I mentioned the other day that I’d recently reread Anne Lipow’s “‘In Your Face’ Reference Service.” There was one other point from that article that I wanted to mention. Lipow writes: We should conduct a fair test of which is preferred, the human reference librarian or the computer, and if, as I suspect, both are preferred under different conditions, we’d learn when which mode is the first choice. The test.. Read More
For those of you who aren’t following this little drama in the library blogosphere, Stephen Francoeur recently discovered that a big chunk of his webpage on dig ref had been plagiarised & used as the Wikipedia entry on dig ref. He posted to Dig_Ref about this & got some response. I even came out of lurker mode to suggest, as I have before, that librarians should take the initiative &.. Read More
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about marketing & PR for dig ref services. One of our findings from the NCknows evaluation was that they need to do more marketing to raise awareness of the service around the state & in specific communities. I suggested recently that one reason for the failure of the MIT libraries’ chat service is a disconnect between what the users think the service can offer.. Read More
This post from Dig_Ref announces the IIS’ launch of Reference Extract: Reference Extract is a targeted web search engine. It is built from the expertise of over 60 AskA services geared to the education audience. The Virtual Reference Desk team has identified high-quality archives of FAQ’s and previously asked questions. These sites were then indexed, and the result is an easy to use, quality oriented search engine: Reference Extract. Some.. Read More
Just a quick follow-up on my previous post about Google Scholar @ UNC: if you go to Google Scholar’s Preferences page, you can now select UNC-CH. On that note, there was an article in The Chronicle today about Google Scholar: More Than 100 Colleges Work With Google to Speed Campus Users to Library Resources
Speaking of time travel… A party for time travellers, from the Economist: It is not often that The Economist uses its pages to pass on party invitations, but here is one that might be of interest not only to existing readers, but also to future generations. For this is a party that you may attend retrospectively. On May 7th, the students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plan to hold.. Read More
The Final Reports from the Convocation on Scholarly Communications in a Digital World have been released. These include the brief final report made to the Faculty Council in March & the accompanying Powerpoint, & the longer final final report. The whitepapers were an effort to raise issues for discussion, & the convocation was an opportunity to have those discussions. The final report includes all of that, but also goes beyond.. Read More
The Complete List of the 1,000 Top U.S. Schools, from Newsweek Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school in 2004 divided by the number of graduating seniors. Chapel Hill comes out looking damn good here: East Chapel Hill Chapel Hill And, if you’ll forgive a bit of gloating, my.. Read More
Horowitz, L. R., Flanagan, P. A., & Helman, D. L. (2005). The Viability of Live Online Reference: An Assessment. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 5(2), 239-258. Abstract: The MIT Libraries enthusiastically implemented real-time online reference service in September 2001. After 15 months, Ask Us!-Live was suspended due to ongoing software problems. This article describes the four-part assessment of the service with recommendations for the future. Actually I’ve known 2 of.. Read More
Stephen Francoeur asks: Wouldn’t it be cool if your patrons could use an IM client to chat with your web contact center software (such as the versions of eGain offered by Tutor.com and 24/7 Reference or Docutek’s VRLplus)? We know huge percentage of our users are already using instant messaging, but imagine if they could add your library’s chat reference service to their buddy list and then use their IM.. Read More