Neuroscience
I am catching up on my blogs and just read Swiss Army Librarian's Sept. 29 post “Cloud of Survey Comments from Library Patrons.” His library did a word cloud based on comments in their recent patron survey, which he shows in his post.
I joked in the comments about doing a Wordle on our recent reference interactions ... and was pleased at how simple it was to set up. I think this will be a good way of showing non-library folks what we do in libraries: help answer questions ... and help folks print. Also, we refer people other places when we can't answer their question or don't have what they need. Note how big the word "chat" is; that's because we code all of our LibraryH3lp / chat reference notes with the word "chat."
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I taught a "one-shot" session of The World of Mass Communication this semester. It's a 100-level class designed to introduce students to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I went in to talk about doing better Google searches AND...
- How Librarians Can Help In Real Life, At #scio13, And More
Librarians are so helpful! (Creative Commons image courtesy of Christchurch City Libraries on Flickr) How do librarians help scientists? If you haven't worked with a good librarian, it's hard to know what we can offer and how we...
- What Can You Ask A Librarian?
A recent Library Hacks blog post at Duke's Perkins Library, Ever wonder what you can ask a reference librarian? prompted me to publicize some of the questions we've been asked at the Park Library. (I first posted this on the JoMC Park Library...
- Reference Theory & Practice
I'm thrilled to link to my article on The Reference Interview: Theories and Practice, recently published by Library Philosophy and Practice (LPP). They abstract it thusly: The reference librarian's task is to translate the patron's question...
- "hi, Pat, Your Question Is Interesting"
Carol Tenopir’s March 1 column in Library Journal describes research by Marie Radford Lynn Silipigni Connaway into the social dynamics of chat, particularly in the relationship between librarians & patrons. “They find that chat reference conversations...
Neuroscience
Reference Questions, Wordled
I am catching up on my blogs and just read Swiss Army Librarian's Sept. 29 post “Cloud of Survey Comments from Library Patrons.” His library did a word cloud based on comments in their recent patron survey, which he shows in his post.
I joked in the comments about doing a Wordle on our recent reference interactions ... and was pleased at how simple it was to set up. I think this will be a good way of showing non-library folks what we do in libraries: help answer questions ... and help folks print. Also, we refer people other places when we can't answer their question or don't have what they need. Note how big the word "chat" is; that's because we code all of our LibraryH3lp / chat reference notes with the word "chat."
Thanks to DeskTracker for the ability to easily download our reference interactions; I simply copied & pasted the comments field into a text file, which I then pasted into Wordle to generate this graphic. The most time-consuming part was standardizing questions and Question to "question" ... and removing the word "patron" since after standardization, it would have been twice the size of the word help!
I was a bit worried that this exercise would violate patron confidentiality, but it doesn't seem to, for two reasons: first, we don't put any personal information in our comments field, and second, because the text of over 600 transactions is in this Wordle, so details like "Times-Picayune" or "HBR Case Studies" doesn't show up.
- What They Learned In Class
I taught a "one-shot" session of The World of Mass Communication this semester. It's a 100-level class designed to introduce students to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I went in to talk about doing better Google searches AND...
- How Librarians Can Help In Real Life, At #scio13, And More
Librarians are so helpful! (Creative Commons image courtesy of Christchurch City Libraries on Flickr) How do librarians help scientists? If you haven't worked with a good librarian, it's hard to know what we can offer and how we...
- What Can You Ask A Librarian?
A recent Library Hacks blog post at Duke's Perkins Library, Ever wonder what you can ask a reference librarian? prompted me to publicize some of the questions we've been asked at the Park Library. (I first posted this on the JoMC Park Library...
- Reference Theory & Practice
I'm thrilled to link to my article on The Reference Interview: Theories and Practice, recently published by Library Philosophy and Practice (LPP). They abstract it thusly: The reference librarian's task is to translate the patron's question...
- "hi, Pat, Your Question Is Interesting"
Carol Tenopir’s March 1 column in Library Journal describes research by Marie Radford Lynn Silipigni Connaway into the social dynamics of chat, particularly in the relationship between librarians & patrons. “They find that chat reference conversations...