Loose Cannon Librarian

Oh, I just can’t stop talking about kindness! Kindness in tech, over at TechSource!

One of my favorite moments of library school was when Stephanie Willen Brown returned from a conference (I no longer recall which one) and in her recap of the sessions she attended said that “librarians express affection through information.” I blurted out “can you call my mom and tell her that?” It was a funny moment of both personal and professional revelation for me. That undeniable impulse to smother the people we care about in information seems to be a common thread through the variety of librarian personalities and experiences.

Throughout my time in libraries, my colleagues have frequently observed (usually of homeless patrons) that we are probably the only people to be nice to many of the patrons who approach us. It can feel a little self-congratulatory as a topic of discussion amongst middle-class librarians who work with impoverished kids, homeless folks and people struggling to get by. Nevertheless, it is likely true. Increasingly, I think it’s true across the spectrum- we may be the only genuinely kind person many of our patrons, regardless of socio-economic status, encounter all day.

My whiteboard, while not very glamorous, has a list of everything my department does in a given month. Above all of those things (and there are quite a lot), we have scrawled “MAINTAIN GENUINENESS.” I know that for all of us, the need to share and give away information is fundamental to who we are. We can’t not do this. Of course, we go to workshops and take classes and bring in speakers to keep our skills sharp, but the thing that brings us to work every morning is that need to share information. If we are genuine, it shines through to our patrons and each other.

So, what of the affection we are expressing through information? In our personal lives, how many of us have greeted a friend or loved one in crisis with a stack of articles or a barrage of emails with links to websites they might find helpful? Are you soothed by researching the things that worry you? You might be a librarian! At work, we are caring for our community in our own quirky way. I have yet to meet a librarian who has not chased after a departing stranger with one more article that would really really help.

Jenny Engstrom frequently talks about kindness as a lifestyle and the notion  lodged itself in my mind. It dovetails nicely with my recreational interest in Buddhism, but I am increasingly convinced that kindness is an important part of librarianship. I am not suggesting that we are nice in lieu of being accurate or actually helpful (surely, we have all encountered nice but useless assistance at most service organizations. It is maddening.)

At Computers in Libraries, I closed my portion of Darien Library’s presentation by saying that “kindness is our chief export.” Of course, information is sort of important too, but I think for many of us, the two are irrevocably intertwined. This is how we know how to help people. Without the kindness, we lose much of our value to our community. When I am in need of a break from public facing time, I often say that I am “out of nice” for the day. I’m not out of the ability to find information, but on its own, it doesn’t do much for my organization or our users.

And what of kindness to each other? When we step back to look at the big picture of libraryland, do we forget the incredible amount of effort put forth by legions of dedicated library workers? Are we forgetting to encourage each other’s hearts? Darien Library has seen a huge number of librarians come through lately. Granted, they are a self-selecting group, but they are all people with the right intentions.

Intentions are too frequently overlooked. When we photograph bad signage or criticize seemingly outdated policies, are we encouraging self-awareness amongst librarians? I think that is the intention- to encourage discussion and to work together to figure out how to best serve our patrons, but it’s easy to slide into finger-pointing without looking at motivation. We’re all going to have bad policies or make foolish decisions at some point, but our intentions have to count somewhere. The tremendous amount of hard work and huge number of good hearts on the front lines of every library in the world have to count.

John’s, Cindi’s and Kathryn’s Darien Statements are remarkable for many reasons, but I keep coming back to how positive they are. Even if you don’t know the three of them, it is so clear how much they care about libraries, librarians and library users. They’ve left room for those of us on the front lines with good intentions to stumble without fear we’ll be dunned for it, while asking us to push ourselves and our organizations forward with all our might.

Personally, I am thankful to work with extraordinary people who push forward every day. They don’t have blogs and they don’t get to tell you how great they are at conferences, but they walk into the library every day and they are kind and they work hard and they do good things.

I liked Peggy Orenstein’s column in last week’s New York Times Magazine so much, I posted about it on TechSource:

I wonder if Peggy Orenstein ever got a letter (or several letters) from someone she was hoping to gracefully lose touch with. Or had a friend who called her parents, trying to find out where she moved after college. Maybe she wished for an “ignore” button. More likely, she grumbled to a friend and continued pursuing her adult identity.

