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Financial Aid
Monday, September 17th, 2007
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Both the Health Sciences Library at Stony Brook University and the Moraine Valley Community College Library have added Google maps into their websites. Stony Brook is using their embedded map to provide directions to their library, while MVCC is providing their patrons with a places-of-interest map.
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Monday, September 17th, 2007
BusinessWeek has put together a Special Report called Doing Business Online which spotlights ways in which today’s savvy businesses are using 2.0 tools for promotion and marketing. Check out some of these items included in their report:
Make Some Noise: How web 2.0 tools can help you communicate with customers more effectively – this is an article featuring success stories of business using blogs, social networking, wikis, podcasting, and online video.
Web Tools to Watch: Analysts, tech gurus, and small-business experts tell BusinessWeek readers about the hottest trends in Web-based marketing and innovation – this is a slideshow highlighting tech trends.
Marketing with New Web Tools – this is a video interview with a marketing blogger and chief strategy officer at a marketing firm who discusses how businesses can use low-cost new Web tools for promotion.
Crowdsourcing Customer Service – This article which talks about getting consumers involved in customer service.
How to Make SEO Work for You – This article provides tips for improving your ranking with major search engines.
Scoring Money from an Online Crowd – An article which discusses raising seed money online.
Monday, September 17th, 2007
Melissa L. Rethlefsen discusses tagging and social bookmarking in her Library Journal article Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us. Rethlefsen talks about tagging in del.icio.us, LibraryThing, and LibMarks, as well as tagging implementations in libraries, and specific features such as tag bundling, tag clouds, and rss feeds for tags.
Friday, September 14th, 2007
Reactee, a service that lets you create interactive t-shirts now offers Twitter users their own tees! When people text “Follow ‘your username’” to the number, they receive your Twitter status.
Reactee’s t-shirts are free to create and are great for promoting an event or a (*hint* library) service. You custom design it with a unique keyword which people are encouraged to text to the provided number. You order the T-shirt(s) and wear it. When people read it and text the keyword, they receive a custom text response provided by you.
Via Emily Chang
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
The Virtual Marketing Blog offers 7 tips for starting your own Facebook Group, a guide to creating your own sub-community within the Facebook universe. Whether for sharing news, outreach, promotion, PR, or as a recruiting tool, the author suggests following these guidelines:
Via Social Media
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
A new website called What Should I Read Next? provides book recommendations based on a collection of over 32,000 of their members’ favorite books in the blink of an eye. It’s not necessary to register to search for recommendations, although you can in order to save your own favorites and help build the collection.
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
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The social book cataloging app, LibraryThing released an interesting feature this summer called the tagmash. It allows users to conduct a search for multiple tags and have the website mash them together with all their variant tags, providing for a comprehensive search of the collection.
In anticipation of Halloween next month, I tried out a search for some scary reads. Here’s my tagmash for the search query : fiction, horror, vampires, -anne rice. LibraryThing has aggregated all of the variant ways which users have spelled and cataloged their books with the terms fiction including with capitalization and possible misspellings. It did the same for the other tags, including “genre: horror” within my mash as well as the singular “vampire”.
I got back the top 250 books which are relevant to my search, as well as related tags to search, and additionally a list of related tagmashes, and related subjects. To try out your own tagmash, you can search by tag on the main search page.
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
Ryan Deschamps at The Other Librarian provides a straightforward summary of of key programming terms and technologies for library folk in his Under the Hood of Web 2.0 : the top ten programming concepts for librarians to understand.
Ryan breaks it down for non-developers with an “in a nutshell” description of concepts, a section on “why it matters” and suggestions about “How you can learn more (besides Wikipedia)?”. The top 10 programming concepts covered include:
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
The Programmable Web – a go-to source for Web mashups – has put together a list of twelve new mashups which use third-party APIs to deliver some interesting FF extensions. My top two picks from the list include Shareaholic which lets you submit a webpage to social sites such as digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, and other places, and Blueorganizer which transforms your right mouse button into a one-click link to multiple Web services. Check out all twelve in their article: 12 Firefox Mashups
Monday, September 10th, 2007
Sept 14 – Nov 9 – Virtual World Librarianship in Second Life – Illinois Alliance Library System and GSLIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Three NEW sections of Introduction to Virtual World Librarianship and a new Intermediate Virtual World Librarianship course.
Sept 18 – Setting up the New Stuff: Planning & Implementing Library 2.0 – David Lee King, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library.
Get practical planning and implementation tips for dealing with emerging digital trends, focusing on setting up new Web 2.0 services such as MySpace, blogs, and Flickr to meet client needs.
Sept 25 – Oct 2 – Thinking Like a Designer: How Blended Librarians Can Use Design Thinking for Better Information Literacy Collaboration – Steven Bell, Temple University and John Shank, Penn State University.
There is an extensive body of literature on information literacy and the importance of librarian-faculty collaboration in achieving it. The workshop will bring a new perspective on information literacy and collaboration through a conceptual framework the workshop leaders refer to as “Blended Librarianship.”
