Lost In the Stacks

WREK in Atlanta offers a weekly radio show focused on music commentary and library technology .

-DD

Librarian's Blog

Michael Stephens has a blog about librarianship .

-DD

Librarians Are A Valuable Resource

Shannon Mersand extols the service of librarians in helping students and teachers with technology. The post includes charts showing the distribution of services librarians provide.

-DD

Library Graphic Changes With Time

I discovered that the American Library Association has developed a new graphic to reflect the new reality of electronic information access.

The old graphic was an individual reading a book:


while the new graphic shows a person at a laptop:


-DD

Ethics in the Library

University of Toronto students produced a video on "The Ethical Responsibilities of Librarians ." Privacy is of such a concern that at my workplace, library credentials are only shared via secure university issued email accounts.

-DD

 

Virtual Reference Service

Rutgers Professor Marie Radford has a YouTube post about virtual reference service .

I serve as a reference librarian equipped with chat technology such as described by Dr. Radford. However, with a student body of perhaps 10,000 students, most prefer to use email or the telephone to communicate, not a service where they must type in a chat box. After perhaps six months of using the chat service, we rarely get one chat request in a day. With such sporadic use it is hard to justify keeping someone at a desk where they would wait for a chat query.

Another problem with chat service is that the synchronous typing back and forth is very s-l-o-w. This limitation makes it suited for quick answers such as the library hours, but not for the type of interview a librarian wants to hold with a serious researcher.

An ethical issue with typed chat clients is that authentication is not required to promote ease-of-use. This means that the librarian really does not know who they are chatting with, and thus cannot ethically release information such as library account numbers, information about books on loan, etc., over the chat stream. So if any of these common requests appear, the chat has to be aborted and an email sent.

In summary, chat offers a mode of service that is appreciated, but in no way does it replace the phone, email, or personal visit to the library.

-DD

 

LibraryKnowledge.com

Library Knowledge is the Web site for Tony Bandy's training firm. The site offers sample training materials which might be useful to anyone wanting to learn about Web sites or information technology.

Note: I attended an event where the presentation equipment suffered a total technical failure, and witnessed Tony cooly continue his presentation with an alternate technology.

-D.D.