This morning I was poking around the Apple website, pretending like I was going to buy an iPod touch (so very tempting, so many reasons not to right now…). Anyhow, I was struck by a few things. First, I was interested in whether the 8 GB Touch was in stock in my local Apple Store. [...]
Came across a nice pithy illustration of how major search engines tend to privilege commercial results this morning. Try Googling “philosophy.” Maybe a nice example for an info lit session…
Lately I’ve been thinking about how we could move towards being able to offer a single search box that can placed on the library homepage. Ideally, the box could also be easily dropped into disparate locations (subject search pages, WebCT, departmental research pages? personal websites? MySpace?) The box would search the libraries’ catalog, databases, and [...]
While in the shower this morning, was thinking about the polka mass phenomenon and idly wondering about the feasibility of the Polka Bibliographic Instruction Session. I did come across this discussion of whether the Polka Mass is appropriate or sacrilegious. Read it and tell me if there isn’t at least a whiff of some librarian [...]
It’s a short one. Tutorial I hope our users have better luck than this as they start their research…
This isn’t a new idea, but it crystallized in my mind rather clearly during today’s library all-staff meeting. Libraries are facing decisions about how best to get users to engage with our systems and resources. On the one hand, we can train users to interact with the different interfaces, repositories, and collection types that libraries [...]