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. [...]
A coelacanth is a hollow-spined fish. So how come when you do a keyword search for coelacanth in our library catalog, the first result is: The Best women’s stage monologues of 2003 / edited by D.L. Lepidus. (NB: we do own books on coelacanths.) Also, that link will stop working real soon. That’s reason #232 to [...]
Interrupting radio silence to kvetch a little… Just got an email via a listserv which contains what promises to be an interesting recap of a session that I didn’t get to attend at ALA Midwinter. But…the recap is attached to the email as a Word document. Grr. Why would this rankle me? Well, there’s the [...]
Two reports in the past few days of institutions restricting access to social networking sites… Middle Georgia College blocks Facebook, MySpace (via the Kept-Up Academic Librarian) Facebook Banned in Library (via Library Stuff) Both the library and IT department on my campus are dead-set against policing the type of content that can be viewed on [...]
This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features a chat with several “young” (= under 40) library science practitioners on the state of the art (or science, as it were) of librarianship. I was extremely impressed at the group of people they chose to interview–many of them are people from whose work (blogs, projects, presentations, publications) [...]
Here are some of the links for today’s workshop on blogs and wikis for student supervisors in the UMass Amherst Libraries. Examples of blogs being used as student workforce communication tools: UMass Amherst Information Desk UMass Amherst Learning Commons Example of a wiki as a clearinghouse of student library staff information: Access Services Student Operations [...]
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 [...]
Three interesting developments in library catalog land over the past week or so… 1. The University of Washington Libraries have just gone live with WorldCat Local. From the OCLC Newsletter: “Through a locally branded interface, the service provides libraries the ability to search the entire WorldCat database and present results beginning with items most accessible [...]