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The December/January 2008 issue (pdf) of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has a special section on Virtual Reference Services. Contents of special section:
- Introduction by Yungrang Laura Cheng, Guest Editor
- An Informal History (and Possible Future) of Digital Reference by Joseph Janes
- Virtual Reference to Participatory Librarianship: Expanding the Conversation by R. David Lankes
- Evaluation of Online Reference Services by Jeffrey Pomerantz
- Implementation of Professional and Ethical Standards by Pnina Shachaf
- On the Trail of the Elusive Non-User: What Research in Virtual Reference Environments Reveals by Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Marie L. Radford and Timothy J. Dickey
A few blogs about chat reference or for librarians providing chat reference:
The Association of College and Research Libraries announced a new online seminar: Introduction to Website Usability (January 28 – February 16, 2008). It is aimed at librarians who are interested in doing usability testing but don’t know how to get started.
I thought I’d take a couple screenshots of the University of Alberta Libraries Facebook application that I mentioned a couple weeks ago. I really like how it displays its catalog results within Facebook – down to the item level. The app on the profile page is unremarkable – it provides a link to the application page. However, the application provides quite a bit of functionality.
Here is the catalog search in the application:
Here is the results page after doing a search in the catalog:
And here is a catalog record page:
Nice! Clicking on New Search, Reserve Desk, and My Account all keep you within the Facebook application as well. There are more features to this application, so it is worth checking out. Also, this app has over 500 users!
Graham McCarthy has created a tutorial that walks you through the steps of creating a library Facebook application based on the Ryerson University Library app. I reviewed the application a few weeks ago. You can download a shell program based on the Ryerson library app to work with as well.
Instant Instruction Feedback Forms found via ILI-L:
Instant Instruction Feeback Forms are web-based surveys that are designed to offer librarians a simple way to evaluate their information literacy/bibliographic instruction sessions. These forms are open source software and are available for free download under the GNU General Public License.