Orenstein’s thoughtful essay in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the impact of online living on the creation of an adult identity has shown up on twitter a few times and (natch) on Facebook. For those of us who joined social networks as adults, the question of how to navigate the often-dreadful tweens, teens and twenties online seems huge and difficult.

However, it seems like adults are the only ones perplexed at the meta-level. For Orenstein’s six nieces headed off to college, asking what it’s like to be a teenager with a Facebook account is probably like asking how they plan to handle coming of age with cell phones- it’s just part of their lives. Navigating the waters to adulthood is nasty, tricky business, regardless of the tools at our disposal.

The rest is over at ALA’s TechSource blog.

Here are my slides from Internet Librarian. Keynote and my laptop had a moment of epic fail and I gave my presentation without notes. My slides are pretty much all picture, so here’s the bullet point version of what I said. Edit: I realized the PDF cut off some of the photo credits, so I’m including them here!

Slide one: Title slide. Nothing to see here folks.

Slide two: Hi! I’m the head of reference at Darien Library. I’m relatively new (started in March) so I have a strong sense of where our library is starting from and what’s unusual and interesting about that. We are moving to a new building in a few weeks and we just launched a new website with John Blyberg’s amazing SOPAC 2.0. Photo credit: Someone at Darien Library!

Slide three: Extreme! Our focus has been on extreme customer service. The library is valued by the community thanks to the hard work of our director for the past (almost) thirty years. Extreme customer services is a great starting point- our patrons have very high expectations of us but they also have a great relationship with us and are willing to let us know when they think we’ve missed the mark. Our current physcial set up is fairly traditional. We have a reference fort, things are arranged by Dewey with a Reference section and a Q or oversized section. Everything is great! Except it’s not. Photo Credit: Flickr user Tyla’75

Slide four: The death of reference. I presented in the Problem Track. Reference has problems. Everyone knows the statistics- reference is down, no one loves us. We’ve all been wringing our hands about this for years. Libraries have been slow to adapt and grow to people’s new relationship with information. When everyone Googles, we chastise them for looking for mediocre information, which does not endear us to our users. Photo Credit: Flickr user ozyman

Slide five: Where to Start? This is a tough problem.  If people don’t need us to look up the GNP of Argentina for them anymore, what do they need us for?  We can’t make people talk to us, but we also can’t be useful only as assistants to figuring out Dewey or lousy database interfaces. Eat your wheaties, kids! Photo Credit: Flickr user ilmungo

Slide six: Our professional ideal is very hands off. Not just the stereotype of the librarian pointing to the correct section, but the philosphical underpinning of “we don’t know things, we know where to find things.” I’m not suggesting that we answer things off the tops of our heads, but the gatekeeper model doesn’t work. No one wants a gate keeper, they want a partner. Photo Credit: Flickr user Today is a Good Day

Slide seven: Stop. Collaborate and Listen. True collaboration isn’t doing their work for them (though it isn’t awful to hand out some fish). Collaboration requires engagement with our patrons, with their content. We’ve hung our professionalism hat on a model that avoids engaging with the content our patrons bring to us. We come to work as whole people, though. We can be professional without being omnipotent reference dictators. Photo credit: Flickr user detritus

Slide eight: Power Law of Participation. I found this online- it’s kind of old for the Internet (2006!) Traditional reference interviews pull out context, but to truly be collaborative, we need to go a step further. When I was a new librarian, I had a patron who was looking for a single volume that would compare cost of living, cultural amenities and private schools of an area. She wanted Peterson’s, a cost-of-living guide and a retirement guide all in one book. I showed her the various volumes we had that had the disparate pieces of information in them, but she wanted one book.

A magic book as far as I could tell.

She ended up leaving empty handed. If I had it to do over, I would have pulled up a chair, sat down with her and started making a chart with her with the information she wanted from the various books we had. We didn’t have the book she wanted, but I could have made it if I wasn’t still so attached to traditional reference. Graphic by Ross Mayfield

Slide nine: I made this library law of participation chart, based on the previous slide. Darien’s new library won’t have a reference desk. There will be a service point- it’s a really nice table where we can collaborate with our members. Librarians will be roving- the table won’t get the label as “place to come for help”, our people will. Phones and tablets will rove with us.

We’re trying to free our members up to move up that participation curve. We need to get out of the way so they can collaborate with us or with each other using the library in their own way and not just the way we think they ought to.

