Reflections on LIS 768

I enjoyed 768. I especially liked that is was practical as well as theory based. I have become less and less interested in theory as graduation loomed because I am not able to put theory down on a resume, but I certainly can put down “created podcasts,” “active blogger,” etc.

I knew of most of the technologies we discussed in class but had not used them and had not thought about uses for them within a library environment. I am excited about all of the technologies and am starting to implement them.

I find myself somewhat in charge of the Franklin Park Library’s website (I know it isn’t great, but, wow, you should have seen it a few weeks ago) and I am creating a new web presence for the library as well using the Drupal CMS. If you want to follow the creation process it is online (talk about a transparent library), but I have only been working on it for a day or two ( busy upgrading the old site). But we have integrated a Flickr badge, a Meebo chat widget, and a del.icio.us cloud. I am planning on creating blogs for every department and service (with comments enabled). I will set up RSS feeds for the front page and the blogs, as well as an aggregator for new items to do with Franklin Park or the Chicagoland. I hope to set podcasts and vodcasts some time in the future as well as that super cool toolbar thingy.

As you can see LIS 768 has been very valuable to me and beyond that valuable to the library that I work for.

Any suggestions about the site would be great.

Podcast group

We created a few podcasts for our group project. I felt we all did a good job learning all aspects of making a podcast. I would be plenty comfortable making a publishing a podcast on my own if asked (and I am sure I will be asked in the near future).

Making a podcast is fairly simply.

1. Download Audacity.

2. Download the MP3 plug (this allows you to export files from Audacity to whatever medium you so desire).

3. Play with Audacity for awhile to learn all the cool effects and get comfortable with the software and the mic.

4. Decide what to record (this may be the most difficult part, Annie did an excellent job tracking down uses for libraries).

5. Record, preferably with two or more people.

6. Save, I saved to my desktop because I knew I would be storing the podcasts online.

7. Upload to Divshare or a another audio storage site (think of them as Flickr for podcasts).

8. Post to a blog/Myspace/Facebook/website

9. I used Feedburner to better be able to get statistics on how many people are subscribing to the podcast and also for lots of interesting goodies.

Podcasts should be used on library websites and should definitely not be feared (if anybody has questions just e-mail me).

Check out all our stuff at http://podcastpractice.blogspot.com/

del.icio.us

I love del.icio.us. I feel rather crippled when I have to work on a terminal that does not allow me to add the del.icio.us toolbar and icons used to tag and view.

Del.icio.us is what got me into the whole web 2.0 technology thing. I was assigned a project at work which involved adding a bunch of sites to the New Lenox Library del.icio.us account. I am not sure how much it was used (no roll out or staff instruction), but it served me very well.

I was so impressed with it I decided to give an instruction about how to utilize del.icio.us for my user instruction class. I credit del.icio.us to be the final factor in causing me to switch to Firefox.

An aspect of del.icio.us that is often ignored is the excellent results it returns. I know other search engines are trying to do something along the same lines e.g. Mahola. I do wish they would make a more complex search mechanism, something along the lines of an OPAC or even Google.

My links are to the right, you will probably see a lot of Drupal and Spanish collection development sites recently added. I suppose if you wanted to keep tabs on peoples research, you simply need to subscribe to their RSS feed. Feel free to add me to your network.

Question and Answer Websites

I wrote the final paper about question and answer websites, specifically Yahoo Answers, Askville, Live QnA, Wiki Answers, the Wikipedia Reference Desk, and ChaCha. I learned about these kinds of sites from the recent “Slam the Boards” event in which librarians went to these sites to provide quality answers and to market the library and librarians as a, ahem, good source of information. Playing around on these sites started me on the path of wondering what these sites can be used for by libraries?

Questions on these websites range from PhD level (Wikipedia Reference Desk mostly) to increadibly juvenile (Yahoo Answers) to attempts at being offensive (sadly, all of the sites at one time or another). Subjects vary as much as content, questions on how to set up a Wii to questions about the history of Serbian sharpshooters in WWI.

I believe librarians should start to use these sites and go to where the questions are. This will lead to the users receiving more authoritative information and librarians improving their reference skills (find new excellent websites etc.). I consider this to be a type of interlibrary loan of reference skills. Librarians may not be answering the tax or tuition paying patrons who support their library, but if enough librarians start doing this another librarian most likely is.

Going to the question sites will also, hopefully, crossing my fingers, perhaps, lead a new generation to discover the library and the virtual reference services that many libraries are implementing.

ChaCha

Has anybody tried ChaCha yet?

ChaCha is a new search engine which has a “Search with Guide” option. They advertise themselves as an alternative to Google because they have “experts” to help you find sources, if you need them. To use the guide option you just sign up, takes a few minutes at most.

ChaCha defines itself as a…

“LIVE GUIDED SEARCH – Instant search not cutting it? One click hooks you up with a live ChaCha Guide. A real person that will ask you questions, understand exactly what you want, and send you results that are dead-on. Computers can’t do that. It takes a community of people who are motivated to help you get the answer you seek – no matter what it takes. The brainpower behind ChaCha.”

This is direct competition with libraries, isn’t it?

Well, not yet at least. I have used ChaCha (writing a paper that has to do with online question and answer sites) a few times. Each time I was shocked at what are the so-called experts (5-10 dollars a “research” hour experts I seem to recall) are recommending. I actually had a race against them a few times to see what websites they would come up with and ones that I would. I am happy to say I won every time.

No reference interview takes place and, it seems, to be an expert one has to simply know how to type in keywords to Google. I read an article (sorry I don’t have the link handy at the moment here it is) by an ex-ChaCha guide in which he wrote something along the lines that 90% of the questions are pranks.

Another article I recently came across told of a 10 million dollar investment in ChaCha by the state of Indiana. What is this? That 10 million dollars would build an awesome library statewide IM reference center/interface and get the news out about it too. Getting info out is probably the hardest part in fact, need to look into marketing ourselves much better.

ChaCha isn’t very good, but is this the future of search engines? What does that mean to online reference?

Mostly what I was hoping for is for people to try this and report back. Get a couple reference questions and see if they do better than us. If you want to read some interesting/funny experience with ChaCha TechCrunch has forum in which people have submitted transcripts of interviews.

Have fun with it if you have the time.