Hi. Are any librarians who are responsible for staffing public access computing facilities feeling some sympathy today with poll workers stuck with malfunctioning voting machines, lack of backup procedures, insufficient provisional ballots and grumpy support staffers and voters? Remind me what problem were these machines supposed to fix again, and at what cost?
Author: jessamyn
Dartmouth confrerence outreach notes online
I’m just going to be hurling some links up here today. The talks from the Dartmouth conference I was at on Thursday are now all online linked at the end of each presentation. There were some really great ideas about library outreach and assessment put up, I recommed you take a look at a few things librarians are doing. They also did another cool thing [in addition to being fierce about the time limits for talks] which was to have a conference evaluation online. They sent an email reminder with a link to the evaluation form. Anyone who filled out the fairly detailed evaluation form — which had an entry for rating each presentation — would be eligible for a $75 gift certificate for something or other. It added $75 plus staff time to the conference budget but I bet they get nearly 100% return rate on their evaluations. Smart!
search ala.org, really
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how we know what we know… collaboratively
The Wikipedia media attention lately has really gotten people thinking about the idea of truth, and truth in news particularly. The NYT this weekend had an article entitled When No Good Fact Goes Unchecked discussing how collaborative systems of evaluation and assessment can actually result in more accurate facts. My argument, when I discussed this in relation to blogs at an ALA Preconference is that this can be helpful for effective reference work as well. I’m sure it’s no suprise that The Fact Checker’s Bible is creeping up there in Amazon sales rank. The more we get over the Tyranny of the Expert and accept that there’s more than one way of looking at many issues — even with the same set of “facts” — the more easy it is to actually utilize collaborative information systems to help us with many library oriented jobs like selecting vendors, providing news and reference services, making good referrals and connecting with our patrons.
hi – 30oct
Hi. I’m a little tired and have been taking bad notes, though I did see the Power of the Napkin Sketch work wonders this evening. Both Eli and Fred have some good commons-meeting-oriented notes on their sites. There may also be some notes on Peter Levine’s site. There likely won’t be any wrap-ups here because 1) Fred and Eli did such a good job I see no reason to be redundant 2) my big picture thinking about the whole commons issue sums up a lot of what people were talking about, unhelpfully, as “details” 3) I’m already halfway to Australia in my mind, even though I’m not going for a few weeks now.