Database presentation. Also, punditry.

March 26, 2008 at 1:37 pm (news, presentations)

Click here to see slides from yesterday’s presentation to the Pittsburgh District Library Council. It was great to get a chance to share information and resources with staff from other public libraries in the county.

Also still juggling research/experimentation with collection development, reference questions, and the like. Though I’ve been skimming 2.0 blogs and technology news, nothing’s really inspired me to strike out in a new direction just yet. Twitter is still on the table, but I think I want to finish weeding the Zs first. Simplify, simplify, simplify, right?

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Catching some Z’s

March 19, 2008 at 5:55 pm (collection development)

A nap?  No – just doing some collection development.  In addition to staying on top of the popular non-fiction, my “official” collection area is the Zs.  Since this encompasses topics like graphic design, publishers, and book arts, I’m getting quite a kick out of it.

The Zs also include the wild world of professional reading for librarians.  Because CLP already has such an excellent professional collection, many of the resources you’d need to bone up on different aspects of library service are already available.  However, I try to keep an eye out for titles that might be useful to have in multiple quantities, if necessary.

Recent purchases include books about Web 2.0 and digital libraries, to be sure. But there are other issues and concerns in library science, from collection development to health literacy.

Given that the best way to learn about life in a library is to work in a library, what sort of professional reading materials would you like to see? Drop a word in my ear, and I’ll do what I can to grab you some Zs, too.

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All a-Twitter? Possibly

March 13, 2008 at 5:16 pm (Learning 2.0, Library 2.0, Twitter, news, philosophizing, traditional library services, web resources)

This past week has been chock full of reference questions involving older print resources, with longer research/callback times than usual – that’s not a complaint!  The nice thing about 2.0 is that you really can tuck it into the back of your mind and let it simmer when the more traditional reference work is required.

That may possibly be the optimal approach; a recent New York Times article about late technology adopters indicates that for every wave of folks fannish on the shiny-new, there’s a similar flock of people content to wait and see.

So, over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about libraries and Twitter. There’s ample evidence that the microblogging service has proved useful for some libraries. And guides like this one make it easy for interested librarians to get their feet wet. But would it play in Pittsburgh?

Given that the Meebo project is just now headed to the steering committee for approval, it’s probably too early to push another innovation. However, I have to admit I’m intrigued. What could a Twitter feed do for CLP?  Some thoughts:

  • If you have it up and running at the refdesk, you can type in brief descriptions of what you’re doing, and display the feed on the webpage.  Obviously, you don’t want to compromise patron confidentiality.  However, short summaries of reference questions could be interesting to someone surfing our website.
  • Provided said info was in the public domain, you could post interesting trivial tidbits, or link to news articles.
  • Someday, far in the future, we could actually text patrons on their cell phones, pagers, and other mobile devices.

Can anybody think of anything else?  It’s exciting, uncharted territory.  But I’m a big fan of William Morris’s axiom that things should be either useful or beautiful. Twitter’s cute, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful. And how useful would it be for CLP?

Thoughts?

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In-between days (and projects)

March 4, 2008 at 6:44 pm (Learning 2.0, Library 2.0, Meebo, access, blogging, databases, humor, philosophizing, website redesign)

Eleventh Stack has received just under 1,000 hits in less than one week. Even adjusting for friends and well-wishers, that’s still an impressive bit of traffic!

When not obsessively monitoring Estack stats, I’ve been helping fix remote access issues that cropped up in the website redesign. Some of them are access-related, some of them are cosmetic, and almost all of them are fixed!

And now, I’m ruminating about the next steps. It’s never good to rest on one’s laurels, of course. Meebo is still on the table, and talks are in the works. But what next? It’s back to newsreader perusal, sifting for trends, trying to envision what would make the library a better place for everybody to be.

So, an in-between period. But, as I’ve been tagged for the Six-Word Memoir meme by Don (wordsmith extraordinaire from, among other places, The Lilliput Review, I gladly comply:

Sought greater light on the daily.

That will make a fine obituary too, many, many, many years from now!  In the more immediate future, though, more library things, as I figure them out.

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