Louisville Free Public Library, Kentucky, suffered a flash flood; a librarian there has been posting updates and photos via Twitter. There’s an interview with the library director plus photos and the Library Society of the World (a grassroots organisation based on social networking, the absence of policies, and a stringent Cod of Ethics) is fundraising US$5000 to help out – latest I heard today they’d reached $2700.

Web and search
Curtin Library have created an optimised website for mobile phones.

You can now search for Creative Commons material across various sites in a single place, to find free photos, music, and videos.

If you’ve got an image on your computer and you’re not sure where it’s from (or if you’ve uploaded an image and want to see if anyone else has stolen it), Tineye may be able to find it. Like any search engine it only indexes a portion of the web but it’s indexing more all the time.

Subject guides
Some libraries are discussing ways to use LibGuides material in other parts of their library websites.

A new edition of the Internet Resources Newsletter is out, as usual listing a whole lot of new websites in a broad variety of subject areas – many could be useful for subject guides.

Food for thought
A bunch of librarians have been writing A Day in the Life of a Librarian blog posts – interesting to see what goes on in different libraries and different positions.

Seth Godin charts media according to bandwidth/value of information vs synchronicity/speed of communication – an interesting way of thinking about the way we communicate with our users.

Deborah

Can anyone who has seen Crate #28 (dark blue with green handles) please return it to Central Library checkin area.

Thank you!

Deborah

Once our Facebook fan count passed 100, we became eligible for our own username, which gives us a short URL:

http://www.facebook.com/uclibrary

The old URL still works as well, but this one will be much easier to share with users than the old strings of numbers.

Deborah

Do any of the branches have a spare book trolley (or two or three) they could lend Engineering Library? We potentially need them until February 2010 though shorter term loans would also be helpful.

Deborah

We’re launching the University of Canterbury Library page on Facebook today. Thank you to project sponsor Heather; everyone in the project implementation team (Alison J, Catherine, Deirdre, Donna, Erin, and Lisa); and to our weekend admins (Caroline Anderson and Anne Milligan) for helping make this happen!

The page includes:

• importing news from blogs;
• links to campus pages and hours;
• photos, discussions, library events;
• ‘boxes’ to promote the blogs, AskLive, Subject Guides, our YouTube videos, and OCLC’s citation application.

The aim is for the page to keep current so please let me know if you’ve got any ideas for content to add.

For some background, you can read up on the Facebook implementation project on the Camelot wiki. I also recently came across a blog essay on Facebook Usage by US Colleges and Universities.

Deborah

An essay on the serials review process.

The Global Legal Monitor, published by the Law Library of Congress in Washington, offers an RSS feed for updates for all news stories as well as RSS feeds broken down by topic and/or jurisdiction.

Make it Digital by DigitalNZ has guides, voting for what NZ resources should be digitised (the AJHRs are currently in the lead) and a place to ask and answer questions about digitisation.

Judith Thomson pointed me to LiveJournal (mentioned in new book Marketing today’s academic library) – this is a blogging platform that’s focused on community, so it’s easy to comment, to read all your friends’ livejournals in one place, and to create topic-based community blogs where any member can post; it also allows for custom privacy settings (so eg only certain people can see your posts).

Marketing

• Five ways you can save money by marketing by Kathy Dempsey
• A librarian from Maine State Library gives instructions on how to embed or adapt the Library Use Value Calculator – “This calculator was developed in 2007 as a way for libraries to let patrons calculate how much their use of the library means to them”.

Added web functionality

• Cornell University describes how they created JAbbr, an online tool where you can type in a journal abbreviation to find possible matches in their catalogue. The source code is available under the MIT License.
• Tom Pasley at UCOL Library writes about adding an APA citation into the records displayed on their (Voyager) catalogue.

Deborah

Not content with publishing fake journals, Elsevier’s marketing division recently decided to “offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.” Upon exposure, it’s now recanted the scheme.

More New Zealand libraries on the social web:

• Lincoln Uni Library on Twitter;
• Otago Uni Library on Twitter and showing their Law Library refurbishments on Flickr;

Christchurch City Library staff on Flickr (with photos of Paul Sutherland’s 50th birthday party).

Photos of libraries to drool over:

• Republic Polytechnic Library, Singapore — lots of space; and
• Hjorring public library, Denmark — a red ribbon theme flows through the whole building; lots of bright colours and cool spaces; self-checkin.

A report from Cambridge University about what students are interested in doing on mobile phones: primarily opening hours, location maps, contact info, and access to the library catalogue.

A hilarious and very true rant on attending vendor training sessions; and a more serious post in response on how this applies to the kind of training sessions we give students.

National Library of the Netherlands is to secure long-term preservation of the content of the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Deborah

A bit of humour: “Dispatches from a Public Librarian“, told Twitter-style (so may make most sense if you scroll to the bottom and read upwards).

Springshare have launched new LibGuides features, including co-owners for guides (will display both co-owners’ profiles on the guide) and moderation of user-submitted links.

Newly-discovered-by-me Twitter users include Lincoln University and Humanities NZ. Increasing numbers of NZ public libraries have accounts.

Someone’s created a “search engine taste test” where you type in your keywords and it searchs Bing, Google, and Yahoo simultaneously. You can then vote for the best set of results and it will reveal which search engine it’s from.

A Swedish university library has created a simple javascript bookmarklet people can add to their browser so that if they’re browsing the web (via google or links recommended by friends) and find themselves on a subscription-only page, they can click the bookmarklet to reload the page via ezproxy instead of having to navigate back to the library website and find it again. A librarian from there suggests other libraries should “Steal the JavaScript from this page or write your own.“

Deborah

University of California Berkeley Library have redesigned their animated tutorials page to be “more visual, navigable, and less, ahem, u-g-l-y, while giving users a means of providing a bit of feedback on the tutorials to help us evaluate and prioritize them.”

LexisNexis NZ has a new Twitter account. (And have I mentioned Springshare’s account where they post about updates to LibGuides?) Ooh, and the COSC department, another new Twitter account, have just plugged the library’s online exam papers.

The User is Not Broken manifesto has its third birthday.

The National Library of Wales is Flickr’s 26th Commons partner. “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.” See how users can add information in comments and notes (hover your mouse over the image).

Deborah

Resources
Gateway to Scientific Data from the Canadian government.

Emerald Management Reviews Citations of Excellence Top 50 papers

The first time Europeana (a digital library funded by the European Commission) launched so many people visited that it promptly crashed. This time it seems to be stable and is very nice to browse.

Musopen “is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music.” (Project Gutenberg and Mutopia also have sheet music; Gutenberg also has music recordings, moving pictures, etc.)

Tools
Have you ever used Tinyurl to make a short link for a long url? Now Krunchd gives you a short link for a collection of urls.

Ideas
David Lee King writes about embedding a link to their virtual reference in their HIP catalogue (including on their Search Results page).

Stephen Abram writes about how phrasing on signage can increase compliance.

Deborah