Comments for The Earthbound Librarian

Comment on culture of usability by Hillary

Hillary — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:16:53 +0000

Agreed! I love Don’t Make Me Think….didn’t we see him at Simmons together?

Comment on culture of usability by StephanieWillenBrown

StephanieWillenBrown — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:32:25 +0000

amen to all that. I hear so many people say “we should do this! let’s do that! more stuff for patrons! more stuff!” … and yet, I know, I *KNOW* that patrons can’t find what we do have. We make things so darn hard that patrons go away and don’t come back. And we blame Google, when it’s at least partially also the fact that we have NO IDEA if our stuff is actually usable to the uninitiated, the un-MLS’d.

Comment on reason #231 to hate our OPAC by ealling

ealling — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:24:42 +0000

CW–yeah, yeah, you ALEPH apologist –but why does it come up *first*?

Comment on reason #231 to hate our OPAC by Hillary

Hillary — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:54:42 +0000

@#*^&)! I am totally with you, sister.

Comment on reason #231 to hate our OPAC by CW

CW — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:36:00 +0000

Hey,the word “coelacanth” does show up in that record!

Comment on i’m back by Stephanie Willen Brown

Stephanie Willen Brown — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:50:42 +0000

yay! welcome back! look forward to more posts!!

Comment on i’m back by CW

CW — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:59:24 +0000

I’m one of the faithful ones! Welcome back!

Comment on legacy formats by Carol

Carol — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:38:05 +0000

Stop making sense!

Comment on Something old, something new by barbara fiser

barbara fiser — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:28:43 +0000

Thanks for making your article accessible. I also had an article in a Haworth journal that was MIA for years. It was on a less time-sensitive topic, but I fell off my chair when it finally came out (oddly enough, in a different journal than I had submitted to). It was one of those thematic thingies also published as a book and the one review I saw slammed it for being out of date. Well, duh, we all wrote the stuff five years before it was published. This makes manic modes of publishing more and more attractive )

The copyright agreement I signed with them (so long ago I didn’t know that I should refuse to sign such agreements) prohibited any archiving so I haven’t put it online. I hope they’ve improved their agreements. Glad you put this in your IR.

Comment on Despite owning computers, students still rely on campus labs by LTG

LTG — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:46:52 +0000

Hi Emily, I just stumbled across your blog and wanted to first say – great work! Lots of good pithy stuff here. I work on some marketing and communication efforts here at UMass for prospects and students so come at things from a slightly different angle but there is plenty of overlap in terms of how to use various emerging tech tools to communicate. Anyway, I also just wanted to comment on this post and say that I think that one of the very plainly obvious reasons that students like places like the LC is the social aspect of it. This is also why people prefer to hang out with laptops in coffee shops versus sit at home. Yes, people want to work and need a relatively quiet, comfortable and well-equipped space to do it in. But they also want to see and be seen, glance up and notice that so-and-so just came in with so-and-so, be able to easily take a short break for a cup of coffee and a chat and have all the tremendous resources of a library all around them. I don’t think it’s a mystery really. It’s for similar reasons that movie theaters didn’t actually die out because of the advent of video/DVD/cable/satellite as some predicted. People like going out and doing things with other largish groups of people. We are social animals, bottom line.