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Stephen Francoeur
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Digital Reference

Moving Days for Library Communication Channels

I've been busy this summer engineering two online moves and launching a new blog. For four and a half years, our library's reference wiki and reference staff blog have been at hosted services (PBworks, formerly PBwiki, and Blogspot, respectively). Having witnessed a number of free online services go belly up over the few years (e.g., Yahoo! Photos, Google Video, Google Notebook, Jaiku, etc.), I decided that it would be best to run these essential communication services on servers we fully control. We're nearly done moving our password-protected reference staff wiki (which is essential a policy and procedures manual, as well as a repository of inside dope) from PBworks to Confluence. This week, we officially relaunched the staff blog, Reference at Newman Library, on WordPress MU, which is locally installed and administered here on the Baruch campus by the cracker-jack team at the Schwartz Communication Institute.

The new home for the blog features a Google Custom Search Engine that searches for content on both the old and new homes for the blog. We've been using Delicious for years to tag and index our posts and will continue to do so.

Moving the wiki from PBworks proved particularly hard. Because of the lack of interoperability among many wiki platforms, there was no easy way to import the 500 pages from the PBwiki version of the wiki to the new Confluence one. Instead, a dedicated and detail-oriented student employee copied and pasted text and recreated links. The version of Confluence that we have installed here does not offer all the bells and whistles that PBworks does, but when we get the new version set up and add in a few plugins, it should be as rich an environment for the user as what we had in PBwiki.

Later this week, we'll officialy launch another new staff blog that is intended to highlight issues and news of interest to all library staff in our library. Called the Newman Library Idea Lab, this blog written by and for the folks who work here. Feel free to subscribe, though, as the content should be of interest to anyone who works in most any outpost in libraryland.

Pointing to Open Access Journals

A post on the iNODE blog, "OA Begins at Home," struck a chord with me. We should be doing more to ensure that open access content is findable in our discovery systems (link resolvers, A-Z journal lists, even the databases we subscribe to).

Essential Chat Reference Skills and Training Techniques

I recently discovered that the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science has a podcast series from its colloquia (here's the feed URL) that includes a nice presentation by Lili Luo from 2007 about chat reference skills and chat reference training. There are number of ways to access the recording of her presentation:


As part of her doctoral work at UNC Chapel hill, she surveyed nearly six hundred librarians about what they felt were the essential chat reference skills. Then she held another survey that close to three hundred librarians responded to in which respondents noted which training techniques they had encountered when being shown how to do chat reference.

Of the thirty compentencies listed in the first survey, twenty-one were deemed essential. As noted on Luo's slides from her presentation, the top five were:
  1. Refererring users to appropriate/services when necessary
  2. Skills in selecting and searching databases and internet resources
  3. Familiarity with subscribed library databases
  4. Ability to think quickly and deal flexibly with unexpected situations
  5. Using open probes to clarify questions
The survey on chat reference training techniques asked respondents to rate twenty-three different approaches for teaching. The top ones that Luo listed on her slides were:

  1. Trainees pair up as patron and librarian to gains hands-on experience on using the software
  2. Trainees review selected chat transcripts to learn more about the transation
  3. Trainees ask questions to real chat reference services as users and evaluate their experiences - the secret shopper approach
  4. Librarians pair up to practice chat reference skills on a regular basis for a certain period of time
  5. Cheat sheet containing vital information librarians might need to access quickly and often while covering the service
There is tons of great stuff here that should help anyone who has to train colleagues in how to do chat reference. The only quibble I have is Luo's description of a competency that is unique to chat reference: the knowledge of library services and resources of other libraries in a chat reference consortium. She suggests that to provide effective service in a cooperative service, librarians must have a basic level of familiarity with the services and resources provided at each member library. I don't think that quite gets to the real skill that librarians who do chat in a cooperative environment have to master.

What is essential is that librarians are familiar enough with the wide range of services (and ways of offering those services) that a library elsewhere in the cooperative might offer. As a librarian at Baruch College helping students at UC San Diego in the QuestionPoint 24/7 Reference Academic Cooperative, I don't need to have memorized all the services at UC San Diego. I just need to know how to navigate the library's web site to see if such a service that the student is asking about is offered and how it is offered. In QuestionPoint, we also have online "cheat sheets" on each library in the cooperative that give you a quick overview of that library and its services and resources (as well as the relevant links to the library's many web pages). If UC San Diego happens to loan digital cameras to students, I am not expected to have memorized that fact; but I should know how to find out if the UC San Diego library does so if I am ever asked about.

As far as familiarity with resources at member libraries go, again, I don't need to have memorized what libraries have which databases. But I must know how to locate any library's list of databases. I should also know how to recommend databases that I am unfamiliar with based on subject guides, etc., that a library has put up. At no point, though, am I expected to have the ability to list from memory what resoruces each library has. With hundreds of libraries in the academic cooperative, it just isn't possible to memorize like that even if you wanted to.

