Aaron the Librarian

Where in the World is Aaron the Librarian?!

edit: btw the “**” means I **must** attend the meeting & “*” means I sorta oughta attend

ok, a beef with the “Agenda” view: Why does only one meeting with the same start time show up?! I know I’m double-booked for at least three “must attend” meetings, but only the alphabetically 1st one shows up

Thanks to the Disruptive Library Technology Jester I just learned about HitchHikr (I feel soo behind the times!)

There is a HitchHikr Page for the ALA 2007 Annual Conference with some on- & some off-topic posts and pix already in there.  For those of us wanting easy updates, an RSS feed would be a nice feature to add for HitchHikr (I didn’t find one available)

Still scrolling through the ACRL Conference Blog, finding more gems.

ACRL peeps Merinda Hensley & Annie Paprocki have started a discussion forum in the ALA Online Communities for anyone to join. The discussion forum is based in ACRL’s section of the Communities. I posted a message to the NMRT email list, which reads semi-indignantly to my shame, making folks aware of the resource and wondering if NMRT has a similar resource or has one in the works.

Steps to follow to join the ACRL New Member Online Community can be found on the NEW: New Member Online Community post on the ACRL Conference Blog.

So I was persuing the ACRL Conference Blog & saw several posts about PennTags. Intrigued (again), I Googled up more about PennTags and caught some of the discussions about how some people think PennTags ignored the existence of del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites. Which made me think, “hm… could I add a way for my users to socially tag records directly from our catalog?” Turns out I can, with a few wrinkles still needing ironing out, and have thrown a beta “Tag with del.icio.us” link into our ExLibris / Endeavor Voyager Catalog (see example, the link is at the bottom of the record)

The cool part of PennTags, which my little hack doesn’t do, is the FRBRized tally of tags per catalog item. I would love to figure out how to show a tag cloud of potential future tags, too. I would love to add a pre-populated tag entry to better discover tagged items from our catalog, but I do not see a way to turn on the autocomplete function for the “tags” entry in del.icio.us.

While I was scrolling through ACRLblog’s Official Correspondent Site of the 13th Annual National Conference, I read the “anxious much?” and “Do you have anxeity about doing research” posts hinting at sessions or posters or discussions about research anxiety, research to support a successful tenure track chase, and research for students’ class assignments. I would love to hear more of the ACRL Conference discussions (As well as other venues) about these and how people are managing theirs or their students’ research angst.

While I respect and applaud ACRL for making the effort to host a simultaneous virtual conference, I see no mechanism for post-event information dissemination/sharing. I checked the “About” page and only see that if I want to “attend” I would have had to pony up the registration fee for the Virtual Conference before registration closed.

Is there a moving wall of access? Maybe ACRL members (like me) have access (I prefer interactive, but read-only would be acceptable) after the conference ends, ALA members a few weeks later, and maybe read-only for the general netizen a few weeks after that? Yes, lots of policy and finance discussions would probably need ot happen at the ACRL level.
I suspect there’s a lot of info in there that could be potentially useful & I’d like an opportunity to check it out and maybe add to the discussions.