Tag Archives: twitter

Links of interest 19/6/09

Leave a reply

A bit of humour: “Dispatches from a Public Librarian“, told Twitter-style (so may make most sense if you scroll to the bottom and read upwards).

Springshare have launched new LibGuides features, including co-owners for guides (will display both co-owners’ profiles on the guide) and moderation of user-submitted links.

Newly-discovered-by-me Twitter users include Lincoln University and Humanities NZ. Increasing numbers of NZ public libraries have accounts.

Someone’s created a “search engine taste test” where you type in your keywords and it searchs Bing, Google, and Yahoo simultaneously. You can then vote for the best set of results and it will reveal which search engine it’s from.

A Swedish university library has created a simple javascript bookmarklet people can add to their browser so that if they’re browsing the web (via google or links recommended by friends) and find themselves on a subscription-only page, they can click the bookmarklet to reload the page via ezproxy instead of having to navigate back to the library website and find it again. A librarian from there suggests other libraries should “Steal the JavaScript from this page or write your own.“

Links of interest 11/6/09

Leave a reply

University of California Berkeley Library have redesigned their animated tutorials page to be “more visual, navigable, and less, ahem, u-g-l-y, while giving users a means of providing a bit of feedback on the tutorials to help us evaluate and prioritize them.”

LexisNexis NZ has a new Twitter account. (And have I mentioned Springshare’s account where they post about updates to LibGuides?) Ooh, and the COSC department, another new Twitter account, have just plugged the library’s online exam papers.

The User is Not Broken manifesto has its third birthday.

The National Library of Wales is Flickr’s 26th Commons partner. “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.” See how users can add information in comments and notes (hover your mouse over the image).

Non-English blog roundup #12

2 Replies

[Sitting around since last year…]

Bambou (French) writes about Wikimini, a Wikipedia-like project written by kids for kids: 8-13 years old. It was conceived by a teacher as a pedagogical tool.

Penser le futur (French) writes about the ease of amending incorrect data on Amazon – [not quite as immediate as Wikipedia perhaps, but] it only took clicking a button, adding details, and waiting while Amazon verified it – a few days later Amazon even sent an email explaining why some of the changes had been accepted and others left alone.

Frank den Hollander (Dutch) points to the experimental PurpleSearch (English) at the University of Groningen. PurpleSearch is a federated search engine that doesn’t require users to select which databases to search – instead it parses the search keywords to guesstimate at which will give the best results.

And if you’re interested in non-English blog posts you may be interested in LibWorld – library blogs worldwide, a book version of the essays on InfoBib.

[More recently…]

Vagabondages (French) lists French and francophone library twitter accounts and Biblioroots lists accounts for librarians, bibliobloggers, authors, editors, booksellers and more librarians as well as general information and technology accounts.

Erik Høy on Biblog (Danish), inspired by Google promoting short videos of its employees introducing themselves, suggests that librarians could do the same.

Links of interest 5/5/09

Leave a reply

“Links of interest” is an irregular series of posts I started making recently to MPOW’s internal blog, based on items culled from FriendFeed, Twitter, and Google Reader. I started thinking it was a shame not to have it available publicly, so here it is. NB Dates on future posts will be in dd/mm/yy format….

Lessons from the library booth at a local festival: or how not to engage customers

A blog post on New Citation Rules in the 7th Edition of the MLA Handbook.

Merck makes phony peer-review journal to promote a drug, published by Elsevier.

Google Maps adds historical maps of Japan which turn out to accidentally facilitate discrimination.

UCOL tweets that: “UCOL Library now has over 20 wireless laptops students can use anywhere on campus. You can borrow a laptop for up to 3 hours.”

National Library explains Twitter – they compare it to Personal Items columns in early 20th century newspapers, describe the feedback and interaction they’ve had for their account, and talk about how they do it.

Tweets on libraries

1 Reply

Gerrit van Dyk comments on some tweets about libraries as (respectively) discussion space and quiet space, and I think these raise a couple of issues for libraries:

  1. Often libraries do have the discussion areas people want, but people don’t know we do! We’re not always very good at promoting the resources/services we have. (In a focus group recently, a postgrad student timidly said that it’d be nice if the library could offer a service where if she was stuck on her literature review she could come to us and we’d help her do it. Us reference librarians running the focus group had a hard time not banging our heads on the nearest desk: this is #1 on our job description and she didn’t know that’s what we’re here for!)

  2. Sometimes we get so focused on a trend (more people want discussion spaces) that we forget that this doesn’t mean that everything’s completely changed all at once (ie people haven’t suddenly stopped wanting quiet spaces). (Last year I made a video with some of my library’s students asking them what they liked about using the library, and a startling percentage said what they liked was that it was a nice quiet place to study.)

—

It’s definitely illuminating seeing what people say about libraries online, though it occasionally feels like stalking. I’ve got an RSS feed of a search on tweets in New Zealand about libraries (due to the NZ ISP system I couldn’t narrow it closer to my region). One recent one that is food for thought: “wondering why i’m being told to take a library course when i have been at uni for 3 years and know how to read a book“. Hopefully the library course will answer that question…