Internet Librarian: Tuesday Review Entry

Met the author of librarywebchic and thanked her for sharing information on her blog, which has been a source of inspiration to me over the past year. She remarked that sometimes you had to push for what you needed for users.

I've found this very true in my own library. I ask if we can do something, the default answer seems to be ‘no’, and I’m never content with that answer. If my original idea might not work, then there must be something else that will work and we simply need to discover what it is.

I’m interested in looking at Meebo as a source of ‘contact a librarian’ information.

One of the presentations I was at today remarked: use Web 2.0 technology that you are already comfortable using. This makes me wonder about using Facebook, not from a library perspective necessarily, but as a personal way to communicate with the community: students & faculty.

There were some interesting presentations and lots of interesting tools that could be used inside libraries for information literacy and reference.

The Keynote presentation was particularly interesting in terms of the philosophy of reference. I really agree with several of the points made by Joe James. I do think that the future of reference is going to be about putting the library into the path of users wherever that may be.

We need to stop thinking about reference as only something that happens inside the library and somehow we have to figure out best practices for our library to offer varying styles of reference without having hardship on the librarians.

We’ve always given varying degrees of service to users – you wouldn’t do a forty minute reference interview with someone who wants to know the capital of Bolivia, for instance – so why should we be worried about answering very briefly emails and/or IMs we receive?

Another comment was in discussion to reference rooms – putting reference books into circulation. Honestly, I think there is more of this that needs to happen. We need to move away from the library as a space to hold our collection and towards keeping and allowing physical spaces for users. If we could free up more of our reference room to do this, I think it would be a very good thing.