5 Things You Don't Know About David Free

I popped into Bloglines after a few days and noticed that David Lee King tagged me to tell you 5 things about me you don't know. So here we go...

1. I've never lived outside Georgia.
2. If I could be any animal, it would be a kitty cat.
3. For Christmas I got 4 cds, 2 DVDs, 2 books, a shirt, a Blue Snowball microphone, and a gift certificate to Goner Records in Memphis. I'm sorry if I forgot anything.
4. I'm a huge fan of Belgian beer. My dream vacation is to take a tour of monestaries and other fun brewing places in Beligum. But I will drink a Belgian beer with you pretty much anytime or place. I'm very sad that Computers In Libraries isn't within walking distance of the Brickskeller in DC this year.
5. My first "real" job was working at Burger King. I then worked at a grocery store deli. I got a job at the UGA Library in 1987 because I didn't have to work with food. Other than a telemarketing stint when I moved to Atlanta, I've worked in libraries ever since.

Hopefully you at least didn't know one of those. I will now tag Michelle Boule, Cliff Landis, Karen Coombs, Meredith Farkas and Beth Hoffman. I don't think any of you have done this yet.

I'm In Chicago And It's Raining

Actually, it not raining right now. And it's not 10 degrees either! Not too shabby.

My laptop seems to have temporarily recovered from a near death experience yesterday, so here are links to some podcasts we'll probably talk about in the ACRL podcasting workshop today. I'll go back and add any others we discuss later.

NPR Podcasts
ABC News Podcasts
60-Second Science
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
LibVibe
Talking With Talis
OPAL Podcasts
PALINET Conversations Podcasts
Moraine Valley Community College Library Podcast Policies
ALA Washington Office Podcasts
YASLA Podcasts
JAMA Weekly Audio Commentary
Biodiesel Conference Blog Podcasts

Links to podcasting tools and guides are available on my wiki.

Friends+Columns=Coolness

In a bit of coincidence, three of my Internet/conference/etc library friends announced this week that they are starting to write columns for various library publications. Well, two of them are sharing a column but that's beside the point.

David Lee King and Michael "Libraryman" Porter are going to be the new authors of the "Internet Spotlight" column in Public Libraries starting in March.

And starting in January, Meredith Farkas realizes her 9th grade dream by starting a new column in American Libraries called "Technology In Practice". It's going to call attention to cool stuff that libraries are doing with tech that you can easily do at your library too.

Congrats to all! Should be some good reading.

IM Gap?

I just ran across this article on CNN.com about a new poll by AP-AOL on generational IM habits. The poll found that there is a pretty wide gap in IM usage between teens and "adults". Interesting stats: 48% of 13-18 year olds use IM (this is more than 2x the number of "adults" - I honestly thought the number of IMing teens would be higher!),more than half the IMing teens send at least 25 messages per day, and 16% of teens have used IM to break up with someone (I got dumped over the phone many a time, so is IM break-up really so different?).

The article does point out that there are exceptions to the generational differences though, as we found out here when starting our IM reference service. We had several librarians of the general Boomer generation who fell in love with IM and some younger librarians who aren't remotely interested. And I did have a friend tell me last week that her 10 yr old daughter just showed her how to IM (although I have yet to see any successful IMing from her!). I think that trend of parents learning about technology from their children will continue and maybe reduce the "IM gap".

The (probably not so newsy)lesson here? Lots of teens and youngers IM. Let folks IM on your library computers. And set up IM for reference and other interaction. It's free and easy and more and mroe folks are going to expect it.

ALA Staff Flickrs

I had a couple of minutes today to take a peek at the ALA Staff Flickr pool that Jenny and a couple of other folks have mentioned recently. The have pics from a DDR tournament at an ALA staff day. Very cool! I think the behind the scenes type pics open up and humanize the organization a lot. And could possibly do the same for your organization too.

ALA is starting to do some really neat stuff! I'm impressed. And promise to renew my membership before next week. I'm just lazy and broke. Really.

12/6/06 Update:
Yesterday Steven Cohen noted a couple of different cool things ALA is doing. Nice.

AHSLC Presentation

On Friday I went to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta to talk about podcasting for an Atlanta Health Science Library Consortium meeting. We had an interesting discussion about podcasting issues and social software in general. My presentation is available on my wiki and here is a handy link:

Podcasting: A Primer for Health Science Libraries (PPT)

Before I spoke, Tim Daniels from Georgia State talked about a plethora of social softwares including blogs, wikis, IM, Flickr and del.icio.us. He pointed out a few interesting resources I hadn't seen before including David Rothman's community health and patient information custom Google search,Ganfyd (a wiki-based "medical knowledge-base", and the MedWorm searchable database of medical related RSS feeds. Very cool. I've been out of health science librarianship for almost three years now so it was very cool to get somewhat caught up in that world.

So it was an interesting and informative afternoon! And I got to see a couple of old friends and former colleagues to boot. Thanks for having me (and thanks to my colleague Steve Koplan for getting me involved) and please let me know if there are any follow-up questions or if you start using any of the social softwares we discussed at your library!

Links For AHSLC Presentation

Here are links to podcasts I talked about at the Atlanta Health Science Library Consortium on December 1.

Gibson D. Lewis Health Science Library (UNTHSC)
Claude Moore Health Sciences Library (UVA)
GPC Decatur Campus Library
University of Buffalo HSL InfoPods
LifeBridge Health LifePODS
Moraine Valley Community College Podcast Policies

Links to podcasting tools and additional resources are available on the presentation wiki page.