Competing in High Gear

"Innovative, enthusiastic and excited about their profession, 'the new generation of librarians is really starting to take hold,' said Steven Cohen, a law librarian at Rivkin Radler in Uniondale....

One time he was able to help the firm get a jump on a case when he discovered an article that reported one of its clients was being sued, before either the client or his lawyer knew about it. 'I printed it out and I ran down the hall and handed it to his attorney and said, 'They've been sued,' he recalled. The attorney was able to inform the client before he found out from someone else and get right to work. 'The lawyers were running down the hall screaming, 'Cohen did it! Cohen found the case!' That was a good day. It is so great being able to bring them the information.' " [Newsday]

Another virtual reference failure tonight. Kailee was reading about Neti and Ditto, the cloned monkeys, when she asked if we could find a picture of them. After a couple of fruitless attempts on the web, I again suggested she try my System's virtual reference project since we still had 15 minutes before they "closed" for the night.

So we fired up the URL and after a couple of confusing attempts to connect, we waited for a librarian to "answer" our call. And we waited. And we waited. And we waited. We finally gave up and submitted the question via email, only to be told we'd probably receive an answer in 1-2 business days.

It's extremely frustrating to try to teach Kailee to turn to librarians online for help only to keep running into problems and dead ends when she actually tries to do this. If she didn't have librarian parents, I'll bet she'd be giving up on us now.

ala program: top tech trends

"Just a couple of notes on the Top Technology Trends program I went to while at ALA Annual a week or more ago....

As a last note, I believe it was in this program (but I'm not positive) where someone mentioned that instead of managing your library's online presence as a table of contents or an index to the library, manage it like a branch. Still ruminating over that one, but as an administrative paradigm? Eye-opening. And like an eye libraries should be opening." [rawbrick weblog]

Ernest Miller, proprietor of The Importance of..., received an interesting question from one of his readers.

"I've been working on something else I think might be interesting- gaming at public libraries. I've been having some success on both ends- talking to some librarians who have staged successful 'game nights' as a way of getting teens into the library, as well as with people trying to have tournaments and in need of a cheap (or free), available venue.  Precedent seems to be key.  It's one of these 'well, if so-and-so signed off on this, I guess it's okay.' Seeming 'with it' is at a premium for libraries all over, as well as serving the community in novel ways, and in particular the teens, for most of whom going to the library is anathema. Could be good traction for that same 'unimpeachably good' quality we're looking for in early activities (who can be anything other than supportive of getting the teens 'off the streets and into the libraries'?). Games make libraries seem cool, and libraries legitimate games."

Anyone know of a library doing this?

Accepting Feed Requests

"...I've been asked a number of times by now whether I could produce a custom news feed for site XYZ, and until now I've declined most of the times. But today I thought 'heck, why not'. :)

Now, I've thought about the how. Hosting feeds costs money, scraping feeds is taking time, and maintaining a feed can take some time as well. So, I'm offering you the following service. First read the list of things you get, then see whether you'd be willing to shell out a small one-time fee of €2." [feedpalooza journal, via Boing Boing]

I submitted two requests for my local newspapers (hop a cluetrain, newspaper guys!), but I have to wait for a PayPal transfer to go through before getting the URLs. Joe Hall, on the other hand, was much faster at this and he had Carlo create a feed for Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list! Some good stuff should come out of this offer, and hopefully it will further illuminate the demand in order to increase the supply.