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Category: Tools and Technology

Being on the Other Side of Chat Reference

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 25th, 2007

Yesterday I was asked if I could help someone find the first known translation of a Russian short story (from the early 17th century) into German. In no time flat I’d found a bibliography and was composing my email response when I realized she’d asked for first translation into German… not English, and no bibliographies we have would record such a date.

Scrapping that email I wrote another one about using WorldCat to find bibliographies of this author’s works, and then limiting the language to German, because a German bibliography might just record the date she needed. (I don’t think she quite understood my response, though, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, then one of my co-workers pointed out that the University of Illinois has a whole library devoted to modern languages, and they might have such a bibliography. And sure enough, their catalog returned a record for something that looked promising, if only I could read the German. But I didn’t really want to ILL the enter book on the off chance that it contained the date I needed, so I hopped onto their As A Librarian page and, on a whim, chose the chat option. I’ve never been on this end of chat reference, so I was curious to see it in action.

I explained who I was and what I needed, and the librarian was very friendly and helpful, but in the end had me email my request so that she could give it to someone with an actual command of the languages in question.

This more specialized librarian found what I needed in a Russian-language bibliography, even scanning the page from the bibliography (which I still can’t read) so that my patron could see all the information.

What helpful people! And I’ve got to say, I really enjoyed starting out my quest via chat so that I could clarify myself when the librarian didn’t understand what I needed without having to play email tag. By the time I composed the email I was much more confident that I’d be able to write a question that the librarian on the other end would understand.

I’ve always been hesitant to ask for help from people I don’t know. Before library school I had never in my life asked a librarian for help. But every time I have an interaction like this a little more of that old hesitancy dies. World, beware.

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I Knew It!

Published by Iris on Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Remember last year when I wondered what letter would become popular next? Remember I said it would be “s” for “social?” Looks like there’s a possibility I was right. John Blyberg is working on the SOPAC — the social -er- catalog. And man, oh man, does it look good. And you don’t even have to be a library card holder to participate!

But that’s not even the good part. No, the good part is that he’s made his code public.

So let me be among the first to say, “Me too! Me too! I like this idea too!”

[Update: As I suspected, this is getting major buzz in the biblioblogosphere, so I’ve created two ways to keep up with it. You can see (and subscribe to) the posts I’ve read on the topic here. And you can see (and subscribe to) a libworm search for the topic here.]

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Blogger Line Breaks Broken

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 18th, 2007

At least now I’ve learned… If I ever include a blockquote, list, or picture in my posts I have to switch over to the HTML editor and insert nice little paragraph tags around all subsequent paragraphs before publishing. That stinks.

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Collaboration, Social Software, and My Strange Obsession With My Virtual Life

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 18th, 2007

I didn’t even get to turn on my computer until 3:00 today. Thank goodness I have pretty much permanent access to a laptop at work because I’ve been living off that today. (Heaven forbid I go for more than a few minutes without a softly glowing screen in front of me.) But in among reference desk shifts and meetings, I was asked to take stock of the collaborative technologies I use.

Here’s the backstory. Back in August people from the library and IT met to discuss collaboration: what we’d done together, what we’re planning to do, and how to enhance collaboration. You may remember that meeting from this post. Out of that meeting grew a new group on campus called the Info Services Forum. This group coordinates periodic (about twice-monthly) sessions at which staff (or interested faculty) can either present or discuss a topic of general interest. Anyone on campus is invited, and there’s free lunch to the first 40 or 50 who show up.

So far we’ve had a session on the planned reorganization of the campus web site (complete with discussions of usability and organization, as well as breakout focus groups on specific organizational ideas). Then there was a session on the new campus copyright policy at which Dan Donnelly from the University of Minnesota’s Copyright Information and Education group gave a really wonderful talk copyright for educational campuses.

Now we’ve had the first of two sessions dealing with collaborative tools, and for the second session they want to put up a slide listing what people here are using already. Here’s my list.

  • del.icio.us (for my own professional work, collaborating/sharing with my co-workers and other librarians, and building a curricular link library for students)
  • Google Docs & Spreadsheets
  • AIM/Google Talk/MSN Messenger/Meebo
  • Blogs (several, some for workplace collaboration, others to communicate with the outside world — a couple are Carleton-supported and a couple aren’t)
  • Shared Google Calendar
  • Moodle
  • Backpack (for shared To Do lists)
  • Bloglines (to share what I’ve found with others (most of my feeds are public), or to learn what others have found, as well as to keep up with my professional and personal blog/journal feeds. I can also keep up with things like updates to wikis or public google docs using RSS.)
  • Flickr
  • LibraryThing (share books, reviews, etc.)
  • I’ve also experimented with Wet Paint (a wiki) as a place to build a curricular resource wiki, though I haven’t had time to work on it for a while.

So, there you have it. Except for the wiki, these are things that I use at least weekly, and often multiple times per day. But just because the first thing I do in the morning is turn my computer on and the last thing I do at night is turn the computer off doesn’t mean anything. I could quit any time…

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