Monday, March 7, 2016

Technology and Reference Librarianship

I consider myself to be very lucky with my fieldwork.  The many librarians I worked with were very enthusiastic about the technology they had available.  A few of the programs that were used were brought up in class this week, which made me think of all of the other cool programs I learned about while I was there.

Gimlet: Gimlet was a website that we used to track questions and answers that were asked throughout the library.  Each library department could post to it, and then tag it as directional, technological, or reference.  They could also tag who asked (i.e., student, faculty, community,  unknown).  The website allowed searches to be run on questions for keywords in any time frame, and would also run reports on number of questions, where the questions were asked, which department answered, etc.

Camtasia: This program intimidated me at first, but in the end I feel like I had the hang of it.  We used it to make video tutorials of different subjects.  I helped with several videos, but the one that was 90% my work is posted below.  The program allowed us to chop out bits of the video/audio, record over the video, call out segments, etc.






Pidgen: This was the chat program we used which worked like most other IMs.  I was not a fan of this program, but more because of the inappropriate questions than the program itself...

LibApp: This was through Springshare, and it was used to create LibGuides.  Before working at the reference desk, I didn't have much interest in creating LibGuides.  Before I was done, I was loving it.  It was a great resource to direct students to when they needed a direction to research.  Two examples of LibGuides I created using this are below: 

So, overall, I guess my point is just that technology is cool.  It's cool in any part of the library.  Someday, I may even get around to posting about how the archives use technology. It's a total combination of the old and the new!

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