Slide ten: Evolution. Virtual reference is something we’re continuing to grow. We opted out of our state’s IM reference service because most of the questions are local and our patrons were not happy to have nonlocal answers. We’ve been doing IM reference for a few years (started during the 05-06 fiscal year). The new site has caused an 80% year-over-year uptick- good design and placement makes a big difference. When I looked at the early transcripts, it helped me see the trajectory. We started with a lot of “call us for that information” and now we’re sending links and scanning documents to email. The questions have evolved too. People are asking more involved, complicated questions over IM and we’re outgrowing the MeeboMe widget. Photo Credit: Flickr user Leo Reynolds

Slide eleven: Libraries=Love. We’re also remixing Dewey. BISAC is great for browsing, but not so good for finding. Dewey is great for finding, but not wonderful for browsing. We’re putting peanut butter in the chocolate. Photo Credit: Flickr user fornal

Slide twelve: Ultimately, everything we’re doing or experimenting with is for our patrons. We’re trying to move past “giving them tools” and into making the library experience so seamless and easy they don’t need new tools to use it. Joseph Muennich of CraftySpace was talking about Drupal and OSS in general and said, “the more you give away, the better it is”. Even though libraries give away information, traditional service models have included a lot of holding back- we’ll give it to you if you can find it or if you approach us in just the right way.  Our service models keep trying to lower that bar. Free isn’t free if they have to jump through our hoops. Take away the hoops, reduce the threshold to free. We need to let our patrons in and learn from them. Photo Credit: Me!

I don’t believe in Information Overload. Over at TechSource, I’ll tell you why…

I never quite got the hang of believing in Santa. Flying reindeer seemed suspect to me, but the real problem I had was the speed at which he made it around the world, in and out of all those houses and back in a single night. Even accounting for time differences and the International Date Line, I couldn’t get comfortable with the idea.

Like Santa, Information Overload has never quite settled properly into my mind. Every time I read an article (and there are oh so many to read) about the perils of the Information Age and the overwhelming amount of information we’re all drowning under, I find myself squirming.

I know there’s exponentially more information available to us, I know we all feel overwhelmed at times and I know those two factors intersect, but I could never bring myself to set out milk and cookies for Information Overload.

At the recent Web2.0 Expo, Clay Shirky explained why, like Santa, Information Overload is a myth. One meant to make us feel better and keep some magic in our lives, but something that does not exist.

The problem, Shirky tells us, is not more information, but outdated filters. This should resonate with librarians who have helped people use the Internet for the first time and watched the careful left to right tracking of their eyes across the screen, treating everything on the page as if it had equal importance… as if it were printed material.

Compare that to teenagers who can keep several chat windows open, hang out on Facebook, listen to music and work on their math homework simultaneously. Filters that evolved with the Internet are fitter.

Over at the reference desk, our job has evolved from information provider to information filter. “Here are the materials on your topic” isn’t good enough anymore, not because people are lazy, but because that stack of material is gigantic and in order to truly help our patrons, we have to help them parse what’s in there.

Read the rest at ALA’s TechSource.

Public service has turned me into a difficult customer. I have high expectations and I’m totally unapologetic about it. I’m very understanding when the computer’s slow, when the receipt printer flakes out, when it’s super busy and everyone’s running as fast as they can. I get it: it’s my life, too. But, boy, do I get cranky when I have to jump through a company’s hoops just because that’s the way they do it.

Recently, I made a trip to the Post Office to pick up an awkwardly shaped package (a poster from Tiny Showcase). My usual Post Office is not the package-holding place, because it is itty bitty. I’m fine with that, because I’m sure it makes the overall system more efficient, but I know the people at the itty bitty post office and they’re nice and very helpful. I like my Post Office.

I like my PO even more after my adventure to the Post Office that Customer Service Forgot.

Since I was not familiar with this Post Office, I waited in line to find out that packages are picked up at the window in the outer lobby, and that there is a bell to ring for assistance. I went to the window, where another person was already waiting so I did not ring the bell, which was my first mistake. A postal worker helped the person in front of me and indicated that someone would come along to help me.

A few moments pass and another person sees me- I made eye contact and smiled. She called back to someone else “are you helping this lady?” and I heard an affirmative reply. She gestured behind her and displayed universal “someone will be right with you” body language. No problem.

Several minutes later, I decided to be a jerk and ring the bell.

