Friday Link Round Up February 29, 2008

Cool things other libraries/institutions are doing

• Welcoming Freshmen: CeLIBration @ the GT Library
• Pageflakes continues to attract library pages
• University Video Portal Lets Students Remix Lectures
• iGoogle Gadgets at your Library
• Screencast: Creating a Library Database Page with Drupal

Web 2.0

• The myth of Web 2.0 democracy
  • short review
  • full article
• Manage your online reputation
• 10 Ways Libraries Can Use RSS

Search

• Sortfix – Making Search Child’s Play
• ManagedQ – really! try it!
  • about
  • try it

Friday Link Round Up February 22, 2008

Cool things other libraries are doing

• Virtual tour of ACPL
• 10 ways to make your library great in 2008
• Featured Reviews: A Way to Give Easy Ego Boosts to Your Customers
• all sorts of goodness from Vancouver Public Library

Humor

• Kirk wants to be a librarian
• Amazing posters

Miscellany

• Find the Perfect Meet-Up Point with Mezzoman

Technology

• computer and internet safety information

Friday Link Round Up February 15, 2008

Cool things other libraries are doing:

• Fish 4 Info
• Home page images and staff picks
• 25 Awesome Beta Research Tools from Libraries Around the World

Technology

• Sarah’s top ten Firefox plug-ins
• Web development cheat sheets

Advertising

• Databases – Get the word out

Assessment

• The power of a bruised ego

Friday Link Round Up February 8, 2008

Just cool (not library related, though certainly community college mission related – incredibly inspiring, worth watching the whole thing)

• TED Talk – Bill Strickland: Rebuilding America, one slide show at a time (and that’s Herbie Hancock on the piano)

Cool things other libraries are doing

• Facebook advertising
• Movie postcards advertising personal reference assistance
  • Article
  • Cards
• Technology Petting Zoos
• Video contest

Technology

• 5 (Actually, 6) Three Letter Acronyms for Librarians – XML, API, CSS, PHP,GPL
• Top 10 Tab Techniques (I’m loving “Mousewheel click links to open in a background tab”)
• Social Software in Libraries, a presentation – especially good for a discussion of the difference between tools and brands in the social software world

Friday Link Round Up February 1, 2008

Cool stuff other libraries are doing – sorry for so many, libraries must just be extra cool lately 😉

• UT Widgets
• Maui Community College Library
• Allen County Library
• More from Allen County Library
• Creating a Librarian’s Info-Portal with Netvibes and RSS
• Proquest widgets

Musings on the future

• a cafe branch
• a nice take on Library 2.0

Technology

• Learn More Series
• ChatStat – live chat service with library potential

Humor

• books that make you dumb

Friday Link Round Up January 25, 2008

• Just ask! – Good advice and the UMV library campaign
• Another way to do subject guides
• “Walt Crawford’s January Cites & Insights is available for reading. The piece entitled “A Time of Limits?” was quite intriguing, examining the presumption that “everyone” has all of these wonderful technology services (cell phones, Netflix, etc.) and the actual reality of the digital divide and people who can’t actually afford to buy these things end up buying them anyway to “keep up.”” (LibrarianInBlack)
• Sarah Houghton-Jan’s Top Tech Trends for 2008, ALA Midwinter (especially her comments on the digital divide and our reaction to it – past and present)
• Top 10 obscure Google tips
• There’s a great article in the January C&RL News about using fantasy football to teach information literacy. “Librarians Sport of Choice“

Friday Link Round Up January 18, 2008

Another big one since we had such a long break. I’ll try to slim them down from here on.

• LibGuides at BSU
  • On a personal note – I love that they have the course codes running down the left hand side. I would love to see our guides browseable in that manner.
• Ten things that will change your future (tech trendspotting/casting)
  
• Great display idea
  
• Online Photo Sharing in Plain English (another one from the folks at Common Craft)
• Soliciting input
  
• Google Generation is a myth, says new research (Full report)
• Book review – Microtrends
• For fun – Learning from Cats
  • “Academic squabbles are often compared to cat fights, but as one who has owned cats for several decades, I’ve come to believe that such analogies are unfair to felines.”

Friday Link Round Up December 14, 2007

It’s a big one to last you through the holidays…

Food for thought:

• Reconsidering Digital Immigrants…
  • Excellent discussion!

• Tastes Great, Less Filing
  • A recent LibraryJuice posting made an analogy targeted at undergrads suggesting why they should choose the library over Google. “Why eat at McDonald’s when you can eat for free at the five star restaurant of your choice?”

Information Literacy:

• Take study-worthy lecture notes
  • something to share with students?

• Lesson Study in Libraries
  • Blog post
  • Official Page
  • ACRL Article
  • “we’ve used Lesson Study to write, revise, and perfect a couple of modules teaching librarians can use when they go out to do library instruction”

Tools:

• Creating interactive course assignment pages
  • Blog post
  • Official page

• More on Meebo in the Catalog

• Dublin City Public Libraries Portal with PageFlakes
  • Covered by Tame the Web
  • Covered by Phil Bradley

• Virtual Classroom free web based software
  • interesting possibilities for trainings

• AuthorStream and a Web 2.0 presentation
  • Overview and example of Authorstream, a product very similar to Slideshare, in that it allows you to upload presentations to webspace and to share them with groups. The example is a nice presentation on 30 Web 2.0 tools.
  • Note how you can flip through slides and the audio jumps nicely. (which you can also use to flip through to things you might not have heard of rather than listen to the whole thing)

• Office 2.0 Database
  • “I came across this post recently and thought people might be interested. Its from The Office 2.0 Database blog by Ismael Ghalimi. In this post he lists the web 2.0 services that he uses on a day to day basis as alternatives to locally installed software and also a host of alternative services that people can use.Most, but not all, are free services. So it’s well worth a look if you are looking to start working/studying/researching/living virtually.”
  • Via – UCD Library to Go

Just for fun:

• McLuhan’s page 69 test – Turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book. A collection of page 69s.

• How to know you know
  • “Read books, google around, check wikipedia. When you start, it will look like most of what is said is reasonable. You are in good shape when you think that 90% of the stuff you read is BS.”

• Here comes another bubble – video mocking technology boom

Friday Link Round Up December 7, 2007

I do these as part of my staff development committee duties at work – why not share them here:

• Point of need assistance at David Lee King
  • “We added a Meebo widget to unsuccessful keyword searches in our library catalog. This way, when a customer searches our catalog and doesn’t find anything, they can contact us via IM and ask for help (we also display our phone number if they want to call).”
• Critical analysis of the NEA’s – “To Read or Not to Read” by Nancy Kaplan
  • Points out some serious data distortion.
• The need to design for personal value before social value at Bokardo
• Educause releases 7 Things you should know about Skype (pdf)
• For your entertainment – Ordering a Pizza in the Future

Past Friday Link Round Ups can be found in my delicious account.