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Amazon Video Reviews
I am not sure when Amazon started doing this but now you can post a video review of an item instead of just typing in text. Awesome.
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Food in the Library
Last Friday our library staff went on a tour of some of the libraries in our area. The newest one on our trip, Utah Valley University‘s new library, had a cafe on the first floor and a food-anywhere...
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Yelp Listens, So Can Libraries
I started on Yelp for fun a few months ago. I would have posted several more reviews except there was no way to save a review so you could go back to it later. I emailed Yelp about it two months ago...
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Rethinking Resource Sharing (NWILL 2008)
The North Western Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference at the Portland Community College–Sylvania campus this year had about 200 people; I was pleasantly surprised how big it was. I heard...
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Marriott Hotels and “Yes”
I have been thinking a lot about how to say “yes” instead of “no in library policy interpretation. Certainly we have great reasons for many of the policies we have in libraries but is there not a way...
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Library Names
Dan Maas writes at the Littleton Public School’s blog about a possible name change for libraries and librarians (thanks to Tame the Web for the link). Maas utilizes the ever-popular etymological...
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Life as a Library Patron
Brian Herzog at Swiss Army Librarian has come up with an interesting concept: Work Like a Patron Day. Basically, Herzog recommends doing as much as possible the way a patron does things, including...
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Usability Testing in Libraries
A group in our library has been reading Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think over the past few weeks. It is an excellent resource for anyone considering building or redesigning a website. Anyhow, we just...
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How Virtual Trumps Face-to-face Everytime {humor}
I have been out with laryngitis for a few days but I decided to come into work today, anyway. Although I can’t really get much done on the phone or in person, I can communicate just fine on facebook,...
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“Library Instruction is Boring”
How can we liven up our library instruction/info literacy sessions so our students really internalize the extremely valuable information we try convey?
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Library Newsletters
Brian Mathews at Ubiquitous Librarian has a really interesting post about what male and female students expect and want to find in a newsletter put out by their library. Here is his list of responses:...
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Food in Our Local Library
I have discussed food in the library before, but I just found out last week that the Harold B. Lee Library is considering adding a cafe and eating area. I must admit I was pretty excited. It will take...
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Review of 2008
Top three posts of the year were: Publishing in Library Science Improving the Librarian Image Lincoln Dounglas Debates My favorite posts of the year were: Facebook Free “Library Instruction is Boring”...
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LibraryThing’s Will You Like It?
Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, just came out with a new recommendation tool for LT: Will You Like It? Essentially the tool looks at your library and decides based on other readers’ ratings and...
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Libraries Loaning Kindles
I have been looking into the possibility of libraries using the Kindle to support circulation and Interlibrary Loan now for about 6 months. Now that Amazon has released their second version of the...
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“I Don’t Want to Leave My House for Library Books”
To @drewlaplante and any others out there who would love to have the library in their home: we are getting closer and closer everyday. Of course what I am talking about is electronic journal access...
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“Why Can’t I Collaborate in the Library?”
Really interesting tweet from @felixmortimer Actually, felixmortimer, libraries today offer these spaces more and more; some have individual rooms for groups to study and discuss in; some even an open...
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“I Have Never Heard of Interlibrary Loan”
It is really sad when people wait for books that they could get really easily from another library through interlibrary loan services; many libraries do this for free for their patrons! To...
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Tools for Multi-social Networking in Libraries
I presented some thoughts I had on Ping.fm, netvibes, and friendfeed at a technology forum for libraries last week. (as a side note: I used bubbl.us for a diagram to show the differences between...
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Amazon: “OK to Lend Kindles in Libraries”
I have written before about my interest in using Amazon’s Kindle for circulation and interlibrary loan. Yesterday I received a response from Amazon about doing so. On the phone, the Amazon rep. and I...
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Goodreads Adds Google Book Preview
Goodreads now offers a link to previews of books through Google Book Search when available. You can view and search the text while still inside Goodreads. One thing that would be nice is a...
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Librarian App: Shushes Instead of Searches
When I saw the tag line on this post, “Librarian is now LIVE on the iTunes App Store,” I thought, “Oh this will be interesting, another way to search for stuff from a phone or other personal device.”...
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“Librarians Can’t Spell.”
Whatever your brand is, you will lose followers if you say you are great at something but you actually don’t deliver. Even seemingly trivial mistakes can alienate the public. A fly in a soup at a...
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Picture Books on the Kindle
As more and more traditional print publications begin to discard the print model and publish digitally, it seems that the last type of publication purely in an analog format will likely be the picture...