The bell is a serious bell. It’s one of those metal wall bells that I remember from elementary school because I was always desperate to be in my classroom when it rang. I could feel it causing permanent damage to my underage eardrums. It’s loud. It’s startling. It’s sure to get me my package.

The next several people to pass by did not make eye contact. I contemplated ringing the bell again, but it seems simultaneously too loud and too passive. I thought about employing the “mess around with stuff and look confused” method that causes assistance to materialize in stores (and libraries), but there’s no one to see me and the only things I could reach were a wall calendar and some scrap paper. And the button for the bell.

I wonder if maybe I’m invisible. That would be cool.

The window isn’t so much a window as a window in a door. The door was locked on my side, but I realized that I could just reach in and open the door. Two more people passed without looking at me, even though I moved around to catch their eye. Dancing in the post office window seemed like a serious loss of dignity, so I opened the door.

Like most warehouses, there were paths marked with bright yellow tape. I followed one until someone asked me what I was doing. “I need to pick up a package.”

My package was instantly found and I was hustled back to the door. The scanner couldn’t scan the package, though, because the barcode wraps around it. There is no way to manually punch in the bar code on the handheld scanner. I was told to go back to the inner lobby, where it can be scanned. The window was shut and locked behind me.

The scanner in the inner lobby was also unable to read the barcode. Again, there was no way to manually punch in the barcode.

After a couple of minutes of attempted scanning, I was given a card and told to write out the barcode (which was longer than 14 digits) and write my address underneath. On the other side of the card, I was told to sign my name, print my name and write my address again. Finally, I had my package and could go on my merry way.

The entire experience was designed to make the user seem broken or inept. I’m not expecting a Danny Meyers experience, just basic functionality. I know it’s possible. My PO of choice is filled with people who help their users navigate the very unfriendly rules and regulations put in place by the postal powers that be.

Plenty of organizations have a lot of rules that the front lines staff are unable to bend or break. Fine, but without the staff to act as a buffer between users and rules, they just seem punitive, even if they’re very reasonable.

Tell me, readers, do you find that public service has raised your expectations of other service-sector workers? Prior to working in libraries, I think I would have rolled my eyes, grumbled a little and thought nasty things about the people working there (okay, I did think a few mean things about the people working there).

Now, though, all I can see is a broken system- why put the onus on the customer to navigate the multiple service points? Why isn’t there a communication system between the service points (like, say, a phone)? Why, oh why, doesn’t the barcode scanner allow for manual entry? The PO I visited is still operating as if it’s the only game in town. Its lingering monopoly is still enough to keep a broken system barely held together. Maybe the people working there are at their wits’ end with the broken system hanging around their necks, but they seemed more interested in guarding their antiquated modes of operation.

I worry that too many libraries are taking the spit and sealing wax approach to their service models. But I suspect there are more library workers ferreting out ways to make their patrons’ library experience wonderful despite any busted-up systems they’re dragging around behind them. When we find ourselves appalled by the customer serivce of another organization, do we stop and think about how our libraries can avoid the same trap?

Working like a patron can start anywhere, even the Post Office.

For my latest TechSource post, I sat down with Darien’s fantastic Head of Children’s Services, Gretchen Hams. She talks about SOPAC, kids and literacy and is, as always, really interesting!

Google

• “gene therapy” view:info
• Labs product that has list view, info view, timeline view, map view
• timeline view: dates for pages. clickable for groups of posts. Example: olympic boycott brings up things about olympic boycott of the 1980s.

Searchmash

• google with a different skin and organization
• search results, image results, blog entries, videos on results page.
• in search results- URL is main URL only, not whole string. really helpful!
• click on URL to restrict search to that site.

Google News

• has an archive (ooh!)
• news.google.com/archivesearch
• has licensed content from other sites, not just Google News.
• timeline at top. click on bars to limit to a time period. (timelines are a huge theme here!)

The .. operator

• lets you search for a range
• “wireless headphones” $50..$99
• includes decimals- found headphones priced at $59.99.
• Only works for US$
• Only works for numbers with no more than 2 after the decimal. Laws  328.4b3 to 328.4×3 won’t work.
• can do open ended- any mention of these numbers anywhere.
• nospaces!

