Library Stuff

There is an article in the latest issue of Ariadne on Wikis. The author, Emma Tonkin, brings up the concept of the single user wiki, something that I had never thought of before:

“Talking to yourself may well be the first sign of madness, but what about writing to yourself? At first sight, it seems peculiar to imagine a single author making good use of a wiki. Wikis are collaborative environments, after all – or they’re fast flexible multi-user web development platforms. What can one person do with a wiki? Or, rephrased, what on earth is the good of wiki software for a handheld or PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)?

They can map concepts; wikis are extremely useful for brainstorming. Exploring a topic by means of a wikiweb is a curiously comfortable feeling, and often very rewarding. Authoring a wiki on a given topic produces a linked network of web pages roughly analogous to a concept map, a visual technique for representing knowledge and information”

When I think of wikis, my brain immediately turns to collaboration, but I can see how the single-user wiki thoery works when placed in mapping structure. My articles follow a stream of consciousness when I am in preliminary drafts. A wiki might help in putting all of the pieces together by working alongside my thought processes. Interesting…

Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt will be doing the library community proud when they present at the Online Social Networks Conference in Februrary. Here is their track:

The Library Blogosphere: Toward a Working Taxonomy
Hosted by: Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt
The classification of library related blogs has provided insight into the ways libraries and librarians are using blogging software to help them achieve their goals. In this presentation Stephens and Schmidt will discuss their research of blogging in the library world.”

I’m so excited that librarians are being included in this very important conference (with an even more impressive line-up). Good luck to Michael and Aaron.

Hip Hip Hooray!! I’ve been waiting for a tool like this one to come along. If you can’t decide whether you want to use Furl, del.icio.us, or a few others, why not just post to more than one?

The Delicious Furled Tea Bookmarklet Maker will pop-up a few boxes for you to post to your open tagging tools of choice. Maybe now I’ll resume posting to del.ico.us again.

Thee are a few resources that I don’t see in there (digg, feedmarker, and citeUlike, but I’m sure that they will be getting to those. (link via http://del.icio.us)

Scitech Library Question comes up with another big post (linked from Richard Akerman) about a Firefox plug-in for the CISTI Catalogue.

I used CISTI a lot when I was at the law firm. A great product and well worth the price of obtaining documents that can’t be found elsewhere. And boy do they have a quick turn-around time.

We need a directory of library catalogs that can be searched on Firefox…

Since LISblogsource is officially kaput, I figured that I’d mention a few of the new(ish) library weblogs that I have come across over the past month or two (many are older than that – I’m just a bit slow on the uptake).

I found these 3 through my ego feed (well, the last one was linked through) on PubSub (Do you have an ego feed? I do!) with mentions of my cornucopia post last week. These posts relate to using internal weblogs as communication devices at the reference desk:

+ Chad F. Boeninger, who blogs at Library Voice, writes about his experiences:

“Overall, the Reference Blog has been a huge success. Searchable, organized information can be found easily in our blog. Reference staff are freely contributing to the blog, so it truly is a resource of collective knowledge. Our student assistants receive the email notifications, and their being in the loop helps them to serve our patrons better. Our blog serves as a knowledgebase for our department and is used as such. Countless times I have heard a colleague say, “Oh, yeah, I remember reading about that in the blog.” The colleague can quickly find the information and answer the question quickly. Or others often say, “I really think this should be in the blog.” Five minutes later, there is a post about that particular issue. Being able to create, disseminate, and find information quickly is a beautiful thing.”

+ Meredith Gorran Farkas, who blogs at Information Wants to Be Free, writes:

“During one of my interviews this week, I asked the interviewers what some of their biggest challenges were at their library. One of the challenges they mentioned was keeping all the staff on the same page about policy changes and news when people worked varying shifts. This is a common issue in libraries. The fines for late videos change, a new printer is bought with new procedures for troubleshooting it, or a meeting is rescheduled, and it’s difficult to disseminate the news to all of the staff. When I worked in a public library, there was a memo pad that contained all of the important news that we needed to know. But it was easy to forget to look at the notebook, things were sometimes written in illegible handwriting, and it was difficult to make changes to or to link new news to older related news. I always thought it would be great to have something online – an intranet, a blog, or something – where the news would be easy to change and disseminate, and would be accessible from any computer.”

+ Rochelle A. Mazar, who has a great title for her blog (“The Trials and Tribulations of a Subversive Librarian) wrote about this issue a few weeks ago:

“Most organizations already do something else in place of a group blog. They send mass emails. Hundreds of mass emails a week, which generally clutter up mailboxes or get deleted. Wouldn’t a blog be better? Rather than spotty archives in people’s email, everyone could have access to ONE keyword-searchable, date- and time- stamped archive. Rather than carry on a conversation on a listserv, forcing all staff to get our witty repartee via email, staff with questions could post comments and have them answered by the poster or anyone else with information. I suggested complex, threaded comments for educational blogs, and I would definitely suggest them in this context as well. With threaded comments, questions could be asked, answered, and archived in a forum open to all staff without clogging up inboxes.”

I’m going to start discussing wikis more as communication tools at the reference desk. I have been more and more impressed with the ability with the communication of a small group of people using a wiki (maybe 10-15 or less – I’m not sure yet). We’re also going to try to use wikis for communication amongst the PLA bloggers at future conferences. Even more reason to take Will Richardson out for coffee at CIL.