Karen Munro, Learning Librarian

A great little short video from Maya Design about the future of computing and information…in short, things are scaling up fast in terms of how many computers we’ll see, what shapes and forms they’ll take, and how much information they’ll process.  Think trillions.

I just visited yesterday with the great librarians at Ziba Design, which opened in a new location about two months ago here in Portland. Ziba does great design work–industrial design, architecture, web design, etc–and their collection is made up of books, magazines, and also a materials lab. Their space is small (but appropriate for the size of their company), and they use LibraryThing as a catalog. Since they don’t check books in and out, I think they use LT primarily to keep track of what’s in their collection. It’s an interesting model (and reminds me I need to fire up LT again sometime to take a second look.)

The UO Portland Library and Learning Commons is on Facebook!  Become a fan and learn about our Flip video cameras, architectural blueprints, new DVDs, and Thanksgiving plans.

Now that fall’s in full swing, I’m teaching and doing reference as much as I’m, well, administering.  (What is the word for that–the endless work of emails, meetings, phone calls, and hallway conversations that makes an institution run?)  It’s a pleasure to be answering reference questions again, and it made me realize that I’ve let my reference question blog lapse.  I hereby offer some of the questions I’ve fielded recently, in the spirit of Bibliophagus, the much-loved, but now-largely-defunct reference question blog…

• Where can I find a building outline map of an address in San Francisco?
• Where can I find books on photography–not technical manuals, but books on theory and artistic approach–composition, ways of seeing, etc.?
• Where can I find articles on best practices for fundraising in nonprofits?
• Where can I find a general overview of the state of the conversation about political communication?
• Where can I find scholarly articles about crisis management and public relations?
• Where can I find scholarly articles about the differences between political campaigns and ballot measure campaigns?
• I want to use Zotero, but it’s not logging me in/not recognizing my username/not synching to the server/not working at all.  Help!
• I want to use Zotero Groups with my class, but I don’t know how it works.  Help!

I remember when I was in library school, examples of real-life reference questions were hard to come by and always fascinating.  I hope these pique the interest of some students or colleagues out there.  At least they’re more interesting than most of the emails I send.