Talk with Google

• Call Google to get an answer
• 1800-goog411
• text google 466 453
• sms.google.com
• only certain queries work

Street View

• terrain- tied it into a topo map
• plan walking routes to minimize calf burn

Simply Google

• nice site that shows you all of the things google does
• just search a certain area of google
• google subsites
• blogs- official and non

Yahoo’s Secrets

Feature :ing

• looks for pages with that feature
• feature:index just home pages (how does that work for sites with flash intros?)
• feature:table
• feature: image
• feature: audio
• feature:video

Q: how does that work with flash intros?

A: fancy openers do exclude sites from being indexed that way, but those are mainly commercial not informational or educational.

Regional limits

• region: africa
• region: downunder
• region: europe
• problem is it only does it based on domain
• lots of companies don’t use that.
• lentilasanything.com australian restuarant.
• better for nonprofit, gov, edu sites

Yahoo Search Assist

• little arrow under search box.
• Narrower Terms
• Explore Concepts
• based on search results- takes a moment to come up after you search.
• based on most relevent ranked results.

Live.com’s Secrets

Resources we love to hate, especially because it’s MS. They sometimes roll out interesting new toosl and then they disappear. What works today may not work in 2 months. less stability here.

Prefer option

• add prefer:word to search.
• Ranks those results higher.
• “hybrid car” prefer:convertible (ha!)
• do a search for hybrid cars, but if you find any page with convertible, put it at the top.
• tells it how to organize results, doesn’t change them.

Search for feeds

• hasfeed:word
• want a site that’s authoritative and keeps up with new developments
• sites with feeds are interested in keeping people up to date on the topic.
• personal sites less likely to have feeds (i don’t know about that- blogger and wordpress and popular blogging sites give you feeds automatically, no?)

has a link to

• contains: file-type
• “single stream recycling” contains:ppt
• presentations about how to introduce the concept to a community

(running out of battery, so i’m done!)

45 Search Tips in 60 mintues

(my comments, if there are any, in parens)

Google Translated Search

Lots of translation services out there, but what if you want to search a concept in another language, but you don’t know how to express that or read the results?

Translates query, searches in language you want, brings results back to you in English.

Google knows synonyms

~word

its idea of a synonym isn’t always our idea of a synonym, but it’s pretty good.

Ride Finder

uses in-car GPS to track shuttles.

Google’s Topic Search

they’ve attempted to pull together best resources and organize information on frequently asked topics (hello, Yahoo in 1997!) Google brought in librarians to organize content on the web (copying Ask?).

Health related stuff in particular.

Google Trends

See how words are searched over time. (Zeitgeist+++)

multiple terms, graph, gives regions where searches originate. Search querys not mentions online.

Google Insights

• Volume
• Regional Interest
• Top Searches- people who were interested in search x also did search y
• Rising Searches

Be careful whens howing someone this, because some areas have really dodgy related searches!

Yahoo’s [Brackets]

retrieves words in that order, but not as a phrase.

[bank america] will get bank of america but not american banking.

Yahoo Glue

India’s Yahoo. Still in beta. completely different! Pulls all the stuff from the web- boxes with news results, yahoo answers, user reviews and ratings, etc.

Dogpile (wow, that’s an oldie but goodie!)

meta search is good to remind us that google isn’t the internet.

picks up sponsored ads as well as search results.

Jux2

another metasearch “what only google found” “what’s missing from google” (cool!)

Live.com

product ratings and reviews. They aggregate the sentiment of the reviews and give stats on features relevant to the product.

Synonym suggestion tool

You’re looking for other words and drawing a blank. developed for advertisers, not searchers, but it still works. Conceptually similar terms.

Blogpulse Trend Search

Trend results over time for blog posts about a concept.

Sortfix.com

google made better. sits on top of google. boxes on google with “Power Words” words used commonly with your search term. Can drag terms to “Add to search” box “remove” box. Standby box for terms you want to search later- inspriation box.

Zillow.com

(Evil! Evil!) How much your house is worth. The Zillow estimate is not always accurate!!! In condos, it averages the pricey and cheaper units.

OmniMedicalSearch.com

nice way of searching for medical information. Consumer related info v. Professional information v. discussion boards

TimeSearch.com

useful if you’re trying to find when something happened or you want to look at what was happening during a certain time.

Scrolling timebar on the side. Timeline results for your search.

Searchme.com

fun search engine. Type in a word and icons appear with different context? Sun: Astronomy, Astrology, Stocks, Computer Programming, Business News, Search All.

