Meebo In Your Web Page

There's a detailed post at Michael Stephens blog, Tame The Web about putting Meebo into your library web page as a quick and easy way to offer some form of virtual reference to your patrons.

Virtual Reference Overview

There's a Virtual Reference Special Section (pp. 8 - 28) in the new issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Much of the content is directed toward large library systems, but if you are considering planning any type of virtual reference service this would be worth reading.

YouTube For Library Instruction?

Here's an interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the use of YouTube for educational purposes. Has your library considered YouTube for library instruction?

Free Online Instruction/Presentation Tools

Last Friday, District III of the NCCCLRA held it's winter meeting at Rockingham Community College. I did a presentation on the use of free instruction/presentation software to support library instruction and for publicity purposes. Some of the tools require a download to your computer, and others are completely web-based. Here's an expanded list of the software grouped into categories; all are free, and most allow you to include audio along with the presentation:

Screenshots, Screen Recorders: Webinaria, ZDsoft Screen Recorder, Jing

Power Point-Style Presentations: Thumbstacks , AuthorPoint Lite

Public Platforms for Power Point-Style Presentations: AuthorStream , SlideShare

Short Publicity Videos, Slideshows with Music: Animoto, SlideStory, RockYou

Co-Browsing Tools: Spreed, Share-It-Now, Vyew

Facebook Hostile To Librarians?

You can read the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education and find out.

Outreach and Marketing

Hello, Anybody Out There? is a summary of table discussions on outreach and marketing from the ALA Instruction Section’s Management of Instruction Committee meeting at the 2006 San Antonio Midwinter Meeting.

Do you have any novel ideas for outreach to faculty and students? Does your library have a formal outreach plan to reach faculty across the curriculum?