Live, from LPL! Our Podcast!

“LPL's first official podcast! I've created a separate podcast feed for this blog.

Science Project Strategies

I used Audacity and recorded directly to the laptop.” [’Brary Web Diva]

Lansing PL is one of my member libraries, so I can testify to the fact that they are not a large library, not are they a particularly rich library. And yet, they’re taking advantage of free, social tools like blogs, RSS, instant messaging, and now podcasting and beating out larger libraries that have more resources. They’ve even put together a podcast info page that helps explain the whole thing to patrons. Go LPL!

I’ll also note that Kelli recorded the audio from the 2005 SirsiDynix CODI Conference, which is just too damn cool. Even better, SirsiDynix was smart enough to let her podcast the recordings, which you can start grabbing here (depending on when you click that link, you might need to scroll down to November 20 and earlier). That totally rocks, and as Kelli noted to me in an email, “how’s that for ILS transparency?!”

A couple of weeks ago, Michael posted his list of Abram-isms from the CPL Scholars in Residence gig, in part because while listening to Stephen, we joked that we were going to start a random Abram-ism generator from a database of things the king has said.

So here are my additions for the database:

• You can't ask great questions from a standing start.
• We need coaches, rather than technicians; it's no longer a financial decision about buying computers, it's a financial decision about people.
• We like email because we like to send letters faster than our grandparents.
• It's an information ocean, not a highway.
• And my personal favorite that Stephen ended his presentation with just for me: When librarians study something to death, we forget that death was not the original goal.

IM Reference Update

“Overall, we’ve been very pleased with our first quarter of using Instant Messaging in reference, and we’re looking for additional ways to market and promote the service. Perhaps the most important thing that we can share from our experience is that if you set up and promote an IM service, you will have patrons who use the service. In other words, if you build it, they will come.” [Library Voice]

Emphasis above is mine. Click through and check out those statistics. Pretty impressive.