Twitter: Not for Conferences for me

I recently spent some vacation time at ALA. I took it as vacation so I could visit friends and family after the conference was done.
Like Walt Crawford before me, I thought Twitter had potential as a communications tool during ALA. He didn’t find it helpful, but I thought it was worth a shot. I had [...]

Tag Surfing: An Outreach Tool?

One of the nicer features of WordPress is their “tag surfer” feature. It allows you to view entries from other WordPress.com hosted blogs that match categories and tags used in your own blog.
It occurs to me that this feature might be used by libraries and librarians with WordPress hosted blogs as an outreach tool. When [...]

TBLC PSA - Ask a Librarian

Friendly video promoting Florida’s Ask a Librarian’s service. I’ve found a few more on YouTube.

Librarian resistance through the ages

Stephen Abrams has a post called Kicking and Screaming, which gives a good overview of technologies or approaches that librarians have resisted over the years.
A few good quotes:
“It is certainly not the function of the public library to foster the mind-weakening habit of novel-reading among the very classes—the uneducated, busy or idle—whom it is the [...]

Newspaper Gem: Pike Place Market 2

A jewel from the collection of the Washington State Library.
Newspaper Gem: Pike Place Market 2
“The week-long festivities celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Pike Place Market are beginning in earnest this weekend. We’ve previously featured the newspaper coverage from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer 100 years ago, and the Seattle Times [...]

Open WorldCat Lists - What are implications?

I’m likely the last to know, but in case I’m not:
Open WorldCat lets registered users build lists that can be shared with anyone on the Internet. The lists can have notes. See an example I created at http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/dcornwall/lists/204 on tidal power in Alaska.
This looks like a great way to build bibliographies intended to be shared [...]

Social Psychology for Librarians

I’ve been doing some reading and reflecting on how librarians and other activists can use social psychology to influence attitudes. See my FGI blog entry at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1223 for details.
Think I’m on to something? Or crazy? Comment here or there!

Blogs, Podcasts raise Library’s circ by 30%

The latest episode of New Comm Road, Bryan Person’s podcast about new media and online communications features an interview with Jeff Scott - manager of Casa Grande Public Library in Casa Grande, Arizona.
Jeff credits social media with a 30% (50,000 book) increase in circulation this year. He provides examples of the tools he is using [...]

Got to say, I don’t get this

The Nebraska Library Commission has opened up a Twitter Account. According to the NLC’s blog, it is a stream of reference questions without answers.
Aside from satisfying the idle curiousity about what kind of questions come to state libraries, I don’t see the point. I don’t see myself signing up for their feed, even if I [...]

When on Ning, Give me a ring!

I just noticed that Newkirk Barnes, FGI’s April BOTM has a profile on the Ning-powered Library 2.0 Network. Taking a stroll to that site revealed several other documents librarians as well as other social-media oriented folks.
So what could I do but establish an account of my own?
A few features that I found really nice:

It plays [...]