According to PC World, Opera usage has been growing among the visitors to the PC World site. This is due in large part to Opera becoming totally free. The post also discusses how Firefox continues to maintain a 20% market share among visitors to the PC World site, while IE 6 is still holding on... Continue Reading →
Business Blogs Survey
This request was made by Becky Smith, Head of the Business & Economics Library at UIUC, on the BUSLIB-L listserv, and I thought I'd pass it on. I am conducting a short survey about the use of blogs in business libraries. Even if your library is not currently employing a blog, please answer this survey... Continue Reading →
Librarianship, Degrees, and Perceptions of Educational Level
Rochelle has written a great post about faculty and librarians as being "comrades in arms." Most recently, Meredith also blogged about whether academic librarians are faculty or support staff. The faculty status of librarians is a debate that is ongoing. If you talk to colleagues at my library, where we do not have a tenure... Continue Reading →
Microsoft and Yahoo Dealing Over IM
According to an Associated Press News Story: Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have agreed to make their two instant-messaging programs work together, a partnership that could threaten market leader America Online, people familiar with the situation said. A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership, allowing users of the competing services to exchange messages seamlessly, would give the two companies... Continue Reading →
How We Handle Shift Changes
Our IM reference service is in full swing, and I've gotten several questions about how we staff the service. Here, I'd like to show how we handle shift changes. Generally, each reference librarian has a one-hour shift on IM during the daytime hours. Night and weekend shifts can be a little longer. When the next... Continue Reading →
Are You on IM?
Scott Pfitzinger at Biblotechweb has a good write-up of using instant messaging in reference. He writes: Instant Messaging is an incredibly easy and ubiquitous form of communication. There is definitely a place for it in practically every library. Whether it’s to provide patrons with an alternative method of communication or to facilitate internal communication, IM... Continue Reading →
IM Questions this Hour
At our library, our staff take turns manning the IM service every hour. This past hour I had four IM's. As you can see below, we're receiving a variety of questions over IM. Student received an email that a book she requested through OhioLINK was in. She was needing to know where to go pick... Continue Reading →
Settling an Argument Over Wikipedia
One of my colleagues forwarded me this email from her son in college. She had sent this around to the rest of our reference department as well, hoping to get answers from our staff. Her son writes: Hey Mom, I've got a kinda silly reference librarian question for you concerning the validity and accuracy of... Continue Reading →
Playing with New Themes
I was getting kind of bored with the old look of Library Voice, so I've been tinkering with a few new themes. The latest incarntion is using the stock version of a theme called Connections, which I downloaded from the WordPress Themes Directory. Connections was created by Patricia of Vanilla Mist, and it appears that... Continue Reading →