PowerSet.com

most useful if you’re looking for a lot of information about a topic that would be in wikipedia. it only works in wikipedia. pulls together all of the articles in wikipedia about a topic and tries to make sense of them. Good for extracting data, pulls out “factz”

SearchCrystal.com

metasearch- visual results. Good for distilling results for searches with lots of meaning.

Factbites.com

You just want the answer. Delivers answers, not results. For some quick lookups it can be useful

Carrot2.org

Tabs along the top. lets you change ranking algorithim. clusters on side and each algorithim will change clusters.

Silobreaker.com

competative intelligence folks came up with this. help you look at news in new and different ways. Key articles on one side. trends, hot spots, network puts together relationships among concepts or people.

Search Cloud.net

in other search engines, the first words searched are ranked as more important, but that’s all

This lets you make the search terms bigger or smaller based on the size of your terms.

Serph.com

from earlier session

Exalead.com

Very useful if you have spelling issues (oh, yes) or there are a lot of different spellings of a word. If you know how a word sounds or have an approixmate spelling. Labor/labour.

proximity searching- same sentence.

Seatguru.com

Where are the good seats? lots of information about each seat. Red seat is the worst seat.

Kosmix

encyclopedia results, image results, related ideas grouped by subject

Twing

Searching discussion boards for experts. Someone is obsessive when they’re interested in something you’re not. When you’re interested in it too, they’re an expert.

Directory of Open Source Journals

peer reviewed journals

free! author pays fee and that’s it.

doaj.org

OpenCongress.org

crack pipe for poitical junkies

Easy way of tracking legistation (ooh! thomas is tough- this could be cool!)

Congress gossip blog (heh)

Get some trade conference buzz.

See what bloggers have said about it, liveblogging, tag for confernce.

Look sideways

cast a wide net. sometimes you won’t find what you’re looking for, but you’ll find something close.

Let go of the perfect answer and see what’s close. move one step out and you may find exactly what you’re looking for by coming at it in a different way.

When drilling in webpages

use search this site to look for powerpoints, speeches, white papers etc. search terms: .ppt, .doc, powerpoint.

Wayback machine

archive.org

see how a company presented itself in the past.

Google alerts

not always real time, but as soon as google has found it.

Domaintools.com

Who is behind a website?

especially useful for political website. Who owns domain? mlk dot org example. (ick)

Hulu.com

(yay!) initiative by broadcasting companies- if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

tv and movies with ads.

HowStuffWorks.com

MEB uses it when she’s stuck on hold for entertainment.

NationMaster.com

national stats. govt and nongovt sources UN, CIA WFB, UNESCO, etc.

(I’m giggling in my head thinking of my gravymaster escapade)

GoogleLabs

advance access to new services and features.

sometimes things you love go away, but it’s often a way to get a first look at things that will soon be ubiquitous.(google’s dominance is a theme here!)

iGoogle

Ms. Dewey

microsoft brought in the actress and she stood in front of a camera for two days and just acted.

(done. Yow!)

(My comments, as always are in parens)

Web 2.0 Tools

Technorati- her favorite blog search tools.
blogs about x
blog posts tagged with x
blog posts that mention x
videos tagged with x

Can search however you want- granular as you can get. search just descriptions of blogs to find blogs about a certain subject or find posts tagged with a subject.

Can look for a post that has a certain word, which brings up lots of garbage.

Video not their strong suit, but you can search that way.

“Librarian of Fortune”

episodic games- video games where they release stories. each episode takes less than 20 hours to complete. every 3 or 4 months there’s a new game. each one stands independently.

search ing for phrase “episodic games” in technorati.

technorati has a truly advanced search.

authority- look for how many times other blogs point to that blog. Spam blogs are a problem. Technorati has a clever way of determining authority- if one blog links to another, it counts as one vote. If the same blog links to the same other blog again, it still counts as one vote.

Total Authority number- a secret sauce.

Some topics will only bring up authority numbers of no higher than 50 because no one’s talking about that topic. Other topics have blogs with authority numbers in the 1000s. She uses technorati to filter for authority to get thoughtful, meaningful content.

Claimed blogs- people who are serious about their blog. Claimed blogs go into the directory. Example of parenting blogs. Blogs that are claimed are probably the blogs that are written by people who are more serious about a topic and about their writing.

Click on authority number to see what people say when they link to that blog- get a sense of why people are talking about something.

