Twitter 101 for librarians

I gave a presentation this week to library staff about Twitter, explaining what it is, who uses it and why they use it, and how to get started.

I believe Twitter can be a powerful Library marketing tool. It's just one of the many ways we can push information out to our students.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

Twitter for Librarians

View more presentations from neen01.

To Kindle or Not?

I've been wondering whether or not to invest in one of these. According to this academic, it's not a great idea...

CIL2010

I WISH I'd been able to go to this conference. I've been following the tweets (#cil2010) and blog posts by participants. The content looks really good.

I'm intrigued by this blog post by Sarah Houghton-Jan, about a panel discussion in which presenters had to list 3 innovative and 3 dead technologies. Flash drives, cell phones that are only phones and Adobe formats are dead, apparently, as are proprietary catalogue systems (yip, I coulda told you that).

Read the post - it's an eye-opener.

Maybe I could get to this conference next year...

Looky!

I've been published! I'd link to the paper, but it's not online. Sigh. I wrote this as part of the Research Libraries Consortium Library Academy last year:

Blogging in South African Libraries: a preliminary survey. Innovation: journal of appropriate librarianship and information work in Southern Africa, no. 39, December 2009. pp 34-42.

Workshopping up a storm

I'm in Kimberley, running a workshop on digitisation, organised by the Africana Library Trust. It's an introduction, including everything from planning a project, to the how of scanning, to metadata, to displaying your images.

So far, I think the most valuable part has been the discussion and group work.

Here's the first of a series of presentations that I've been giving them:

Introduction to Digitisation

View more presentations from neen01.

File this under cool stuff you can't really use

"The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster."

"True, it might not be a perfect, high-resolution copy of the book. The scanning process might skip pages and, well, your fingers might appear in the images. And that's not to mention all the copyright questions."

Read more here.

Finding Subject-Specific Digital Media Resources

Thanks, JISC, for this list of web sites providing access to media of various types for all subject areas. It would be good to see something similar being generated for South African digital content.

Who uses the library anymore?

via Keeping Time

Social media: here's why

Do you find yourself having to convince your colleagues or those in management of the benefits of social media in your library? Then this blog post is the one to use as ammunition. It's a guest post by Michelle Springer on the Library of Congress blog, in which she talks about the success of the Library of Congress Flickr project.

"The Commons loudly invited people to “help describe the world’s public photo collections,” she says. "Over a thousand records in the Prints and Photographs online catalog have been enhanced with information from the Flickr Commons community. More accurate and detailed information in our catalog, with links to interesting histories, makes the pictures not only easier to find but easier to understand. The interactions with our photos are remarkably varied-ranging from the practical (corrected spellings and dates) to the imaginative."

Covert pdf to Word free

A colleague asked me yesterday whether I knew a way of converting pdf documents to Word. I didn't, but I know you can get almost any application for free via Google. Here's a great online, free pdf to Word converter:
http://www.pdftoword.com/
where you can upload your file and get the coverted doc. emailed to you.