BlogJunction
WebJunction’s niche in the blogosphere
I’m curious to learn if Savan investigates the discourse around community building. “Give back to the community” is my personal favorite. Like, what does that mean?
Recently some of the WebJunction crew participated in a Seattle holiday tradition, The Great Figgy Pudding Street Corner Caroling Competition, as the Dewey Decibels. The Dewey Decibels unique contributions were “Christmas Carrels” with special library-themed lyrics. These were composed for the occasion by our WebJunction lyricist extraordinare, Joe Anderson. One of the real crowd pleasers [...]
My ears and mind received a little holiday gift this week from my colleague, the inimitable DaleM. He shared a link to Pandora, a creation of the Music Genome Project. I’m floating through work this week listening to tunes based on my selections and preferences, and I haven’t heard any repeats so far. Personalization reigns [...]
A recent study published in Nature compares Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica and finds little difference in their accuracy as sources of scientific information. I’m not wading into the controversy about relative accuracy, at least not today. (Nor am I weighing in on the fascinating and heated sub-discussion of copyright issues the topic engendered on Web4Lib.) [...]
WJ Moderators got together this week on Live Meeting and shared our favorite holiday music, talked about how the discussions are going on the site, and caught up with all the new stuff happening over in everyone else’s neck of the woods. But the hit of the party was this: our new community center. Everyone [...]
¡Feliz Navidad from the Spanish Language Outreach Program!
The SLO Program has a lot to celebrate these days. As the program enters its second round, our comunidad of library staff seeking to reach out to Spanish speakers and increase their access to technology is growing.
WebJunction’s Tech Planning team has assembled a great collection of new materials about the technology planning process, including why to do it, how to do it, and where to start.
As we prepare for our live online event on “Technology Planning with the New TechAtlas for Libraries,” I found Roy Tennant’s article What I Wish I Had Known (thanks, LiB) to be both relevant and opportune. Looking back a few years, Roy reflects on unanticipated outcomes. Who knew that Gopher was going to be superceded [...]
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Maybe it’s sort of cliche to quote Gandhi, but this came to mind today when thinking about the number of hours in a day. That feeling of not having time to connect with other folks – no matter if it’s in person or [...]
I had the good fortune to attend Michael Porter‘s excellent workshop “Keep Up! Practical Emerging Technologies for Libraries” in Seattle a couple of days ago. Along with the terrific content, the sixteen or so library directors and technology people in attendance had many interesting discussions. To me the most important was a reflection on this [...]
Everybody knows that if you eat jellybeans *everyday* for breakfast, eventually you’ll die … or at least get to be so creepy that no one will want to play with you anymore.
WebJunction has put up a wuh…wuh…wuh…wiki. It’s an early experimental prototype (did I make it’s status as part of the “perpetual beta” clear enough?), and its available here. Our move in this direction has been the result of a lot of interesting discussions, and is spawning a lot of interesting ones as well. Our thinking [...]
Chrystie recently suggested looking at teens as a key to libraries’ branding quandry. If we can successfully develop and sell library services to teens it bodes well for our ability to adapt to the expectations of some of our most challenging, demanding, and exciting users. I can’t think of a better way to keep us [...]
Jennifer Peterson, our multi-talented and all-around fantastic colleague here at WebJunction, is the community editor for our new section on mentoring. For starters, she’s published a number of articles and resources to get library staff thinking about leadership and mentoring in their library. Do you have mentoring information or resources to share? You can post [...]
As we wrestle with improving the search functionality on WebJunction ( I know, it’s been a long time a’comin’), I have my radar tuned to notice other interesting search interfaces. When the CNET series Taking Back the Web opened with this line, my eyes perked up: “The ‘simple search’ feature at the[International Children's Digital Library] [...]