Posts Tagged ‘ Patron Services ’

Top Ten Links – Week 3

January 22, 2010
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Top Ten Links – Week 3

My hand selected best links I shared on Twitter from 1/14/2010 through 1/21/2010 in no particular oder: not enuf women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks Clay Shirky’s “Rant About Women” post. Both men and women should read this. I meant to blog my reaction to it but have run out of time, I may still do it next week. In a nutshell I agree with him. RT @toptechtrends @sirexkathryn Talking about copia – @griffey and about blio #alamwttt#alamw10 – Take a look at blio & copia, I know I mentioned them in my Top Tech Trends notes, but these 2 things are probably the biggest changes we’ve seen to ebooks and how they work sad to hear so much focus on tools & not the service they provide or needs they meet #alamw10 – This isn’t a link, its one of my tweets but I think it’s so important I’m including it. If you’ve heard me speak you’ve heard me say stop focusing on the tools, focus on your patrons and what’s best for them. The Most Important Success Tip: Stop Lying Down with Dogs, Already from Johnny Truant over at Copyblogger. Did you know your salary & your habits are a reflection of

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Using WordPress for Bibliographies or Readers Advisory Sites

September 8, 2008
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Using WordPress for Bibliographies or Readers Advisory Sites

Remember how last month I blogged about using a wiki for the library’s  Readers Advisory Site?  It looked like this.  Well we ran into some issues, the IT department was having some problems with the input form and the other Librarians didn’t like it (I’m not gonna list their complaints), so I started rethinking it.  Since I was going to be building a new one from scratch I knew I wanted patrons to be able to print out the lists as well as be able to use it to see the record in the catalog.  I also wanted something other staff were comfortable and familiar with.  I knew many of the staff set up a blog during our Library Learning 2.0 program.   I’m very familiar with blogging & WordPress, and I knew I could tweak the pages and post to make it function the way I wanted.  The library already uses WP for it’s main blog so it was a simple matter to have another blog set up.  I got to work and it worked out even better than I’d hoped!  See it here, read on for the how I made it happen. First I created 7 Pages,  including

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Using a wiki for Reader’s Advisory

July 22, 2008
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Using a wiki for Reader’s Advisory

One of the first things we started when I came to MRRL was create online Reader’s Advisory lists for patrons.  We’ve used a couple of different services for this in the last 3 years, but they cost money and were controlled by outside vendors.  Earlier this year I was looking for funding to be able to add some new services and it occurred to me that the Library could save money by using a wiki to provide What to Read Next list.  I got the go ahead from the director, we installed Mediawiki and  I’ve been busy coding.  So I’m pleased to announce the new Reader’s Advisory wiki.  It is pretty “bare bones” looking, as wikis are hard to customize, but our logo is there and it has a nice clean look that matches our blog.  It includes links to lists created internally, pdfs, and lists other places on the web. I’m still working on it and in the spirit of 2.0 it will always be changing.     Remember wikis are the platform for the content your patrons are looking for. They don’t care how it gets delivered as long as they get it.  Using a wiki just make your life easier and seamless integration makes your patrons life easier. 

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We are del.icio.us!

August 28, 2007
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We are del.icio.us!

With a “to do” list a mile long I feel as though I’ll never get anything finished. Technically this isn’t finished either as it’s meant to be a living page and it’s well on it’s way. My library is using our del.icio.us account to create our Weblinks page for our patrons. Robin set up the page using dishy and I’ve been busy adding links left and right. This is so much easier than maintaining a classic weblinks page, the Reference staff only has to know how to use del.icio.us and agree on a taxonomy for tags. No need to know html or use page editing software, which makes our website designer happy too. No creating each link manually or worry about ordering and descriptions. All I have to do it find the webpage, tag it with del.icio.us, assign my tags, add any descriptors I feel are necessary and voila it’s on our page. It’s just as easy to delete or update links too. As I’ve been browsing other Library’s Weblinks page for links to include on ours, I was surprised to see no one else using this method. I’m sure they are out there, I just haven’t found one yet.

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photo by Beth Tribe

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