Twitter

140 characters- small thoughts.

way of seeing what one portion of the blogosphere is saying about something. Follow a person’s activities.

Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn “status” updates, twitter has an archive (she’s assuming the absence of the fail whale!)

Can use it to track breaking news, initial reactions to an announcements, hot speakers at a conference. Twittering is easy and doesn’t take more than a cell phone.

She has yet to discover a real in-depth research use for twitter (hmm… maybe she needs more librarian friends on Twitter!)

Searching podcasts.

• podcastalley.com
• pluggd.tv

Limit words to “series” rather than “episode”. People who podcast usually keep podacasting around the same subject. Podcasts are not plain text, so search engines have a hard time knowing what podcasts are about. The only descriptions are what people put on the page before you click through to the podcast itself.

RadioLab (lurve RadioLab!) librarianesque

Think about where you’re going to find podcasts rather than searching for them.

• Federal Govt - tinyurl.com/ytcco4
• University lectures - MIT Courseware tinyurl.com/2t2rfj

It took a long time for the govt to get good, rich content online. Govt and Industry have really jumped on the podcast bandwagon. University lectures are online as podcasts. Univeristies have realized that they’re not giving anything away, but are enhancing their reputation by putting lectures online. MITOpenCourseWare - most visited courses are all really hard core science and technology.

iTunes has started distributing a lot more content. Most educational podcasts are free and you can subscribe.

Podcast chunking

how to fnd a podcast when you have a topic you want but not a site to start with?

moving beyond metadata to speech recognition. “chunking” of the search results - searches transcripts of the podcast. you can jump to the part of the podcast that’s relevent to what you’re searching for.

• search.everyzing.com
• podscope.com

You wind up getting a lot of stuff, some of it isn’t relevent. Really best for looking for something obscure.

Tracking discussion boards.

emergency services use 800 mhz range and she had a client that was interested in this. first question: who would care about 800 Mhz interference? There’s one person in each county who cares A LOT about this. How are they talking to each other? A bull board or a yahoo group? Yahoo group had 3 discussion groups on that topic.

• BoardTracker.com
• Twing.com
• BoardReader.com

If what you’re looking for is obscure, this is exactly the place you’re going to find the answer.

Q from audience: do you have to sign up for these boards, usually?

A: not usually. If they’re spidered through a search engine, they’re usually open. The one exception is Yahoo Groups and you just have to join.

Serph.com

Web 2.0 meta-search tool - blogs, social media sites, social news sites, social bookmarking sites.

Caps results at 300 results. Generally not a big deal, but something to keep in mind.

Addictomatic

entrancing. tather than aggregating results in one page, they show you each tool and show you the results for each. (plus, cute robot!) Wonderful, but very distracting

Intelways

It does a search in google. Regular old search results. Series of buttons under the search box with all manner of search engines and sites. Quick way to start and cover a broad range of resources.

Above search box, you can change the kind of buttons underneath- only image search, only news search, only social search.

(comment from my colleague the newshound: this is really good!)

It’s not metasearch, it’s just a frame with a super-quick way of comparing search results. Reference search is particularly helpful.

LinkedIn.com

really nerdy way to connect to other people

use it and other SN sites to find who to call. Like having a rolodex on steroids. Nice way of knowing where to go next- can connect through LinkedIn. Useful tools for getting to soft information that you can’t get online.

Facebook

Started for college students. The interesting thing for LinkedIn and FB is that orgs are realizing that they can create community online through these sites.

ZoomInfo

Another way to find people. On the other SN sites are information you have provided. ZoomInfo is the reverse. Looks for mentions of people and uses lingusitic analysis to find out what that information is. It figures out who people are and where they’ve worked. Has links to the pages they used to figure that out. Also pulls in information you might not have found otherwise- member of boards, etc.

Q: how important does that man have to be for you to find all this?

A: This just pulls informaiton that happens to mention this person. He doesn’t have to have a webapage himself, they just have to be mentioned.

Now everyone’s going to go and ZoomInfo themselves!

TouchGraph.com

They’re trying to sell their software, which they do by showing applications of this technology. Visual representation of your connections and their shared connections You can only do this search on yourself

Spokeo

Creepy-o

Pulls information from areas where you’re talking about yourself. Twitter, FB etc. But also Amazon wish list and stuff you’re selling.

Anonimity through obscurity.

This aggregates everything about you online. Guy with cufflinks and carrot up his nose.