Join us for an RML Rendezvous this Wednesday, April 30 at 1:00 pm Pacific Time (2:00 Mountain Time, 12:00 Alaska Time). There’s no need to RSVP. We’ll see you online! To connect to the Rendezvous, go to http://webmeeting.nih.gov/rendezvous at the appointed time. Please sign in with your full name.

Working Together Apart: Online Collaborative Workspaces

Learn about new ways to manage group projects when face-to-face meetings are not possible and e-mail is not practical. Topics covered will include wikis, document sharing, instant messaging, and Microsoft SharePoint. We will also discuss organizational culture issues that can hinder effective online collaboration. After the session, participants will have access to a course wiki they can use to experiment with these new technologies and continue the conversation about how to implement them in our workplaces.

UPDATE 5/6/08: The recording of this Rendezvous is now available, and there’s some interesting conversation happening on the course wiki. Access to the wiki is by invitation only, but contact Alison and she will happily invite you.

Geeks Bearing Gifts is a course designed to get you thinking about how new and evolving web technologies can transform your library’s services and your own professional development. Geeks will be offered at beautiful Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington on Thursday, March 27 from 8:30 to noon. The course is approved for 4 hours of MLA CE credit.

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Does your web content suck? If not, maybe it should.

Web usability pioneer Jared Spool delivered the keynote address “Why Good Content Must Suck: Designing for the Scent of Information” at the Online Northwest 25^th Annual Conference last Friday in Corvallis, Oregon. Here are some key points from Spool’s presentation. Keep these concepts in mind when developing your own web content or evaluating third party web resources for your library.

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Have you ever wondered which blogs (other than the Dragonfly, of course) you should be reading? What about new journal articles? Podcasts? LibWorm can help you decide where to focus your attention. LibWorm is a search engine for library-related RSS* feeds. Feeds are organized into useful categories such as Medical Librarianship, Academic Libraries, and even Humor. You can subscribe to a whole category or browse for individual sources. A simple search box lets you get a quick sense of what the “blogosphere” has to say about a topic. You can even generate custom RSS feeds based on your searches. (more…)