Dont' let this very minor quibble, though, deter you from checking out what is a wonderful presentation.


Interesting Blog for GIS

My colleague here at the Newman Library at Baruch College, Frank Donnelly, writes a really interesting blog that focuses on issues and technologies for GIS. Launched in March 2008, Gothos features coverage of new GIS resources and detailed step-by-step instructions for various projects using GIS software.

Grab the feed here.

Bye Bye PBwiki, Hello Confluence

After having PBwiki host the wiki for our reference staff for the past four and a half years, I'm finally taking the plunge to move to whole thing (499 pages!) over to a locally installed version of Confluence. The college where I work got Confluence to use for various intranets needed around campus. Worried that some day PBwiki might just plain disappear, I decided to move the reference wiki over to something that is on our own servers and more under our control. It will take a chunk of the summer to laboriously recreate the wiki via copy and paste (wiki software from different vendors don't seem to make it easy to do import/exports). So much for that long week at the beach... 
 

:: Stephen Francoeur ::

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Hi Stephen, I'm a teacher librarian & recently started a community based blog for getting boys to read - http://GettingBoysToRead.com. Please send me a friend request if you'd like to network, share ideas, and learn more about getting boys to read...
May 26
Stephen Francoeur and Robin Hastings are now friends
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Newman Library, Baruch College
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Information Services Librarian.
Website:
http://www.teachinglibrarian.org
Blog:
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Interest in Library 2.0
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Thanks to Library Camp NYC attendees

I'd like to thank everyone who helped make Library Camp NYC a success. Most amazing of all was watching the event wiki get populated with new pages and content as the day wore on. The wiki now offers session notes for most of the sessions in the program and links to photos of the event posted on flickr.

Posted on August 15, 2007 at 3:19pm — 3 Comments

Stephen Francoeur

Navigation here in Ning is a drag

This post is here just so I can find a way to easily go back and forth between the two networks I'm on here in Ning:

Posted on March 21, 2007 at 4:16pm — 2 Comments

Comment Wall (12 comments)

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At 2:57am on May 26, 2009, Mike McQueen said…
Hi Stephen,
I'm a teacher librarian & recently started a community based blog for getting boys to read - http://GettingBoysToRead.com. Please send me a friend request if you'd like to network, share ideas, and learn more about getting boys to read.

Sincerely,
Mike McQueen

LET'S NETWORK HERE TOO (request me as a friend):
My FACEBOOK Profile
My TWITTER Profile
At 4:42pm on February 8, 2008, Dennis McMullen said…
I now have a twitter feed of recent ref questions on my blog.
At 5:42pm on February 5, 2008, Dennis McMullen said…
Hi Stephen. I'm head of a ref dept. in a medium sized public library in ohio and I have been pondering, for a while now, the usefulness of 2.0 tools at the ref desk. I've just read your last two blog posts and find them very interesting and thought provoking. I might try the twitter feed of recent ref questions. Keep up the good work!
At 1:52pm on August 15, 2007, Shannon Kealey said…
Hi Stephen, I really enjoyed Library Camp yesterday! Thanks so much for making it happen.
At 3:16pm on May 14, 2007, val forrestal said…
very cool! i sent the link around, and i will def try to make it!!! i will also post on my blog, but sadly, she is a new blog, and so probably the only people who will see the post are the people i sent the link to, hehehe... (http://theinfobabe.blogspot.com/)
At 12:09pm on March 24, 2007, Bonnie Cohen Lafazan said…
Hi Stephen, per your advice i I set this up:
http://youngnewlibrarians.ning.com/
At 9:11am on March 21, 2007, Bill Drew said…
Stephen

Congratulations on your new baby. I understand entirely. MY kids are much older but my wife and I still find it hard to get away to do things. My son is a student here at Morrisville and my daughter is a junior in high school and turns 18 next week. The time will go fast. Family must always be top priority over everything else.
At 9:16pm on March 20, 2007, Stephen Francoeur said…
Peter, 'fraid I won't be at ALA or most any convention until my youngest is a lot older. My wife would rightly kill me if I left her alone for a weekend.
At 5:11pm on March 20, 2007, Peter Bromberg said…
Hi Stephen, thanks for being my friend. If I do manage to get up to NYC for a day (which happens now and again) I'd love to meet you for lunch, schedules permitting. Any chance you'll be in DC for ALA? If so, I hope to see you there. First beer's on me :-)
At 7:54pm on March 19, 2007, Stephen Francoeur said…
Thanks. Nope, no free weekends for me for a while...my dance card is full, I'm afraid. If you're ever here on a weekday, I can often find time for lunch, etc.
 
 

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