BiblioTech Web

LibraryThing has now gone the next step and allowed integration between its now-massive database of information and your library’s OPAC (that’s Online Public Access Catalog for those who haven’t been through Library School–what people nowadays simply call the online catalog or just “catalog”). Imagine your library patrons being able to add tags and recommendations to the entries for your books, and without you needing to struggle to program it all. LibraryThing’s done the work for you, so you just need to add a few lines of HTML code and that’s it!

http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/ gives you all the information you need, including a handy “Take the Tour” link.

I just came across this Flickr photo thanks to Library Stuff. What a great marketing tool for libraries! Makes you want to go to your local library and check out one of the “starring roles,” doesn’t it?

I love that! “They are smarter! They are stronger! They are HUNGRY!”

Sure made me laugh. What a fun thing to encounter on a Monday morning. (Click the picture for the original size.)

Yesterday Michael Stephens linked to a very thought-provoking video about students today and how they relate with technology. The main emphasis is on how that relates to how they’re being taught in school. Much of the content in the video is students communicating their answers (or parts of their answers) to the question “What is it like being a student today?” This question was asked on a Google Doc and 200 students collaborated in creating the document that led to this video.

I found out about another online cartoon series today that I’ve really enjoyed. It’s called bLaugh and it’s a comic strip that is specifically for bloggers. In fact, the cartoon’s subtitle is “The (Un)Official Comic of the Blogosphere!”

Here are a couple samples. If you like them, here’s a link to their RSS feed. (Thanks to Stephen Abram for recommending bLaugh.)

There’s a really good article by Steven on the ACRLog called “What Happened to the Personal Web Site” which discusses the impact that the personal blog has had on academic librarianship. Here is a snippet:

In the pre-blog days if an academic librarian wanted to achieve some of those things for which a blog now serves, a personal web site was the best available option. It could provide a personal profile, access to a CV, a listing of articles and presentations, resources that the site owner wanted to share with colleagues, and specialized resource pages designed to enlighten colleagues, promote new ideas, and create a name for oneself. Perhaps the blog’s ability to accomplish the latter is the primary reason why the personal web site is no longer the first choice - or a choice at all - for many academic librarians who want to establish themselves as thought leaders in the profession and influence their colleagues.

Please click the link above and read the whole thing. It’s a reasonable length and is well worth the read.

Last week I found out about one of the coolest library technologies that’s come down the pike. It’s a Web 2.0 application designed for Library 2.0. It’s called LibGuides and it’s worth getting excited about.

It’s a system for providing information and resources to library patrons in an engaging and organized way, but without the information providers (mainly librarians) needing to learn code or some complicated system. (I’ll refer to the people creating content in LibGuides as librarians from here on in, although they can certainly be non-librarians.) Statistics are even kept automatically, so you can see how many times each link or file was actually clicked on. They count click-throughs, not page views, so your statistics are more accurate.

The coolest part is that LibGuides interfaces with Facebook, allowing your students/patrons to browse your Guides, search your library catalog, and link to various resources that you provide on your library website, all from within Facebook. Librarians who use Facebook can even add the Guides that they’ve created right into their Facebook profiles!

Once you’ve created some Guides, you can make “widgets” that are basically little applet boxes that you can embed on websites, blogs, and even various social networking programs.

Another big part of the LibGuides program is the Community. Librarians can interact with others who are using the system, finding other librarians that specialize in the same subject areas and sharing ideas. You can even browse the Guides from other libraries!

For that matter, the LibGuides are publicly accessible unless they are intentionally made private. So you can use them for internal communications, training, etc., and also make resources that anyone in general can use. There’s even a list of libraries who are using LibGuides along with links to their LibGuides sites.

If you’d just like to see some great examples of Guides that have been created with LibGuides, visit http://www.springshare.com/libguides/examples.html.

NOTE: Butler’s LibGuides are also now available at http://libguides.butler.edu

If you’re interested in learning more about LibGuides, you can get lots of information on their website: http://www.springshare.com/libguides/. Of special interest is their “Introduction to LibGuides” video, for which the link is in the bottom right corner. If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend viewing this.

The following is information from their website. Since it describes LibGuides much better and more succinctly than I can, I figured I’d use it. (The original page is here.)

Description

LibGuides is a “library 2.0″ online publishing system. It combines the best features of social networks, wikis, bookmarks and blogs, to help librarians share information and promote library resources to the community. LibGuides is fully integrated with Facebook, and LibGuides widgets enable the distribution of library content on social networks, blogs, and courseware systems. Patrons can also subscribe to the email updates of their favorite LibGuides content. Simply put, LibGuides connects you with patrons, wherever they are.

How Does It Work?

Every library gets their own customized LibGuides system. The librarians then aggregate and publish useful information by organizing it into Guides. These Guides can be subject guides, info portals, class guides, community guides, research tips… or any type of useful content (see examples). Documents, links, podcasts, rss feeds, videos, search boxes, polls, and any type of dynamic content can be put into Guides, for a true web 2.0 learning experience.

Connect With Patrons

LibGuides provides many options to connect with patrons and distribute information:

• Every librarian has a profile page listing their contact info & all their content.
• Patrons can chat with librarians from any Guide, on Meebo, Plugoo, AOL, Yahoo IM, Google Talk and MSN Messenger.
• Users can participate in polls, rate the resources using star-rating system, and leave comments.
• Everything published in LibGuides is instantly available in Facebook, thru LibGuides Facebook app.
• LibGuides Widgets display LibGuides content on any webpage, blog, or a social network.
• Users can subscribe to email updates whenever new content is published.

There you go. Check them out! Yes, they’re a subscription service, so you do have to pay an annual fee, but it’s surprisingly low–much less than some databases we subscribe to and which hardly get used, while THIS resource is practically guaranteed to see some heavy use.