Customer Love: Valentines Day Edition

Happy Valentines Day! Here are some warm fuzzies from our ever-grateful customers:

Simply brilliant. The individuals who authorized and implemented the library chat hopefully received nice bonuses.

Ms. Pauline was extremely helpful in helping my daughter and I find a detailed map of Nubia for her Social Studies project. She stayed online with us, until we were able to locate the information that we needed. I was very impress with her professionalism and patience. I most definately would use this site again and recommend it to others. It saved us hours of research and a trip to the library.

i think that you have some exelent people who are sweet even after i buged them +they really saved me b/c i needed info. on african culture for a story thats due in one & i half days and she gave me 7 amazing websites thankyou soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much bye-bye and have a nice day

this was one of the most awesome live chat experiences i have had, i hope that more libraries adopt this and will continue to improve upon the information that the librarians can give people. thank you!

This is an excellent service for people like me who works full time and can't take the time to visit the library. Thank you very much.

What a great service this provides! I was able to get information when my library was closed. Without it I don't know what I would have done. Thank you!

I spent almost an hour trying to find the information - the librarian was able to help me in minutes!

This is a very good addition to the website. It makes it a lot easier just going onto the computer, instead of having to drive and use up gas. So i am very happy with this new addition.

what a cool service- thanks so much for the help!

this web page is very good and i will tell my friends about it

Thank you so much for all of your efforts and dedications! This was the best and the quickest way of help any one could have ever asked for! You just made my day! Thank you again.

Great job. Great customer service.

YouTube: The Reference Tool

Have you considered using YouTube (or other online video services) as resources? Don't limit yourselves on where you look for answers / help. In our user-generated world, that question about how to get to the next level on a video game, or how to fix a leaky faucet could be answered using videos!

Check out the NYT article here.

Also, check out other video sites:
Video How-to: http://www.instructables.com/ (one of my personal favorites for all things DIY)
Life Explained. On Film: http://www.videojug.com/
Videos, TV, News, Movies: http://www.veoh.com/
Another YouTube: http://www.vimeo.com/
Video How-to: http://www.howcast.com/

What do you think?

Librarian: Best Careers of 2009

The article came out in December in US News and World Report. You can read the full article on their website but here's the gist:

"Forget about that image of librarians as a mousy bookworms. More and more of today's librarians must be clever interrogators, helping the patron to reframe their question more usefully. Librarians then become high-tech information sleuths, helping patrons plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records, often starting with a clever Google search but frequently going well beyond.

Librarianship is an underrated career. Most librarians love helping patrons solve their problems and, in the process, learning new things. […] The job market for special librarians (see below) is good but is sluggish for public and school librarians. Nevertheless, persistent sleuthing—that key attribute of librarians—should enable good candidates to prevail."

Congratulations, fellow librarians! I hope you are all as proud as me in being a part of one of the best professions in the world: high tech information sleuths! :-)

new links to play with

I scanned Information Today for my usual list of links to check out and came up with a few great ones this time around.

Search Engines**
Biznar.com and mednar.com are "innovative business/medical search." Basically they're federated searching for business and medical topics. I do always prefer Medline for medical information, but these are good sources as well. Both of these "beta" engines are by Deepwebtech.com.

I used "wireless electricity" to search biznar.com and it found me the FAST COMPANY article from this month's issue as well as other things like a patent (via google patents) for the "wireless electric swivel head hand lantern". :-) Some items were not free full text, but some were.

Science.gov
While checking out Biznar and Mednar, i came across science.gov which i'm honestly surprised to say i didn't know anything about. it's a partnership between usa.gov and worldwidescience.org.

Worldwidescience.org 

is also a good place to go... it's maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy's
Office of Scientific and Technical Information as the Operating Agent for the WorldWideScience Alliance.

** I'd continue to use my handy dandy librarian filtering skills to weed out a lot of the mess found via these sites, but they're another place to go.

DeepDyve.com

librarians know that most of the information on the web is in the "deep web" (less than 0.02%, according to UC Berkley, is indexed by traditional serach engines). This site claims to have access to the deep web. You have to sign up (which i haven't done yet) but there is a free and paid version... i wonder what the difference is. 

stats.oecd.org
i was hoping stats.oecd.org would be the place to go for stats online. So far so good. it's the statistical database for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). GDPs, the Agricultural Outlook, Health Expeditures, and more. take a few minutes and poke around this site, you may add it to your list of places to go when your customers need numbers.

Course Management Systems
Moodle and the Sakai project are open source CMS options for Academics.

Social Networking
ELGG.org/ allows you to create your own social network. I haven't had a chance to check it out further, but i will be.

Podcasting
I hear raves about Audacity being a great way to get into podcasting.

Semantic Search
http://hakia.com/ claims semantic search (natural language) and "search results from Cedible Sites recommended by Librarians." Even if you don't dig hakia, you may want to check out http://pubmed.hakia.com/ which is their search overtop pubmed, which we all love.

I'd be curious to see what David Lankes has to say about this claim of the whole "librarian" and "credibility" thing in light of his Reference Extract project.

Cool Firefox Extensions
Jureeka is a firefix extension that hyperlinks legal citations in webpages.

Book Price Comparisions
Bookburro is an extension that will price shop books for you. Yay!

SURVEY: What do you need from Refresher Training?

Refresher Training is coming! Help us make sure you get the information and refreshers you need.

Please take this brief (less than 15 mins) survey to help us design training:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=f43oF1AiYcPLUQx_2bCIjCww_3d_3d

Refresher Training will be kicking off in MARCH with a refresher for the Liaisons.

All Questions can be directed to Julie