Thing 20 - Instant Messaging

It is nice to see how librarians are providing live reference service via IM nowadays. Sites like Chat with a Massachusetts Law Librarian are a way to go! I tried asking a question today, but it was too long of a wait to connect live and I ended up emailing them. Still, nice idea. And I did successfully chat with our course teacher, which was more on topic anyway... I really liked the idea of scheduled group chats at another online XML course I took a few years ago - they made the virtual course feel more real once and for all turning me into a pro-online education champion. The review and comparison of 20 IM services is of a great help: I've never heard of Snimmer and eBuddy before, and many others that combine the most popular instant messengers into one. I am often using Yahoo Messenger with my friends and have come to appreciate Skype with its audio/video features, free international calls, games, and file tranfer systems. Using this in workplace, especially for library and archival services, makes perfect sense: our email tranfers have size limitations, whereas requests for digital files have grown over the last years. And wouldn't it be nice to see your distant patrons once in a while putting faces to names? All of this makes me wonder: do any librarians find chats distracting? I could see how they could be, when you announce to the world to be "online" and become inevitably "available", no matter how busy your day is...

Thing 9 - My Photos and Discoveries

Check out this Knowledge Sponge photo of a Cambridge building that came up in my search for Boston architectural sites on Flickr. What a nice metaphor to the work we do in libraries! It's amazing how quickly these photo sharing services filled with artistic photos and moving images. Being in charge of the Back Bay historic archive, I hope to see more historic black and white photos of our facades and skylines (could not find many of those on Flickr). The BPL project to make the postcard images public sounds great! I wish all local archives would do the same! There is a Digital Commonwealth initiative going on to integrate all Massachusetts historic archives. If anyone works for a participating library, let me know what your experience is.

Going Extra Mile: I've been using Picasa for some time, both for work and family pictures. Here is a link to the Album I created from the negative film found in our archives and turned into a historic exhibit.

Thing 7 - FEEDback on RSS

I've happily subcribed to WBUR, BBC World, TEDTalks, YouTube Most Discussed, and other RSS feeds in Google Reader. My favorite so far is the Joke of the Day from Comedy Central. I am also following the blogs of my fellows from the 26.2 Things in Boston course. It is nice to have all news in one place, my two frustrations have been: 1) it is often difficult to find the correct RSS url for a particular service - you have to go from page to page to find how they break their RSS feeds; and 2) too many too broad chunks, e.g. there is Most Popular and Most Discussed categories on YouTube, but no categories for News & Politics and such. I guess I will get better at it, once I start using tags, but coming up with the subject relevant to each news service is time consuming, as they are not always consistent. I could not subcribe to Library Journal - Google Reader not finding a perfectly valid RSS url for some reason. I wonder if there are alternatives to Google Reader, something more intuitive (regular Google finds RSS pages way better than Reader does).

There is certainly a place for RSS on every library web page: local news, library events, storytelling, new aquisitions, a newsletter, blogs could all be made into RSS alerts. Perhaps there is even a way to deliver the titles for the most discussed or most circulated books and articles to patrons. With the archives collections being more static than regular library ones, I can't quite see the same service for archives. Unless we push professional news, blogs, and newsletter items onto readers. There is always a danger to become too agressive with your customers - we have all come not to appreciate SPAM, but still... No reason no to have a Reader-like subcription page for a library or archive, set up with subjects and readings relevant to your audience.