get through to the Maya [...]

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Zeldman on "Web 3.0" -or- What are we doing right?

Fri 20 Jan 2006, 11:47 pm

Thanks to TangognaT’s (whom I have now just linked to twice this evening, and whose palindromic nom de blog I have only just now figured out) link, I read web designer and standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman’s article Web 3.0.

The article and ideas don’t map seamlessly to Library 2.0; libraries never had a “bubble” that I [...]

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Library 2.0: groping toward a definition through comments

Thu 5 Jan 2006, 9:29 pm

I have been continuing to think about Library 2.0, whatever it may be (aren’t we up to library 2.0.1 or something?), but still don’t have a nice juicy post put together for See Also yet.

I have, however, been quite busy with the comments on other blogs. I hope this isn’t too cheesy, but I thought [...]

Comments? 7

CAL2005: Information Literacy and Program Assessment

Fri 11 Nov 2005, 1:01 pm

OK, I said I wasn’t going to blog CAL2005 to death, but I did take some notes during today’s first session on online information literacy instruction. See my notes after the jump.

In other news, my camera battery is inexplicably dead, so photos will have to wait until tomorrow.

Tags: library, cal2005, information_literacy, tutorial, academic

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Great "reference" transaction on Ask MetaFilter

Fri 21 Oct 2005, 8:45 pm

On Ask Metafilter, “yankeefog” is looking for information from a 1938 Vienna phone book so he can see where his grandfather lived before fleeing the Nazis.

Within half an hour, “arco,” a librarian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library replies, promising to check into it.

Within 24 hours, the librarian has found not only the [...]

Comments? 2

The only thing constant is change

Thu 13 Oct 2005, 3:32 pm

There is a post titled Library 2.0, Beta over at Library Crunch that has a few lines that I like very much:

Constant change is replacing the older model of upgrade cycles. Let me repeat that, constant change is replacing the older model of upgrade cycles. Take a look at such sites as Flickr [...]

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The ubiquitous library

Thu 8 Sep 2005, 11:22 am

A brief write-up of Lowry, Charles B. “Let’s Call it the ‘Ubiquitous Library’ Instead…” portal: Libraries and the Academy 5 (2005) 293-296.

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Integrating library services with the user in mind

Thu 1 Sep 2005, 4:53 pm

I speak at a college library/IT retreat and try an channel Lorcan Dempsey in “integration with the systems environment of the user.”

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