Plugoo Redux

I have been getting some traffic/use on the Plugoo IM link I put into a post as a test, so I’ve decided to put it on the sidebar. Feel free to IM me (at least until someone figures out how to spam it).

The Participatory Librarianship Talking Tour 2007

Tour

Participatory librarianship and the whole “Library as Conversation” idea is certainly catching on. I’ve put together a list of presentations I’ve either given or are planned for 2007 at: http://iis.syr.edu/projects/PNOpen/2007Tour/

In case you’re curious, here’s what’s coming up:

“Participatory Librarianship” South Central Regional Library Council Library: Place Service or Both Series, Ithaca, NY March 16

“The Library as Conversation” The Regione Toscana- Servizi Bibliografici, Florence, Italy April 12

“Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation” Amigos Member Conference, Dallas, TX. May 2

“Participatory Networks” Nylink Annual Conference, Saratoga Springs, NY. May 9

“Collecting Conversations in a Massive Scale World” ALCTS National Conference, Washington, D.C. June 22

“Future of Information Search and Retrieval” ALA Panel, Washington D.C. June 25

Askville

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Jeff Pomerantz points out (here) that Amazon has launched a new AskA service “Askville” (http://askville.amazon.com/askville/Index.do#answers). He does not seem so hot on it. He has some legitimate concerns, but I actually take this as a good sign. Virtual reference is alive and well. I’d love to know if the folks at Amazon are familiar with the work on the library and AskA groups (all of you lurking Amazon folks let me know). Someone might want to go use the service to ask “what other types of virtual reference services are available?” or “what is virtual reference?” or “do libraries offer these kind of thing?” and at least get these questions in the search service and test how easy it is to fin out about our work.

As Jeff points out it has some interesting use of tagging and features, and I hope virtual reference vendor types will take a look to see if there are some usable ideas here.

Test Plugoo

I’ve tried Meebo, but wasn’t impressed. Great to IM through a web interface, but you have to be logged onto Meebo. I saw folks talking about Plugoo on Dig_Ref and thought I’d take a look. Seems very cool. It connects a web based IM to my IM client (adium) on my desktop through AIM (or ICQ or Yahoo! or..). If I’m online give it a try and say hi.