I meant to post this the second I saw it, but the final week of SLA’s free web conference begins today. This is sponsored by the Chemistry, Sci-Tech and Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) divisions of SLA. The line up of posters looks great: http://forum.lib.lsu.edu/slachem/. I plan to check out Christina Pika’s Information Power Tour, Building a Science Browsing Collection for Undergrads and Understanding the Research and Teaching Needs of Physics Faculty. This is an asynchronous discussion. You read and comment on the message board. The creators of the posters will be monitoring and responding all week.
I’ve been avoiding this since the beginning (going back into my WP html files to do some much needed inside work on my blog’s innards), but my search function is a little wack and I think it’s a “since the last update” issue. The plus side is that the WP support forums are excellent. I’ve just been a little lazy and hoping that the problems would just GO AWAY.
[edit 7.28.05: It's a formatting thing, sort of. I've temporarily disabled excerpting until I can get my explicit excerpting (limits number of words shown in an excerpt) to work. Loving PHP. ]
I believe I mentioned here earlier that my consortium was discontinuing use of a certain VR product in favor of a decentralized IM reference service using Trillian. I ran the training for about 20 librarians from RI this morning, and we were lucky to have two librarians from Brown stopped in to update us on their use of Trillian over the last year. They’ve had just over 400 chats with 65% reference related. They don’t seem too overwhelmed by it. I think the training went pretty well, I’ll upload my materials shortly. (more…)
Had an interesting question this week: A student taking a Modern Murder Mystery course taught here is writing a 10 page paper on how adults view child witnesses as depicted in the John Grisham’s The Client. I’m vaguely familiar with the movie. I’m sure I said something along the lines of “I remember that it was a bad movie” when the student asked me if I’d seen it. Oops. Library humor. I briefly gave Mr. Grisham the time of day when he took over the Oxford American, but I really can’t stomach his commercial work. (more…)
I just finished and sent off my first review of an excellent technology planning book for Public Services Quarterly. The journal is peer reviewed, but the Professional Material column where my review will appear is not. One of my LIS profs was quoted and referenced in it. This is kind of gushy, but I always knew my prof “got it”, but it’s nice to see that other people appreciate his expertise as well. I happened upon a “call for reviewers” a few months back, on Beyond the Job. Check them out, very useful source for librarians. If I read my “manuscript submission & limited copyright transfer form” correctly, I should be able to post the preprint here for anyone else interested in reading it besides my parental unit.
I was reading about the new LISWiki and the Shifted Librarian’s post about Best Practices for Wikis, and was reminded how much of a debate we had on the NEASIST program committee about the whys and what fors of using a wiki for our May program. We decided against it and went for blogs instead. The Events blog will get more use as time goes on, but our program committee blog is just, well, lying there. I think that’s mostly my fault, emailing is still very much in my bloodstream. We have some exciting program ideas in the works, some of them long range, so perhaps, we’ll revisit the wiki. At the very least, it will give the people unfamiliar with wikis some practice (unfamiliarity was a barrier during our program planning). The student chapter of ASIST in my region is of the “just do it” mind and have created a collaborative wikispace using jotspot.
My RI databases working group has a jotspot wiki and we’ve really found it useful as both an archival (all communications, documents, and email) record and deliverable of the work we’ve done over the last few months. You have to be willing to dabble, and more importantly, if it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to break-up with a technology that’s not working for you. Michael Stephens calls it “Techno-Divorce”. I’d point you to Stephens’ article in LJ online, but you now have to be a subscriber to read it. Good Librarian Beatrice that I am, here’s the citation: Michael Stephens, “Technoplans VS. Technolust” Library Journal, November 1, 2004. [Edit 7/15/05: Apparently the new for-pay feature was a mistake and LJ's going back to free, so I've put the link in to the Stephens article. Nice.]