Just Missed, but archived –
Creating a 2.0 Library – Thad Hartman, David King, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library.
Discover a digital environment that doesn’t just list the library hours, but functions as a branch location. Bring your stacks to life by reorganizing and working with your digital branch and customers.
Monday, September 10th, 2007
Mashable has put together another quality resource providing an annotated look at over fifty new websites for all of us bookworms. The Books Toolbox: 50+ Sites for Book Lovers list includes links to sites which facilitate:
Friday, September 7th, 2007
System trainer at the Pierce County Library, Steve Campion, offers advice about building an interactive library in his WebJunction article – Building a Social Networking Environment at the Library. Steve outlines 3 steps which libraries much take in order to create an online community experience:
Related to his first step, Steve also provides an article about his experience teaching the staff to use the Social Web in his other WebJunction article – Create a Flexible Social Web Class.
Via Tame the Web.
Friday, September 7th, 2007
Amazon’s Kindle – Photo from Engadget
This fall, Amazon is to offer The Kindle – an ebook device based on E Ink technology at a price point of $400-$500 which will work with their new ebook service. The Internet-ready device will have the added feature of Web-surfing, and the ability to read both newspapers and magazines.
Rather than a device, Google will offer a service this fall which will allow members to read full-text books which it has indexed. Book publishers will decide on pricing for their own titles and share revenues with Google.
Incidentally, Sony’s e-book reader is still on the market at a cost of $300 and is also based on the E Ink technology.
For more coverage, check out these stories:
Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books – The New York Times
Amazon & Google To Enter eBook Business – TechCrunch
Amazon’s Kindle and Google’s Book Thing: More eBook Readers – CrunchGear
Friday, September 7th, 2007
There are thousands of interest groups within Facebook’s social nexus, each with a discussion board, area for posting recent news, photos, videos, and bookmarks, as well as a group wall on which members can leave passing comments. And within that collection of groups, several hundred are relevant to the LIS field. Here are some of the most popular groups of interest to librarians. If you have a favorite group, please post about it in the comments!
Library 2.0 Interest Group – A place to connect with librarians, MLS students, LIS faculty, patrons, and anyone else interested in Library 2.0 concepts and services. 2,577 members
Librarians and Facebook – Discussion of how librarians are using Facebook to communicate with students, censorship issues, privacy issues, etc. 2,469 members
Libraries and Librarians – For libraries, librarians and fans of both. 1,490 members
NextGen Librarians – Social networking for for young, young-at-heart, and forward thinking libraryfolk. 1,312 members
FacebookAppsForLibraries – FacebookAppsForLibraries is a Global Group devoted to the use of third-party Facebook applications for enhanced library services. 1,161 members
Don’t Mess With Me, I Worked in a Public Library – This group is for anyone who has worked in a public library and has all the crazy tales to show for it! 587 members
Digital Reference in Facebook – Digital Reference in Facebook is an umbrella group devoted to digital reference services that offer a companion Facebook site. It also serves as a forum for individuals with an interest in any and all types of digital reference services. 531 members
Future Librarians and Those Who Love Them! – This group is for people in the process of getting their MLS (Master’s in Library Sciences) or related degrees and people interested in getting their MLS or related degrees and those who love and support these Future Librarians! 521 members
Library Workers are the Best – Everyone who has worked in a library in any capacity always says it’s the best job they ever had. Some naysayers may mock our chosen occupation, but they’re secretly just jealous that they don’t have the power to rule the world! 491 members
Uncontrolled Vocabulary – For listeners of, and participants in, the Uncontrolled Vocabulary audio program, a weekly live discussion of news, trends and topics in librarianship. 179 Members
Second Life Librarians – For librarians working in Second life. 89 members
Librarians Who Twitter – Those of us in Libraryland who Twitter. 26 members
American Library Association Members – 1,389 members
Special Libraries Association (SLA) Members on Facebook – 448 members
ARL Librarians – 239 members
LITA members on facebook – 161 members
NMRT – NMRT facebook group. 126 members
FacebookLibrarians@ ALA – 212 members
IFLA World Library & Information Congress 2008 – 176 members
Computers in Libraries 2008 – 115 members
Internet Librarian 2007 – 85 members
LibraryThing.com Users – 478 members
LibGuides – 137 members
Thursday, September 6th, 2007
Animoto is a free Web service which which just launched on August 15th and was demo’ed at the NY Tech Meetup on Tuesday. They’ve been getting a lot of press lately and landed at #1 on Yahoo! TV’s The 9. Their application allows you to quickly and easily create videos from your images on Flickr, Photobucket, and other photo sharing websites, and combine them with an audio soundtrack from their library or one you upload yourself. You can post your clips on your website or send them to Facebook, MySpace, or a number of other sites.
Bring your library and collection photos to life by creating free music videos of your photo sets! Here’s my video which took about a minute to create:
