The Distant Librarian

Chatango

Just plugged this nifty-looking little Flash app into my library's distance ed homepage (Library Connection). It places a small window on a web page that allows a visitor to immediately initiate a chat session. On my end, there's a small desktop application that allows me to indicate if I'm available or not, and that also lets me know someone has just initiated a chat session on my web page. It's just another way to do instant messaging, but doesn't require that the student have an IM account, or that the one they do have be compatable with yours. Yeah, no co-browsing or transcripts, but you could do worse than try to reach out to your patrons, right?

A programming note - the Library Connection homepage now sports applications from Blogger, Chatngo, RSSify, and NedStat! You'd think a university this size could offer similar support, but if they do, I'm not aware of it.

First found out about Chatango from What Ralph Knows. I'll post again sometime in the future to let you know if anyone uses this feature. I suspect there are other similar free tools like this out there - PeopleClick used to offer something similar, but it's no longer available for free. What was neat about theirs was that I would get a ping as soon as someone loaded my web page, and then I could initiate a chat session with them via a floating balloon that popped up right in front of them - "Hi, can I help you find something?". Kind of the online library equivalent of the pushy salesperson. Maybe it wasn't such a great tool after all

Making a Web Search Feel Like a Stroll in the Library

Now this of course is perfect a perfect applications for distance students!  Though I wonder how well it will translate to less visual areas (the example is of an art collection, which to my one-dimensional brain would seem much easier to work with than, say, the ERIC database).  Sounds a bit like Grokker, too.  Hey, I didn't realize Grokker actually had a product to sell finally!  I tried the beta a while back and found it an interesting idea - guess I'll download the version 2 trial and see what's been improved.

But back to the original post topic:

Making a Web Search Feel Like a Stroll in the Library Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have designed software that lets students browse Web sites as if they were walking through library stacks. (The New York Times)

[via Chronicle.com - The Wired Campus]

A journal in need of some library content

I've been watching The International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning for a few months now thanks to the Watch that Page service, and each month I hope to see an article about distance library services, but don't. My only current paper idea already has a publisher, but maybe you're looking for a place to publish? Guidelines are here...

blendedlibrarian.org

Here's a site with some potential -

The Blended Librarian Web Site.

I was surpised to read their definition of a blended librarian, because here at the U of Calgary we've started using "blended learning" to describe a situation where on campus (traditional) students also make use of a CMS like BlackBoard to satisfy some of their "face time".  The idea with that is that they would meet f2f say two times per week instead of three, but would be required to spend an equivalent amount of time in the online environment to make it a three-day per week course. 

But I digress.  The Blended Librarian seems to be somewhat along the lines of an editorial I wrote for the Spring 2003 ACRL DLS Newsletter called "What's in a Name?"  I are one, and you probably are too! ;-)

Not sure about the LearningTimes Network tie-in, but I guess I'll register.

Noticed in the Online Learning Update.

UPDATE 4/19/05:  Was just going back to grab a URL from this post and noticed the Blendedlibrarian.org site no longer exists, so I changed that link to the Internet Archive cache.  The Blended Librarian site now lives exclusively on the LearningTimes Network (registration required).

I'm still here...

Was away on vacation last week - I'd forgotten how beautiful northern Montana is! This week I'm catching up and conducting interviews for our department (Library Connection). Finally going to get some additional help to support our 2,500 distance students; the department had been scheduled to increase in staff way back when we topped 1,000 students, so this is long overdue! There will be some more substantial posts soon...

Minor enhancements

Figured out last night how to get my subject categories hotlinked, so now when you click on the subject headings on the right side you can view the corresponding posts. Had forgotten to enable a setting to get those to work. Also learned about a hack that allows me to insert a search function on the sidebar, thanks to Google. Both of these are only marginally useful now, but in after a few years and a few thousand posts they should prove useful.

Compare and contrast - NOT

So I've had an article sitting on my to-read pile for a couple of weeks, and when an article with a similar topic showed up I thought it would be an interesting chance to compare and contrast, as they promised to come to different conclusions. Ah well, at least my idea forced me to read them.

The first is To Chat Or Not to Chat — Taking Another Look at Virtual Reference, Part 1, by Steve Coffman and Linda Arret, online at InfoToday.com and in Searcher (available in ABI Inform, Expanded Academic ASAP, and Academic Search Premier). This one promised to be interesting because Steve Coffman is the Vice President of Business Development at LSSI - the virtual reference software company, and it sounded like he was coming to the conclusion that virtual reference is a bust! Interesting way to promote your own business... Turns out he doesn't come to that conclusion exactly (though it is only part one of a two-part article - stay tuned to the next issue...). He provides a good history of virtual reference and a lot of statistics that show how the number of virtual reference transactions are falling.

The second article was Facing Live Reference, by Joe Fernandez in the May/June issue of ONLINE. Not online, but available in all the same sources as above. I thought this one was a bust - nothing really new here unless you're looking for a description of how to personalize your virtual reference service. OK, so it's a good article if that's what you need, but if you've been involved in distance education for any length of time you should already be doing everything he suggests, IMHO.

So I can't really bounce these papers off each other. I recommend the Coffman article, but I'll have to remember to see what he actually concludes in the next issue.