Monday, June 14, 2010

Hooked on Gadgets - Interesting to consider . . .

READ ARTICLE - Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price

I will really take a look at this and consider if I need more peacefulness and less gadgetry in my own existence.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Netvibes - Dashboard - READY



Hi Everyone - CLICK to see the public version of the Netvibes dashboard I created.


I have tabs for -
  • General News & Information
  • Information Literacy
  • Technology
  • Music


This is an easy to use site, so try setting one up for yourself.

Tools for the online reading of the future

Just saw an article about some neat tools for simplifying your online reading experience. They bookmark things and/or make it easy to save reading to a mobile device.

Readability = This is what they call a bookmarklet. It reformats the text so that you don't see the adds and extra side bars, and does it in various modes - Newspaper, Novel, eBook.

Instapaper = a way to mark a text in your browser and then either read it later via your Instapaper account or more conveniently save it to another mobile device for easier viewing there.

SEE whole article from ALA's TechSource Blog = Change How You Read

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Summer Projects at ECC

Today at our librarians meeting we discussed options of what we, the librarians at ECC, might like to accomplish over the summer. We also looked through the FY10 goals sheet and evaluated whether there were items from that to still address. It appears we accomplished much of what we set out to do last year, though I of course only starting March 1st didn't do much to help out in this.

So, what to do this summer? There are 21 hours a week I have to work and the students don't have as many questions as usual, so thus some time for summer projects.

Some ideas for summer projects:
  1. Develop an information literacy action plan (including goals for each Research Session)
  2. Continue to weed if this is desired by the Collection Development librarian
  3. Discover Web 2.0 and possible library outreach and implementation of these tools
  4. Learn about teaching and presenting to be more effective in bibliographic instruction
  5. Read about current events to relate to students - more relevant examples for sessions
  6. Finish the Arthur Lourie research - research writing skills and organizing thoughts(my personal goal and not a work-related one)
  7. Acquaint myself with the library resources & ECC classes - reference, videos, databases, etc.
YES, there are many things to do and I will use my time wisely over the summer. Thank God for better air-conditioning today in the library.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

A Personalized "Dashboard"

Though I have my own website at http://www.janaborchardt.com/ I now am creating a "dashboard" - a personalized newsboard or website which will allow me to more easily stay informed through the wonderful technology of widgets and RSS feeds. Instead of checking out several websites and blogs to find the latest news I can refer to my "dashboard."

I read about this cool Web 2.0 tool on another blog "Information Literacy Meets Web 2.0." When I complete my project I will let you see how it turned out.

Create your own "dashboard" at http://www.netvibes.com/. This way the news comes to you, and you save valuable time.