Over the past few years there has been a growing trend in the use of wikis and blogs to help conference attendees prepare for upcoming meetings and to document the content of presentations so that all may participate in at least a virtual manner. Some recent examples of conference wikis are:

• ALA: 2005 and 2006 annual meetings and 2007 midwinter meeting
• Internet Librarian: 2005 and 2006 annual meetings
  
• Computers in Libraries: 2006 annual meeting
  

This year's ASIST annual meeting, which I will attending as a presenter at a workshop on blogs and wikis, now has its own conference blog and wiki set up.

Following the example of many other conferences and meetings, perhaps we should have a LACUNY Institute wiki. Please add your comments to this post with any thoughts about this proposal.

Technorati tag: asist2006

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So your library has created a blog. Maybe some of your community is subscribing to the feed of new blog posts by using a feedreader using a free program (such as Bloglines or the Google Reader) or by signing up for e-mail versions of new entries on the blog.

There's a lot more that you can do to re-use that blog feed and have it automatically be republished elsewhere on the web, such as:

• in Blackboard course pages
• on the library's home page
• on subject guides on your library web site

If your library has a number of blogs, you might want to consider combining the feeds together into one megafeed that aggregates them.

Want to know how? Mystified by all of the above? Then check out this wiki site put up by Paul Pival and Meredith Farkas for their presentation this week at Internet Librarian in Monterey, CA.

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Recently I've come to recognize a growing passion of mine as a librarian: improving access to our resources. I'm always amazed when I see the numbers for what our college and CUNY central spends each year on the physical objects that wind up in our catalog (e.g., books, periodicals, CDs, DVDs), on licensed resources (e.g., databases), and web services (e.g., Serials Solutions). Our students and faculty have (in theory) access to such an amazing collection of stuff, and yet they are frequently stymied in so many little ways from being aware of what we have or from being able to find and access what they know we have.

I get excited when I hear about tools such as federated search and link resolvers that will begin to unify our data silos (databases, catalogs, institutional repositories, etc.) It's heartening to hear talk at the just concluding Internet Librarian conference (blog posts on the conference here) of creating a user-friendly skin for your ILS instead of, to quote Roy Tennant, "putting lipstick on a pig" by adding a few bells and whistles to your off-the-shelf ILS user interface.

Our users encounter so many road blocks related to access that they shouldn't have to deal with:

• clicking a "full-text" link in a database (or in SFX) that takes them to an e-journal page informing them that the library does not in fact have access to that article
• registering for access to an e-book collection (ebrary, netLibrary) and downloading some sort of reader software before they can begin using that one title found in a catalog search
  
• not seeing or recognizing the core database in their field of inquiry in a frighteningly long list of database options
• remote access systems that don't work well or at all with some our licensed resources
• databases that insist on tantalizing users with links to resources that are part of a more expensive subscription we have declined to buy
  

What are some of the other basic access issues that are driving you and your users crazy? Please post your thoughts as a comment on this blog entry.

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The forthcoming Five Weeks to a Social Library course will teach librarians how to use social software in their library. An impressive roster of librarians will be teaching individual components. The class is online (it will take place between February 12 and March 17, 2007) and free but one must apply to take it. The deadline for applying is December 1, 2006. Thanks to my colleague Anne for pointing this out.

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Today, I came across this new article by Siva Vaidhyanathan in American Quarterly, "Introduction Rewiring the 'Nation': The Place of Technology in American Studies." Siva implores us to ask hard questions about "techno-fundamentalism," the idea that technology is progress and is by definition good. His article summarizes this issue of American Quarterly and offers many fresh perspectives.

The article is in Project Muse:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/toc/aq58.3.html

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If you've got five minutes to spare, take Carleton College's survey of library instruction.

Found via Steve Lawson's See Also... blog.

Labels: information literacy

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No, I'm not writing about RefWorks, which CUNY recently made available across the campuses, but rather Zotero. Launched today, Zotero offers a browser-based citation management system. It also gives you space in the browser to keep notes about items you've added to your library of citations. You can even use Zotero to store copies of web pages.

This project is the creation of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. You may recall that the center worked with CUNY's American Social History Project to help create the Who Built America? CD-ROMs in the 1990s.

I haven't yet tried to install Zotero yet and give it a spin, and I probably won't for a while. The software requires that you have Firefox 2, which is itself only in beta right now. At least one librarian has tried it out and blogged about it: Peter Binkley at Qaedam Cuiusdam.

Like any good web 2.0 tool, the folks behind Zotero have set up a blog so you can stay informed of new developments. If you want to learn more about the history of Zotero, the technology working behind the scenes, the origin of Zotero's name, and more, check out this podcast that Dan Chudnov did recently where he interviewed Zotero's creators.

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