edifice ref

ASIST conference in Austin and the Blogs and Wiki Workshop

Beatrice — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 18:35:19 +0000

Arrived late yesterday…luckily my hotel is very close to a few restaurants..sampled my first authentic Austin breakfast burrito and watched the original Ugly Betty (Betty la Fea) before going to bed very early. I’m speaking at a panel workshop on the use of blogs and wikis as conference communications tools this afternoon. I’m really looking forward to it.

It’s a Library Thing..

Beatrice — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:58:10 +0000

A little ATCQ reference…Tim Spalding has just begun talking about some of the social information content within Library Thing…They even make room for user-submitted covers…Tim Spalding’s Author Gallery. All publicly available or permission granted. Spalding views Library Thing as a wikipedia like catalog—all user generated content can be changed by users — and thinks within five years we’ll see an open source catalog alternative to OCLC.

LibXing from the conference

Beatrice — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:02:26 +0000

Godmar and Annette have been talking about scalabilty and modularity…Nicole mentioned a book called Design Rules: The Power of Modularity by Brown and Clark..I just used PC’s test edition to have the book held at my library….Lunch time!

Money money money money..!

Beatrice — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:40:16 +0000

IMLS has awarded Annette and Godmar a National Leadership Grant to support the development of LibX over the next two years….They will be making an Edition builder interface so that libraries can build their own editions. Check this…Virginia Tech is still only using IE. Annette & Godmar plan to build a plug-in for IE..They will also be looking at usability with this grant…

Godmar Back

Beatrice — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:22:47 +0000

Godmar is discussing the functionality of the LibX plugin and OpenURL technology…applause when he dragged the title of an article from a bibiliography on a pdf document to Google Scholar and the window opened up to the new source. Discussing “cues” now…

Go forth and embed…

Beatrice — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:10:02 +0000

I’m at our NEASIST program today…SOLD OUT!! Annette Bailey is up now talking about LibX. LibX actually came about when she was interviewing for jobs last year. Bailey wanted to have something cool and useful to wow prospective employers. Annette and Godmar’s initial conversations included the LibX tool’s potential as a “virtual librarian.” She did this for an INTERVIEW…Follow today’s discussion here or on NEASIST’s event blog.

A Camping We Will Go…

Beatrice — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:36:18 +0000

Library Camp East is underway…Lichen is keeping us in the know on her very prettyful blog. I wish I could hear Casey Bisson’s OPAC discussion. He’s my Innovative hero…I know, it’s too early in the week for puns. My consortium upgraded to III’s WebOpac version over the summer and I am on a task force that will recommend improvements to the interface to enhance its function. The OPAC is the public face to the library, not an earth-shattering statement, but sometimes its importance gets passed over in favor of discussions about federated search and hot databases. I’m the lone nondeveloper on the force. I have html and various scripting experience, but it’s not like I play with java/perl on a daily basis. I hope my role will be to keep the OPAC user-centric.

Fall ramblings

Beatrice — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:27:43 +0000

It feels very silly firing off an “I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaack” post, since I’ve been “gone” for a long time and even I managed to forget about the blog I started in earnest last March. But what’s a blog/journal for if you can’t post a mea culpa every now and again? I think I’ll make this my pre-mea culpa. Blog technology is sooo forgiving. I’m writing while on a dinner break and I’ll save you my what-I-did-last-spring/summer rant, except to say I’ve learned to fence and this summer I rediscovered my love for pre-dawn rowing. It is week three into the fall semester, and it’s starting to slow down just a tad. The meetings however, are still coming fast and furiously…that is one thing they DON’T tell you about in L-school. You learn very quickly how much you should/can take on. As they say, what doesn’t kill you…. I’m quickly approaching my second year in my first professional librarian position and I still love it. Always an interesting question, project or problem to tackle. I also find being active in the profession a great opportunity to learn, stumble at times and grow. Let’s see, this week I’m working on kicking off a project I suggested over the summer: Usage study of our reference collection. I see so many students sprawled in the reference section, what are they using? I’m also finalizing our Libx Firefox extension and accompanying intro page. You can’t unleash a new piece of technology without telling folks how to use it. Godmar and Annette have been so helpful. I’m loving it every time I try it and think our users will dig it too. We will rock when our consortium begins trialing federated search products. Incidentally (okay not so..) Godmar and Annette will speaking at NEASIST’s Dawn of the Embedded Library program at Tufts on Oct. 3. We are very near capacity if you are considering attending. Lastly, I have a couple of web guides left to crank out. I also thought it was time to spruce up the old Wordpress theme. Hopefully, I’ll have that done by week’s end. I just upgraded to the latest WP version, and even the innards are snazzy.

Some final impressions of the ASIST conference in Charlotte

Beatrice — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 13:27:20 +0000

I attended so many stimulating sessions and can say that after a second year of sitting in on one of Karen Fisher’s presentations, I realized that attending an ASIST conference means I can get to hear about her most recent research. This year I attended the “Information Grounds” session. Like many other people there, and like those of you following the conference virtually either through the blog or wiki, we have all been a part of an information ground. Fisher defined an information grounds as a “temporary environment created when people come together for a singular purpose [namely to engage in informal and formal info sharing]“. Fisher identified churches as the most popular settings for information grounds for people in the lower income bracket and the workplace for those in higher income brackets. Think, where else do you spend most of your time? There were several panelists and the results of the studies were reported from research that included baby story-time hours in a large public library system in Canada, a Polish community in Seattle, Hispanic farm workers and college students.

Patti Maes’ “Just-In-Time-Information” plenary was exciting as she described and showed screen shots of some of the gadgets coming out of her Ambient Intelligence Group at MIT’s Media Lab. According to Maes, Just-In-Time-Information is providing “info to the user that is highly relevant to what h/s is focused on” and “promotes insight/inspiration/interpersonal connections w/o interrupting the user’s activities”. Sounds very information commons to me..

This keynote also appealed to the gadget freak in me, I like the idea of a device/app that allows me to keep track of my mentors published thoughts and opinions virtually and the sensors that track your interest and flash when you walk past certain books of interest or books that mention you (for me a very future state prospect).

The “Myth of the Intellectual Commons” session highlighted problems of attribution of ideas and rightful ownership of digital objects in a variety of situations (academic, work-for-hire and libraries in other countries — Anglo, Eastern European and Middle East). What was missing for me in this session and others was more discussion from developing areas (African countries, etc.).

The “Use of Classification in Information Seeking” session had a common thread of “people think they want a Google search but they really don’t”. I think the key will be to make the googlish search features available in most databases as robust as the advanced features we keep directing people to use. My ra-ra rant: It should be seamless for the user, and the user shouldn’t have to know or care about faceted classification. It should be like PubMED!! If only all of the other databases I use and instruct others to use had a single citation matcher or such powerful simple search.

Tips for Ending PowerPointlessness

Beatrice — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 23:11:47 +0000

Free webcast on Thursday, November 10th (3-4pm) from the Blended Librarian folks…http://home.learningtimes.net/library. I’ll be tuning in for this.