You Tube Search Stories - A New Genre

Well new to me anyway...

YouTube/searchstories combines Google searches with music into a very short search video. It's like sitting over someones shoulder watching them search.

Some are very clever

Here's my go - they are very quick to make.

You can't do this with ebooks!

Rebecca McDuff - Social Media in Libraries

When it all comes down to it librarianship is about connecting an audience with content.
That was the central message of the presentation. If librarians are connectors then they have to be in the same space as the audience. Social media and library 2.0 might have created new spaces where the audience hangs out; but that just means the librarian needs to get into that space. Once we are in the space we need to give our audience a chance to interact with the content and with us.

The presentation covered the ways in which U.S. libraries are getting into these spaces and rounded off with a discussion of how to implement Library 2.0. McDuff sees staff training as the key and recommended 23 Things to all staff in the Library. If you're having trouble convincing the systems team or senior management about what you're doing then get them doing 23 Things too. We need to show our colleagues in the rest of the organisation what we are doing with library 2.0.

Librarians need to become comfortable with a range of different literacies, including visual literacy. One example given was the ability to interpret tag clouds.

Chicago Public Library's You Media has done some work on transliteracy, including the use of mentors - what could we take from this?

Rebecca McDuff is a regional Public Affairs Information Resource Officer (IRO) in the U.S. Department of State.

Library mashup's : Exploring new ways to deliver library data - new book

This book has just arrived and I looked it over this weekend. After a good summary of what mashups are there's coverage of a range of different mashups; most involve Google Maps, Flikr and other social networking sites. There's also enough of interest for academic libraries, including a chapter by the NZ librarian Stuart Lewis on repositories and a section on mashing catalogue data.

Of particular interest are - Piping Out Data (using Yahoo Pipes to mash data); Mashups @ Libraries Interact (about sharing mash-ups in the Library community); Mashups with WorldCat Affiliate Services; The LibraryThing API and Libraries and a chapter by LibraryThing's founder, Tim Spalding, on Breaking into the OPAC. Tim has 9 suggestions for things you could do once you've "reached into" a Library OPAC. They are

1. Add alerts to the catalogue so patrons can learn about upcoming events and downtimes

2. Add links to Amazon, Google Book Search or Wikipedia

3. Give users permanent links to catalogue pages

4. Track user actions for statistical purposes

5. Add "did you mean..." spell check functionality

6. Show a Librarian chat widget when a search turns up no results

7. Add dynamic location maps to item pages so that patrons know where on the shelf a book can be found

8. Add dynamic content on item pages, such as recommendations or links to other editions

9. Let users tag, rate or review items in your catalogue

Some of these we do already, some like a chat widget on failed searches might be worth thinking about?