Bio-Med Reference

Welcome!

Welcome to the Bio-Med reference blog! It is my hope that this reference desk blog will can help us communicate about our reference services at Bio-Med (and at Vet Med -- we'll keep track of proceedings on this blog there as well).

For those who aren't acquainted with what a blog is, and why we might use it, think of a blog as a web-based journal. You can create an entry -- for example, a note that a nursing class has been coming in looking for information on elder care, and we have this list of resources available -- and publish it on the blog. Then the rest of us can visit the blog's web page (which you are looking at) and see that posting, and/or we can arrange to have the new blog entries arrive in any of our email accounts.

Exchanging information via this blog has a couple of advantages I hope we'll take advantage of:

• If we have the blog open at the desk, we can quickly refer to it as needed at the desk, instead of having to open and hunt through our email to find the note we're looking for.
• Since much of the information we exchange is of long-lasting value, the search function of the blog software will likely come very much in handy (again, without trying to hunt something down in Eudora amidst all the other emails).
• You can read or add to the blog at the reference desk, in your office, at home, or even while on vacation in Hawaii! (Though if you do the latter, you can expect to be roundly ridiculed...)
• We may (I have to experiment) be able to share selected blog entries with other library units that have similar reference blogs. Why do this? Well, for example, the entry I wrote several days ago on the St. Paul reference blog about some of our ASM journals being down could have shown up on the Bio-Med blog as well, so that y'all knew what was going on there as well. Lots of other examples of shared interests.

I'd encourage everyone to either:

1. read the blog at the beginning of their reference shift, or
2. get the blog entries emailed to you

Since I hope and suspect most of us will get the entries emailed to us, we'll probably want to avoid writing an entry in the blog, and then going to Eudora and sending the same thing by email ;-)

In either case, you might want to keep the "post an entry" web page open throughout your shift in case you want to post something. The URL for the "post entry" management pages, along with our username/password will be sent out by email to you all, posted at the desk, and bookmarked at the desk (or ask me if you can't find it).

Any reference info or questions (e.g., using indexes, or "why do people keep asking about surface tension? We're tense enough already!") or computer issues that you come across, and think would be of general interest, are fair game for entries. Don't be shy about posting!

Below (that is, my previous post) are some instructions for creating a blog entry, and for getting email notifications. Have fun!

- Kevin

Posted by biomedref at February 17, 2004 02:32 PM