Web collaboration
- Tinychat lets you instantly set up a temporary chatroom with its own short url you can share with anyone you want to join you. Once everyone has left the chat it disappears.
- Flockdraw does the same for the virtual whiteboard.
Virtual reference
- Virtual provider pessimism: analysing instant messaging reference encounters with the pair perception comparison method looks at how users vs librarians are satisfied with IM reference sessions. They find that users are frequently happy with results even when the librarians haven’t felt confident with how things went.
- Cyberspace or Face-to-Face: The Teachable Moment and Changing Reference Mediums looks at instant messaging, chat, and face-to-face reference in terms of levels of instruction in each medium. They find that “patrons wanted to be taught regardless of medium, and that librarians responded by providing instruction in all mediums.” (Although different techniques are used in the different mediums.) “These patrons’ consistently high desire for instruction reinforces the notion that the ideal teachable moment can be found in reference work.”
Potluck
- “But I Want a Real Book”: An Investigation of Undergraduates’ Usage and Attitudes toward Electronic Books
- This Open Access mindmap covers what open access is, what supporters are motivated by, what it applies to, how materials are made available (eg journals and repositories) and organised. Many of the nodes have links to articles for further information.
- Discussion of a simple system a Dutch library set up to encourage users to recommend or ‘tag’ books as they returned them – and discussion of how this system became so successful that the library discontinued it.
- Karen Schneider writes Reflections on strategic plans that are neither strategic nor plans
- And finally, Beyond the Bullet Points: New Years Resolution says “Let us make a resolution together. Let’s make 2010 the year of the librarian – not the library.”
Deborah