Searching 2.0 presentation

Thanks to everyone who attended either via EI or PEN today. Here’s the presentation for those that missed it.

Searching 2.0 (EI & PEN)

View more presentations from Michael Sauers.

Just another day at the reference desk

Via Love the Liberry

Well, would you?

Seriously, are you committed to public service enough to demonstrate this for a patron? (Photo: misswired)

Reference 2.0 Presentation Follow-up

In my Reference 2.0 presentation yesterday I was pushing del.icio.us as a great way for librarians to organize their reference resources (bookmarks) and twice the idea of using a wiki (in addition or instead came up). I said I'd think about it and I have a bit and here's my follow-up.

For the time being I'm still going to stick with del.icio.us as a better way to organize reference resources over wikis. This is not to say that wikis might not have a place at the reference desk for internal communication among reference staff (as I believe Rapid City Public Library is doing) but del.icio.us offers a more structured tag-based approach, and allows users to participate (subscribe to feeds, send links to the library) without allowing them to directly manipulate the library's resource list. (My fear would be of a member of the public adding resources to the library's list that the library felt were inappropriate and/or not up to the library's reliability standards. Submitting a link the the library via del.icio.us allows for an approval process which I think is needed.)

So, there's my thoughts on that issue. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Is reference via Twitter possible?

Last night I had a "great idea" for an experiment: reference via Twitter! Our reference department already has a Twitter account (NLC_Reference) so all that needed to be done was to make sure someone was watching the account's e-mail address and to then let people know that they could send us reference questions via Tiwtter's direct message feature. We'd then receive the questions (short ones obviously) and direct message back the (again, short) answers. Well, it turns out things are always as easy as they seem.

Unknown to me, in order for person A (a patron) to send a direct message to person B (the Commission), person B needs to be following person A. Up 'till now, this account hasn't bee following anyone as we're just posting questions asked to show the diversity of questions we get at a state library. There really wasn't any need to follow anyone. But to accomplish this idea of mine the following would need to happen:

1. We market the fact that we're accepting reference questions via Twitter and tell people our username.
2. They follow us.
3. We receive an e-mail telling us of the new follower.
4. We go to the Twitter page of the new follower and start following them.
5. They receive notification that we're following them.
6. They can now send us direct message reference questions.

Granted this isn't exactly the most complicated set of procedures in the world but one must wonder if it's worth the effort for the limited exposure. (We've got a MeeboMe page which doesn't require a user to do anything in order to ask us a question.) Say they start following us late on Friday. We're not going to follow them back until Monday morning. The result is several days before they can even ask the question let alone receive a response. Also, we're worried that if people know we're "following" them they might try to ask us a question publicly instead of via direct message. Despite the fact we are technically following them, we'd have no intention of actually reading anything they post. Might then someone think we're ignoring them if we don't respond?

The decision isn't mine. I think I've explained everything accurately to our head of reference and she's going to mull it over. I'll keep you posted but any comments on this would be greatly appreciated.

Here's a great question for your reference staff:

"What does the rest of the library staff know?"

Since arriving at NLC I've been meeting with different department heads, partially to get to know them personally, partially to get to know what they and their department do here, and partially for them to get to know what my skills are. Yesterday, I met with Lisa the head of Reference & ILL. At the end of our conversation she had one more question for me: "What else are you interested in or know a lot about?" At first this was an odd question but she quickly explained. The reference staff here likes to keep track of what other people in the building know in order to help with reference questions. For example, if there's a baseball question it goes to the major ball fan in the building. Should they ever get a Dean Koontz question, or a question about a SF or horror author, they'll probably head my way in the future.

The ultimate point is to know your available resources. (Hey, I think I wrote that back in 2000?) In some cases, your resources may be sitting right next to you or just down the hall.