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Category Archives: tools and technology
Never-Ending Usability Studies
I normally think of an academic reference desk as a pedagogical space where I use reference interviews to tease teachable moments out of mundane and intricate questions alike. I normally think of vendors and technology-types who tell me “you only want the interface to work that way because you’re a librarian” as offensive, dismissive, supercilious… [...]
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That’ll be Different
Tomorrow and the next day, I’m attending a conference. A virtual conference. A virtual conference in a Second Life environment. I’ve heard of having newbie orientation to large conferences (ALA and ACRL do this, for example), but I’ve never attended those. I did, however, attend the newbie orientation session for this conference and learned such [...]
Also posted in professional development 3 Comments
OAIster
For those of you who don’t know OAIster, if you have any reason to search for digitized primary sources, you should check it out. It’s a union catalog of digital library holdings. It’s chief asset is wonderfully descriptive metadata. And like with other collections of collections, I recommend searching OAIster to find which digital collections [...]
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Seeing Search Boxes
We’ve all heard that single search boxes are the only way to go when it comes to building search interfaces. We’ve probably also seen students who will bypass all relevant information or links on a page and zero in on whatever looks like a search box. But I never put these two pieces of knowledge [...]
Also posted in search and discovery 7 Comments
Search Empathy