New ideas

A couple of weeks after the all-day planning session at work, I'm still dealing with too many ideas all at once and haven't had time to process much. That might be why I haven't been posting here, but the other strong possibility is that I've just been busy during the days and lazy when I get home from work.

One idea that came up and that I'm very interested in is creating web-based tutorials. My gut instinct is to go with short bits of streaming audio and/or video, rather than using any sort of sophisticated software. I'm hoping to invest some time to go over various options soon. In the meantime, it was a pleasant surprise to come across a post at The Ubiquitous Librarian about using YouTube to create a video channel, rather than just individual tutorials. I'll definitely revisit this post when I start exploring more in-depth.

The other big idea, which is way overdue, is to start offering IM reference at the desk. I'm in the process of pulling together a quick overview of the various IM clients and the multi-network clients like Trillian and Meebo. Again, right when I was thinking about the subject, I read a couple of posts about the new Meebo Me widget that can be embedded in a webpage. I posted about it and added the widget to my other blog. I haven't figured out if the widget could be useful for the department as a whole just yet. I might look into adding it to the library blog, but we'll see.