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One caveat: the Virtual Philadelphia application is a resource hog; make sure you have a high-speed internet connection, a decent graphics processor, and lots of memory. Even with these, it can be crash-prone – please save anything you were doing before you start the exploring! (If you don’t have a computer that will run it, check out this early promotional video; it’s a good demonstration of the model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxk0Xm0fRFw) Even with these problems, Virtual Philadelphia is a very exciting achievement.

Philadelphia, high and low.

BurtonGroup's content is based on something they call “Reference Architecture” that describes the underlying principles of a particular technology. Then they supplement the core document annually with more formulaic “if-then” logic pieces to help an IT manager make planning decisions that are up to date with technology and marketplace developments. You can read more about it (here).

Due to publisher restrictions, only full-time Drexel Faculty and Staff may sign up to view BurtonGroup content directly HERE.
Students and adjunct faculty may view the index of content on their website (see links below) and request full-text of individual reports through Tim Siftar, the IST Librarian.

"2008 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award winner announced
CHICAGO - Glenn Peterson is the 2008 recipient of the LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award for his development of EngagedPatrons.org. Engagedpatrons.org provides low-cost and free Web site services for public libraries. The site went live in May 2006, enabling even small- and medium-sized libraries the ability to offer high-quality Web services to their patrons, services that most would otherwise be unable to provide."

(continued...)
Here's the link to the full text.

My previous post was on new services. This one will focus on products. I'll get up the outline first and then come backfill with more detailed instructions later. What I really enjoy sharing are anecdotes supplied by users who go ahead and experiment with the new toys. Feel free to email me any comments along those lines. The "comment" feature on this blog gets hit with so much robo-spam that real replies can get lost in the shuffle. But if you email, I'll include them in an update. So... on with the show!

NEW PRODUCTS

To get your own Meebo account, and enjoy IM access across all other IM platforms, go to www.meebo.com. Just fyi - our Reference Desk service uses "Pigeon" - (formerly GAIM) on account of its nice features for capturing the "log files" of IM interactions with patrons, and storing them in one place on the departmental shared drive.

CRC Evening Office Hours
Your IST Librarian has begun holding office hours in the iSchool CRC from 5-6pm, one evening per week. The plan is to rotate between Tuesday's, Wednesdays and Thursday's. Monday's I'm usually on the Reference Desk at Hagerty, and Friday's... well let's just say there's other business to attend to. I'll do my best to update my Twitter microblog as soon as my office hour plans are set for the next week. Thats the bit of text that shows up underneath my photo on all the Library Research Guides I edit - with the headline "Where's Tim now?" Let me know if you think that page loads too slow with all these gadgets plugged in. I still consider all of this experimental and I may have to change things around if it bogs everything down.

What is Twitter? Aside from loads of hype about it helping to track friends via text messages, it also seems to be an easy way to update my webpage. And it keeps me to 140 characters!

As always, you are also welcome to contact me about scheduling a F2F or phone meeting for less serendipitous encounters!

Best,
Tim

Ours was more of a quick and dirty start-up session. We walked attendees through the avatar-creation process via the NMC.org portal, then toured Drexel's Island and some other library-oriented sites in SL. I've had some good feedback from my colleagues, some of whom are already fielding requests for library collaboration on SL projects from their patrons.

First, your best bet, be sure to see what your faculty have made available on Library Reserve for your class. If there is currently NOTHING on Reserve, not even a copy of your textbook, you might ask your faculty WHY? Be sure to look under both your faculty's last name and your course number before you hassle them. This is their responsibility to get us a copy, or at least request it.

PS - what is Twitter? Here's the wikipedia entry. For me, it's the shorthand way that I intend to let faculty and students know where I am hanging out while "roving" around campus. Mostly it'll just say "I'm in my office" - but you never know!

Dear Members of the Faculty,

It’s that time again – time to submit your reserve requests for the fall quarter!

Complete instructions for placing materials on reserve, including blank reserve request forms can be found here. Please feel free to contact me, Jeanne Hamann with any additional questions.

This speaks for itself!

http://www.tk421.net/essays/nwyt.pdf

"This document provides both a discussion of images of librarians and a multitudes of examples of those images."
[thanks to: Dr. John Jaeger Doctoral Research and Reference Librarian, Dallas Baptist University]

Check out all these iSchool PhD student posters from the last two year's worth of Drexel's internal "Research Day" poster session events.

Do YOU have scholarly publications you would like to see in Drexel's iDEA electronic repository? Get in touch!