Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

David Lee King has a great post about adding MeeboMe to the library catalogue, so that when users do a search and receive no hits, a MeeboMe widget pops up and they have the option to chat to a librarian. This is perfect; it’s obvious from looking at search logs  that many failed searches could be improved relatively easily, if only the user could talk to a librarian who understands the idiosyncrasies of the catalogue.

Sarah Houghton-Jan and Michael Stephens comment. Micheal’s post led me back to an earlier article of his from TechSource which is worth a look.

The blogosphere has been buzzing (well, a low hum maybe) about Slate’s article criticizing Yahoo Answers. Tim Lee at Techdirt agrees, while Jessamyn West is more critical of the Slate piece. I responded on librarian.net, so will just point you to my answer there.

Students 2.0: “we are students… but now we have a voice”. Interesting idea (though of course students have long had voices; one could easily argue that students recently have been much less interested in using them than their predecessors from the 1960s-80s.) This looks like an attempt to reverse that process, and is to be welcomed, especially by those of us in academic libraries. I’ve only glanced through the site, but the posts look to be interesting and well-written. Subscribed. (Via Michael Stephens).

Danah Boyd on information access in a networked world. I was going to write something in response to this, but I’m running out of time and it’s kinda old now. But go read.

Jenny Levine on gaming in the library - for senior citizens.

Citizen journalism site sued over user-posted content (Techdirt). An issue for libraries, especially now that more libraries are (rightly) offering users the chance to interact with their content via blogs or the OPAC?

Writing for the web presentation (Courtney Johnston, National Library) (just the slides; some good stuff here).

Meredith Farkas on the health of organisations. Encouragement of workers by management, and an interest in staff professional development, seem to be key.

Michael Stephens reports a student sit-in, filmed on YouTube, against poor library opening hours. Both sad (that the students needed to protest) and inspiring (that they cared enough to do so). A comment on TameTheWeb notes that the library has listened to the protesters.

Sarah Houghton-Jan on the black market in holds. Sarah makes a fair point - only some users know about holds, and they have a huge advantage over the others when it comesto accessing popular materials. Further, it means the most popular books are almost never on the shelves. Like Sarah, I’m not sure what the answer is, though.

Code4Lib now has an open access library science journal.

The Digital Futures summit is underway in Auckland, with some very impressive names presenting (including Tim Berners-Lee and Chris Andersen, though both only by video). Watch online here, read the programme here (PDF) and read Russell Brown’s commentary here (thanks to Jon P on the VUW internal staff blog).

Kawerau is the first community in New Zealand to benefit from the Aotearoa People’s Network, which provides free access to broadband internet services through public libraries to small rural areas (National Library).

Archives New Zealand have placed a selection of old New Zealand films online, for viewing (though not downloading, I think).  The films seem to be mostly (or solely?) documentaries. A nice feature is that the site is built on a wiki, and viewers can add their own descriptions of each film. A perfect example of combining authoritative cataloguing and the wisdom of crowds. (The first link goes to descriptions of the films, the second to the films themselves).

The government has launched a web standards wiki (National Library blog).

Just going to post some quick links to posts that have caught my eye (probably reflecting my current academic bias):

• The best of Resource Shelf, 2007
• 10 WebVoyage Hacks
• Online marketing for libraries (also here)
• Building online communities (social tagging around the catalogue, blogs/book discussion sites - some interesting stuff here, an acknowledgement that it’s difficult - and some more discussion here)
• Cool tools for webmasters (they look good - I’ve already tried one of these)
• The greying of the internet

(All links to Librarian in Black, The Shifted Librarian, or What I Learned Today)

Has been published; see New Zealand Digital Content Strategy.