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Why I Like UVU’s Library
I am back at the Utah Valley University Library and I wanted to share why I like this place: Light There is just something nice about the feeling of natural light while you study or do research. Why do...
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Goodreads Adds eBook Downloads
Thanks to @bencrowder for the info: Goodreads has added eBook formats (Mobipocket, pdf, txt, ePub) for downloads of over 1, 000 books, so this includes titles for Kindle or Amazon iPhone App users.
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“I Can’t Find a Librarian.”
Aside from helping with computers, the “anything else” could be anything from directions to the bathroom to a twenty-minute research transaction. Some libraries try to solve this issue by “roving” or...
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Our Kindle ILL Model
Our Interlibrary Loan Office was recently approved to officially start a pilot loaning Amazon Kindles to our university faculty. Rationale We looked at the number of requests facutly requests which we...
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“Libraries Help You Go Green”
Although libraries going green has become a hot topic recently, WOWchoice points to a post at thedailygreen.com about how checking out items instead of buying them helps global sustainability.
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“Library Instant Messaging is Useless”
Cautionary words from JesHolbrook about library chat reference. Libraries should go through great lengths to ensure that someone is actually monitoring IM at all times or that the service goes...
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Why I Like Bookburro
I have been using Bookburro for about a year now and am finally able to write a review. Bookburro is an extension for flock or Firefox that searches multiple bookseller sites to compare prices on the...
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MTV and the 20th Century Library
Well, our friends in pop culture continue to perpetuate tired stereotypes of libraries and librarians. The new kid on the block is MTV‘s Silent Library. Oooh, interesting! A reality show based around a...
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“I Love it When the Library Has What I Want”
RT @girlfromPBO “I think stopping by the library on a whim and finding the EXACT RIGHT BOOK you have been pining for is one of life’s most awesome moments.”
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Kindle Now Offers Sheet Music
I thought that sheet music would be one of the last things to go Kindle (along with picture books) but Amazon just announced that they have just contracted to have a large library of sheet music...
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“My Librarian Cares More About Silence than Literacy”
RT @bethsteadman: “Did the icky librarian really just tell my son not to read aloud to himself in a faraway corner of the children’s section near NO ONE?” This is unbelievable. I have to stifle the...
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Borrowing From Our Users to Fill #ILL Requests
Image by moonflowerdragon via Flickr Here is something that I have been thinking about for a few months now. When a user can’t find an item in our catalog they go to ILL. ILL then contacts various...
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“Libraries Are Useful for Bibliography Generators.”
In a way this is a cool positive response from a user but I am always a little chagrined when the handy-dandy bibliographic generator tools (e.g., Endnote, RefWorks, etc) are the only things...
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Disney Offers Subscription for eBooks
From the New York Times: Disney is offering a library of 500 Disney book titles on the web but using a subscription model instead of a purchase-on-demand model. That is a relatively small number of...
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“Library Catalogs are Broken.”
“I hate the library!! Why are you telling me you have things when I can’t find them stupid system!” twitter user: andrewmoore24 OPACs continue to be obstacles to finding. Sometimes I wonder if our...
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“I Can’t Understand My Librarian.”
Twitter user: chrisdude: “I was in the library and I went TO ‘the stacks,’ and I still don’t know what that means.” For those who have heard this idiom used by librarians but have never learned what...
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ILL and Collection Development on a Tight Budget
Image via Wikipedia With the economy the way it is has been over the past year or so a lot of libraries have turned back to ILL as an alternative to shrinking book-buying budgets. I wonder if this is...
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Netflix Finally Adds Search For Non-subscribers
Not sure when they did this but Netflix has finally listened to my advice (and surely countless other potential users) and offered a search to anyone, not just subscribers. The next logical step is to...
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Libraries and Google’s On-demand eBooks
A colleague of mine told me a few minutes ago that Google announced it will start selling ebooks through Google Book Search today. I did a preliminary search for Mark Twain’s authorized autobiography...
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“My Librarian is a Hypocrite.”
It is essential that whatever rules we have in libraries for our patrons we don’t break them ourselves in front of them. Sure I realize that eating happens in libraries all the time but it should be...
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Library Value Proposition
from flickr user armadillo444 We recently had a marketing faculty member come to the library to discuss marketing libraries. At one point in the presentation he displayed a simple evaluation sheet that...
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“My Librarian Thinks I’m a Criminal.”
“Librarians at this university take their job way to seriously, we’re students not convicts.” This comment kind of reminds me of the famous video, Give ‘Em the Pickle. The moment that I am thinking of...
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