Champlain College Library - Miller Information Commons

We've been experimenting! During the past year we have begun using a number of free or inexpensive web-based services to improve our web presence. Here's a quick review....

Photostreaming
We are using Flickr to highlight portions of our print collection: special acquisitions, unknown treasures, readings of potential interest to specific classes. Special feature: each Flickr image links to the catalog record for that specific book so you can see its location and availability. Our photo stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/millerinfocommons

Wikis

Our subject guides are in pbwiki (http://champlaincollegelibrary.pbwiki.com/). Currently, the wiki platform allows multiple librarians to easily create or edit any subject guide; so far, we have over 24 guides in 16 subject areas written by 6 librarians. Soon, we hope to pilot wiki-based course guides allowing students in a course to contribute content.

In addition, the Circulation Department maintains an internal communications wiki in Wikidot that goes a long way toward ensuring that accurate information is communicated throughout a staff whose schedules don't overlap regularly.

Tracking Reference Questions

We wrote a Zoho Creator web-based data collection form to track reference questions. The number of reference questions that get logged has increased dramatically, people can see what kinds of questions have been asked earlier in the day, and it's easy to download data for analysis. In addition, using an online tracking system allows us to look at the trends by ...

Creating tag clouds

Wordle is wonderful. We created a tag cloud of all the questions logged at Reference in 2007-2008. Looking at the cloud gives us a sense of who our primary audience is (students) and what they are asking about (books, articles, finding things). Next, we generated a cloud tag of the main page of the library websites (sneak preview!) We know from the cloud that the website emphasizes how to find things, but does it adequately address the students who are our primary reference audience?

Blogging
And of course we blog, primarily on blogspot: the library blog is "Check it out!. It includes links to several other Champlainers' blogs.

Screencasting and videos

We are currently using Camtasia to create in-house staff training tools; we are exploring both Camtasia and Captivate to produce publicly-available tutorials. We've also used iMovie to create a quick in-absentia presentation explaining the new Technology and Informaiton Literacy competency at a Faculty Meeting (you can view a portion of it in Quicktime format).

Why are we using so much free stuff?

Our goal is for library to become a campus technology leader, and these projects have contributed to that effort through the thoughtful and creative application of new technologies to support library initiatives. Although we recognize that relying on free web-based services for these projects is risky in that the service providers could fail at any time, it has enabled us to move forward much more quickly than any other solution would have.

[June 2008 jc]

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