Friday, February 27, 2009

LILI IT Interest Group Meeting Notes – February 26, 2009

The weather yesterday was rainy and cold, but for the LILI IT Interest Group, the show must go on:

Bob: Mentioned a very interesting article in the NYT about Google, by David Pogue: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/technology/personaltech/26pogue.html?_r=1 Pogue covers many of the important things Google is doing these days. [Tom note: also check out his blog: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/ ]

Group: Discussion of WorldCat [first search] vs. http://www.worldcat.org/ Nancy notes that it is important to make sure that patrons know about the duplicate record issue that has plagued OCLC for some time, and also that the link to journals is obscured in the left hand navigation. The .org interface is otherwise nice and Ian notes that interface design is critical to keep users coming back.

Nancy: Demo of the voice recognition function on her iPhone that ties into a google search. A click on the search results dials the phone. Pretty cool!

Anne: drew our attention to the recent political tangle Twitter ( http://twitter.com/ ) has been drawn into due to certain politicians using Twitter to comment on Obama's recent speech.

Karen: Mentioned that http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ continues to develop. It is an interesting TOC review tool. Nancy mentions that Ulrichs also is a very good source for recent TOCs. [Tom note: I had not seen this in Ulrichs, and it looks useful. Yet another reason to remember Ulrichs.]

Karen: showed two humorous short videos from library contests. These are hosted on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/: the UMD Library Student Contest: Book Staxx; the National Library Week: Reference Desk.