Archive for September, 2007
MHSLA, the Michigan Health Sciences Libraries Association is having their annual conference in Bay City at the Doubletree Hotel, from September 26-28. I had the pleasure of working at the MLC table on Thursday. And enjoyed meeting with many of our MLC members.
Well, while enjoying my wonderful taco bar lunch we were treated to an interesting presentation by Linda Draper of Wayne State University’s Shiffman Medical Library. Wayne has a partnership with the National Library of Medicine to connect health consumers to local information. This is accomplished with a great resource directory called Michigan Go Local. If you’re looking for health services you can search this local directory by: health issue, location, including zip, city, and county plus you can search for specific health services. As usual MLC member libraries are always up to something good.
September 28th, 2007
Yesterday, the Michigan in Pictures blog featured a Flint photo from The Making of Modern Michigan collection. It is wonderful to see that folks are using the MMM collection. Yay! The featured photo is from Kettering University Library’s Scharchburg Archive.
If you haven’t visited the Michigan in Pictures blog yet, you are in for a treat. The blog is full of great photographs taken throughout Michigan – many gleaned from Flickr collections (Absolute Michigan). Today’s post has photos of fall color tours in the Keeweenaw Peninsula. Enjoy!
September 27th, 2007
The Michigan Supreme Court has denied Bloomfield Hills attorney George Goldstone’s request for a rehearing of his case against the Bloomfield Township Public Library. See the Michigan Supreme Court News page.
September 20th, 2007
We are happy and proud to announce that Ruth has been selected to be an ALA Copyright Scholar. The ALA Office for Information Technology Policy has chosen the Copyright Scholars for this year, and Ruth is one of eight new scholars. For the next two years, Ruth will devote a portion of her time to helping librarians sort through the myriad copyright issues that confront them. She will work through the Copyright Advisory Network to answer questions and concerns for network users.
Congratulations, Ruth!
September 18th, 2007
Today we announced the formal launch of the Michigan Libraries Wiki (click here for the press release). MLC staff and others have been working on the Michigan Libraries Wiki since December 2006, and the wiki is finally ready to go public. Yay!
We had some great presenters last year at MLC’s Library Rebooted program on blogs, wikis, and IM – Meredith Farkas, Jessamyn West, Aaron Schmidt, Darlene Fichter – and it was their presentations (especially Meredith’s on wikis) that inspired us to put together a wiki for Michigan library staff.
Please check out the Michigan Libraries Wiki and let us know what you think. We hope it will be useful to libraries in Michigan. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
September 18th, 2007
For the past few months, MLC staff and others have been working on putting together content for the Michigan Libraries Wiki – see http://mlcnet.org/wiki. We’re excited to announce that the wiki is finally “ready for prime time†and will launch formally next week.
Our goal is to provide a useful library wiki for Michigan library staff from all types of libraries. We’re asking library staff, trustees, library friends, consultants, speakers, and others to contribute to the wiki to create a resource for information and news about libraries’ activities, policies, and projects. We invite all to share policies, services, ideas, and best practices.
To build the initial content for the wiki, we began with the most frequent questions that member libraries ask. These included inquiries posted on michlib-l or asked of MLC staff, such as requests for library consultants, sample policies, sample RFPs, lists of libraries providing new services (MySpace pages, blogs, coffee bars, outreach), and more.
Please visit the Michigan Libraries Wiki http://mlcnet.org/wiki and tell us what you think. Better yet – please add your library’s accomplishments to the Wiki! Thanks!
[Note: if you have any technical problems adding information to the Wiki, please contact me at 800-530-9019 x121 or dukelow@mlcnet.org.]
September 14th, 2007
The Grantsmanship Center is offering their Grantsmanship Training Program in Royal Oak, Michigan on October 15-19, 2007. For details and registration, click here.
September 11th, 2007
Karen Schneider has written a pretty good overview of open source software and the reasons why it’s gaining in popularity among librarians. She follows up her TechSource column with another on her own blog.
September 6th, 2007
The New York Times has an interesting article today about eBooks and the new “Kindle” reader coming from Amazon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/technology/06amazon.html
September 6th, 2007
College students always start at Google when they have an assignment to do, right? They ignore all those journals and databases colleges and universities spend so much money for, right? That seems to be the conventional wisdom these days anyway. But First Monday has a paper in its current edition that disputes that bit of accepted truth. The research was done at St. Mary’s College of California among higher level humanities and social sciences students. The researchers found that a majority of these students began their research by consulting course readings or the library’s Web site rather than at Google, Yahoo, or Wikipedia. Obviously, more research is needed to verify these findings and generalize to other campuses.
I was fascinated by this article. It looks like a solid bit of research that directly contradicts what we hear about how libraries’ web sites are virtually ignored by college students. At least at this college, that is not the case. I’d love to know what’s going on at other campuses.
September 4th, 2007
