True Reward from the Embedded Librarianship

It's been a year since I started embedding library services into academic courses with the College of Nursing and the College of Allied Health.  This email message makes my day! It tells all what embedded services mean to the students.

E-Tracking Reference Statistics

Desk Statistics Record Sheet

If you want to turn manually recording of Reference Desk statistics into digital, read this article, "How to Build a Desk Statistics Tracker in Less Than an Hour Using Forms in Google Docs" by Sunshine Carter and Thomas Ambrosi  from the University of Minnesota–Duluth. The article provided detailed instructions on how to create a form for your library.  It would be better and more helpful if Google Docs form provided more functions for data collection and analysis.

Content Creators: Be Creative!

Are you a librarian or a medical librarian? Do you use Twitter? Does your library has a twitter account or a Facebook page? As one of the content contributors to our Reference Department's twitter account, library's blog, Flickr, and Facebook page, I constantly felt it is challenging and time consuming to keep the contents in these accounts rolling effectively and feeding it with relevant information quickly. Ideally, I wish our contents were updated while I'm sleeping...

A recent conversation with a librarian friend about feeding twitter account with RSS feeds on some desired topics. "Well, don't depend on those automatically feeds only. This is why you are here and you are the content creator." What he said really got me thinking. Yes, librarians are well known for being content creators in many ways including Web sites, subject guides, pathfinders, instructional materials, and library tutorials. Now content creators has evolved to include twittering, blogging, facebooking, and more. Librarians becoming digital content creators are the result of digital technology and digital reference services. The difference is digital content creators have to come up with contents in a quick and effective way.

If you are the person behind the scene, how do you manage your library's social media accounts to keep them fresh and relevant?