Update on ALA’s District Dispatch Podcast

Remember awhile back, when I posted about ALA’s District Dispatch blog? Jenny Levine commented (among others) - which is good, because she “has the power” (said with that superhero echoey effect) to fix that kind of thing.
And she did! today I can successfully listen to and download the audio file manually, and I can also [...]

ALA Midwinter 2007: It can be confusing!

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ALA Midwinter was a big conference - one that had many meetings in many different hotels. To the right is a video of me trying (almost unsuccessfully) to get to a program at the conference. I was confused - the hotel the program was held at, as far as I could tell, didn’t [...]

ALA Midwinter 2007: Digital Gaming in Library Instruction

I attended the ACRL Instruction Section Current Issue Digest and Discussion Forum on digital gaming in library instruction. It was pretty interesting - here are my notes, mainly on comments and questions I found interesting, in fairly random order (with two wicked cool ideas that came up, too):

You could use Second Life as a platform [...]

ALA Midwinter 2007: Raising the Next-Gen Resource Sharing Librarian

Mary Hollerich, Audrey Huff, Michael Porter, and Michael Stephens spoke.
Mary Hollerich (National Library of Medicine):

Spoke a little about kids today: different learning styles, tech savvy, collaborative, thriving on change, multitaskers, learning resource sharing on the job
Resource sharing is more than just ILL: blurred boundaries with ILL, circulation, and acquisitions
Expanded concept of resource sharing: lots of [...]

ALA Midwinter 2007: MARS Hot Topics Discussion on OPACS

MARS hot topics discussion group, mars products and services committee: Not your Dad’s Interface: next generation opacs and search engines
Endeca: Someone from NCSU spoke

Endeca is not a replacement for their catalog
Barnes and Noble, Walmart - both use Endeca as search front-ends…
Does great relevance ranking, and allows you to tweak those

AquaBrowser: Someone from King County Public [...]

ALA and Speaking

Jenny Levine posted her experiences with speaking at ALA and PLA. I’ve had two similar experiences:
1. Spoke at ALA, wasn’t a member. Luckily, my library paid my way, so I had airfare and hotel funding. But ALA was terribly strict about my non-member status - I could only attend the exhibit hall for one day [...]

“The point of a scholarly text”

From the Wall Street Journal, quoting Gorman:
“The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue.”
Come on. I went to college. I (and probably many other students) didn’t read the full text - we scanned for the good bits [...]

Gorman and Satire

I like satire. I think it can be funny. VERY funny. However, when one claims to have written a satirical piece in one sentence, and in the very same sentence claims to be “no fan of blogs” … then that person’s satire changes, in my mind at least, to a belief they really hold.
Translation? An [...]

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