Part One: While Nancy answered virtual reference questions at the meeting (!) we had a group discussion about virtual reference...
- It was noted that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of virtual reference calls. Compared to this time last year, there have been 600 more calls in October 2008.
- The Velaro license is locked down, meaning we have 5 operators max. Two are at Memorial, two are at College, and one is in LTG.
- 8-5:00 is covered by Memorial and 5-midnight is covered by College everyday!
- The weekends are covered by SLIS students.
- College needs more practicum students to keep up with the calls.
- Wendt has no central chat application, but Steenbock has created their own.
- The Ask A Librarian site is the central place where callers log-in, so statistics can be gathered from that page.
Part Two: Ian let us know some additional information about Jing...
- Ian uses Jing regularly for chat and has been creating little movies for staff with Jing that he emails out (Ian sent them to the LILI IT list too, thanks Ian!)
- College has an online archive of the Jing clips that they have created.
- Jing works great and is easy to use. Try it out: http://www.jingproject.com/
Part three: discussion of online news resources...
- Ian explained Gaudi: http://labs.google.com/gaudi
- Google is using Gaudi to index the contents Youtube videos!
- Emily wondered if the School of Communication would be interested in this tool. She noted that DATN had been using the closed captioning to index the content of those videos.
- Emily also wondered if Political science would be interested.
- It was noted by ... someone (sorry!)... that Hulu has a news service: http://www.hulu.com/
- Tom noted that Google News is sort of neat: http://news.google.com/nwshp
- Nancy and Emily noted that Ron Larson used to do News Librarianship. ( Here is a blog post about Ron and News Librarianship that I found: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/list-of-longer-pages/recruiting-the-next-generation-of-news-librarians/ )
- Ian noted that the tool “FundRace” http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/ allows you to track political donations.
Part Four: random interesting observations...
- Sarah mentioned that you can use your cellphone as a portable modem!
- Ian noted the Cuil search, with a very large index: http://www.cuil.com/
- Emily and Sarah noted that Google has an iPhone competitor now, the T-Mobile G1: http://www.t-mobileg1.com/
