Week 7: Sharing Slide Presentations

I think that slidesharing would be useful for bibliographic instruction, and could also be used just to share information about the library or news or special events being held in the library. Since I'm interested in its use for bibliographic instruction, I did a search for this topic and found a presentation entitled Bibliographic Instruction 2.0: Using New Technologies to Market Your Library's Resources and Services to Freshman Students. This presentation was developed by a librarian named Fiona Grady at Stony Brook University. The link is http://www.slideshare.net/fgrady/bibliographic-instruction-2-0-final

In addition to discussing many of the items we've been covering in 23 Things, such as blogging and social networks and virtual reference, Ms. Grady includes information on a program that is available to students at Yale University. At Yale, each student has his or her own "Personal Librarian." This librarian is assigned to students in their freshman year, and continues with students through their sophomore year or until they declare a major. Once they declare a major the Personal Librarian introduces them to a subject specialist, a librarian with an advanced degree in their discipline, who will help them with the research they do for their major.
I checked an old issue of the ALA Directory in our library, and it indicated that Yale had 138 librarians with a MLS degree and over 60 non-MLS librarians. When you have a staff of this size, you can provide a service like this. The librarians send a letter to freshman before the semester begins, and also provide ongoing communication via email throughout the year. It's a way of establishing a personal connection with students. Providing a personal librarian acts as an icebreaker and reduces library anxiety. It also serves as "proactive introduction to the library before students arrive on campus."

With all the emphasis on new technologies, Grady reminds us not to forget about "Old School" outreach: "Don't underestimate the importance of a random act of kindness to a new student on campus."

Week 6 :Chat

I chatted with two co-workers for this activity, and one of them is participating in 23 Things. I am not one of the librarians who serves as a volunteer for LRC Live, so I'd be interested in hearing about their experiences. The article on e-reference from Library Journal discussed some of it's challenges, one of them being the demands by some users for "quick (almost instantaneous) answers." If I were providing e-reference, I think I would feel pressure to find the needed information as quickly as possible, and it would take me some time to become comfortable providing reference services online. It would also take a while to learn how to deal with patrons like the one described in the article Virtual in Vegas, where the patron "chatted" with the librarian very little, remaining mostly silent for the 20 minutes of their session.

A number of years ago our library made the decision to ban chatting. We had a situation where patrons were sitting at our stations and chatting for hours on end. This created problems for students who needed to access stations to do research or access Blackboard.

Under "Best Practices for IM," the Library Journal article lists loading IM software on public PCs. "Let users in the library get help without having to go to the reference desk." We always stress to our students that we are here to help them, and emphasize that they should come to the desk if they need assistance. It doesn't make sense to me to go online for assistance if you have a librarian a few yards away who can help you, so I don't agree with this "best practice."

One of the other comments I noted in the LJ article was the statement that with IM, "we are able to talk about things that we would hesitate to say in an email. Office politics and more "feeling types of things are best said without the thought of an everlasting email trail." However, my understanding of chat on G-Mail is that your chat sessions are saved unless you choose to delete them or turn off the save function.

I enjoyed looking at the techdictionary of text message abbreviations. I tested some friends to ask if they knew what certain abbreviations stood for, and got some interesting wrong answers! Well, at this point it's time to say BFN. G2G.

Week Five: Wikis

Before doing the activities this week, I have to admit that when I thought of wikis I mainly just thought about Wikipedia. I was very impressed with the library at Antioch University's training and support wiki. The level of detail on this wiki was amazing! I would never have thought of making a library policy and training manual available as a wiki, but it's an excellent idea, and it's something that I could see our library doing. I also liked the Book Lovers Wiki at the Princeton Public Library. I liked the idea of having a wiki where library patrons are able to write their own book reviews and share their thoughts with others. I've bookmarked the Library Success best practices Wiki. I've only skimmed what is available on it, but it looks like it's full of a great deal of useful information.

I wasn't sure what to make of the University of Limerick's Cataloguer's wiki. It seemed like a strange hodgepodge of different things. It contains a cataloging manual, but then it also has links to sites such as the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Internet Movie Database. I found the fact that ads kept popping up on this wiki to be bothersome. The St. Joseph County Public Library wiki seemed more like a website than a wiki to me.

I haven't looked at it closely yet, but I know VIVA has an ILL wiki.