Monthly Archives: August 2009

Links of Interest 26/8/09

Goings-on
University of Otago Law Library has a new blog to go with their new library.

Massey University Library have added book ratings to their catalogue – when logged in, your ratings show in yellow; when logged out, average ratings show in blue.

Westlaw have annoyed librarians everywhere with an ad that “Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you’re spending too much time at the library. What you need is fast, reliable research you can access right in your office. And all it takes is West®.” They have since apologised.

Useful sites
A Digital Outrigger is a blog covering issues in digital libraries and usability – it posts regular link roundups and is well tagged to allow focusing on specific areas of interest.

The JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool lets you compare journal title lists, databases, and ebook platforms.

Fiction
Heard of Project Gutenberg but don’t have time to read all its books? Now Project Twutenberg aims to convert each of these books into a 140-character summary.

Food for thought
After a presentation on Digital Reference, some librarians have started talking about the emerging trend towards the real-time web and the real-time library. David Lee King points out, “remove all the 2.0, digital, online stuff from this idea, and we’re simply talking about the real, physical, day-to-day experience of a normal (yet very good) library. Emerging online services are working to make this normal, active experience we have at the physical library the same when we’re online.

Links of interest 12/8/09

Louisville Free Public Library, Kentucky, suffered a flash flood; a librarian there has been posting updates and photos via Twitter. There’s an interview with the library director plus photos and the Library Society of the World (a grassroots organisation based on social networking, the absence of policies, and a stringent Cod of Ethics) is fundraising US$5000 to help out – latest I heard today they’d reached $2700.

Web and search
Curtin Library have created an optimised website for mobile phones.

You can now search for Creative Commons material across various sites in a single place, to find free photos, music, and videos.

If you’ve got an image on your computer and you’re not sure where it’s from (or if you’ve uploaded an image and want to see if anyone else has stolen it), Tineye may be able to find it. Like any search engine it only indexes a portion of the web but it’s indexing more all the time.

Subject guides
Some libraries are discussing ways to use LibGuides material in other parts of their library websites.

A new edition of the Internet Resources Newsletter is out, as usual listing a whole lot of new websites in a broad variety of subject areas – many could be useful for subject guides.

Food for thought
A bunch of librarians have been writing A Day in the Life of a Librarian blog posts – interesting to see what goes on in different libraries and different positions.

Seth Godin charts media according to bandwidth/value of information vs synchronicity/speed of communication – an interesting way of thinking about the way we communicate with our users.

Belated day-in-the-life of a librarian

I didn’t do this at the same time as everyone else for a few reasons:

  • when it was announced, I was off sick with flu (my brother calculates that, statistically speaking, it was probably swine flu, so that’s exciting) so my day-in-the-life post would have been “spent the day catching up with a week’s worth of emails and blog posts”
  • only a month ago we learned that we have to merge two of our branches between now and the start of next year so I’ve been feeling too busy to write anything
  • it would have been awkward to write about a day in my life when those things were all related to this merger that hadn’t been fully announced to our users

But I have been keeping brief notes of my days for a few weeks now on Memiary as a way to reassure myself, “See, I did accomplish something today,” so I can recreate these now:

There’s an average of two hours a week on the desk on top of these.

Mon 27 Jul 2009
1. Attempt to catch up after sick leave.
2. Set up Te Wiki o te Reo Māori display.
3. Reply to the Facebook comment re selling textbook and set up a discussion topic.
4. Attend meeting re merger.
5. Make blogpost about Knovel title of the week.

Tue 28 Jul 2009

1. Caught up blogs.
2. Weeded more.
3. Worked on merger communication plan.
4. Arranged to meet colleague in another department.

Wed 29 Jul 2009

1. Met with manager re merger communications.
2. Weeded duplicates from TN.
3. Desk shifts, virtual reference.

(Thursday I seem to have been too busy to make notes. It probably involved desk shifts, weeding, weeding while on the desk, and stand-up meetings at the desk about weeding.)

Fri 31 Jul 2009

1. Finished Facebook launch report for library leadership team.
2. Facebook event housekeeping.
3. Weeded in TAs. And continued.
4. Lunch meeting.
5. First blog post re merger.

This week is continuing fairly similarly for me but with an added booksale of the books that we’ve been weeding.