Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Wed, 2010-01-20 15:42
Kim Leeder at In the Library with the Lead Pipe posted an article a few weeks ago on the topic of Vision and Visionaries. As part of her introduction, she compares two blog posts by school librarians in Georgia, each interviewing their respective students on the topic of "What makes a library a library?"
Leeder notes that the elementary students are focused on resources and the high school students were focused on atmosphere and social interactions. You can read the rest of her summary if you want, but I hope you'll check out the original sources. It is always interesting to hear what patrons have to say.
I don't think these voices represent the way every high school or elementary school student thinks about and uses libraries, even in Georgia, or even in those schools. If we are willing to believe that the librarians didn't edit much out, and faithfully reported everything they had permission to use, then I think the two sets of student responses shows that distinct groups of people can have distinct different experiences of "library".
I love that Leeder, an academic librarian, uses the mouths of babes to open a discussion of vision in libraries. It's not just that some of those kids are going to be college students someday - sure, sure, I believe the children are the future - but rather, that each person's experience with libraries today, and in the future, is heavily influenced by their personal history with libraries: did the library help them in some way? Were staff friendly? Were they made to feel that they belonged?
Will a student who comes to our virtual reference serivce from a library that is full of resources have a different experience than one who comes to us from a library that is a place where people quietly hang out? Are we prepared to serve both students well?
Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Mon, 2009-12-21 14:52
A while ago, many of you helped us out by participating in a cardsorting activity.
I created slips of paper with the names of some frequently used pages on this site and asked you to categorize them. At the time, I aggregated the results and came up with a categorization scheme that seemed to work for a lot of people.
Today I finished applying that scheme to the left-hand menus on this site.
The top menu is things that patrons, libraries and schools might be interested in. The category here was 'public site for patrons'.
If you are logged in, the next link is 'The questions', which includes the current open questions list as well as links to the Buzz (recent questions) and resources for answering questions and working with patrons.
After that is "Technical help", which includes that, as well as statistics and links to general support and documents for L-net.
This is all far from perfect and far from done. There are several pages and documents that aren't represented in the navigation, and we've got to add them. We've also got to test the current set-up to see how well it is working.
Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Wed, 2009-10-14 11:58
The transition to Gale databases from EBSCO has been rocky for a lot of us, but one of the things I've been most excited about is the promise of 25 titles from the Gale Virtual Reference Library.
(I'm never excited that Gale claims the words "Virtual Reference" for self-service interactions. "Find reliable information 24/7!" their tagline goes)
GVRL contains reference books and are exactly the sort of high quality online resources we should be sharing with patrons.
Jennfier Mauer at the Oregon State Library reports that the Statewide Database Licensing Advisory Committee has chosen the first 10 titles:
American Decades Primary Sources
Ancient Civilizations Reference Library
Complete Human Diseases and Conditions
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed.
Encyclopedia of Religion
Encyclopedia of Science, Technology and Ethics
Encyclopedia of World Cultures
Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia
UXL Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes, 2nd ed.
Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia
I think that SDLAC really knows their patrons. Huzzah, librarians!
What about all of those kids coming to L-net to learn about immigration? Egypt? An animal native to Oregon? An endangered species? The culture of a specific country? A certain Native American tribe? Here are resources to help answer these questions.
With 15 more titles to be revealed. I hope the committee will include a spot for the Encyclopedia of Explorers, World War II and Tree Octopuses.
Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Mon, 2009-10-12 11:07
For a few months now, we've been the #1 hit on Google for 'chat with a librarian', ahead of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.
Today as I was demonstrating this to someone, I noticed something else. Someone is paying Google to sponsor a link for this search, trying to steal our traffic. Maybe we're on to something?
I also notice that this company claims to have 82 librarians online. The sponsored link doesn't work when I click it. Any one of you 82 librarians reading this want to comment?
