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Professor Nov, an information systems expert, produced a nice data point that seems to be methodologically sound, covering eight different motivations for contributing to Wikipedia.

The intrinsic motivations in the list may add a bit of extra incentive, but the main goal is to get one's point of view heard.

If the point of reference service is to help people find the information resources they want or need, then the technological environment should help to dictate what a service should look like.

ibraries will need to provide a mix of services via a range of methods:

It would make more sense to play to our strengths: concerns about evaluation and quality of information sources, sophisticated tools and techniques for searching, understanding the nature of users, their communities, their needs and situations, compiling and organizing and packaging information resources for their use, helping them to understand how to help themselves and how to use and evaluate information. These, the goals and motivations for reference librarians for over a century, would lead us to a school of reference librarianship less focused on the answers to specific questions and more on providing assistance and support to people with more detailed, more demanding, more comprehensive information needs of all kinds, from the personal to the professional, from the mundane to the cosmic.

In this article we will identify resources for locating faculty blogs, identify some well-regarded faculty blogs worthy of review, and discuss how faculty blogs can benefit academic librarians and why we should be reading them as part of our regular keeping up routine. Our goal is to encourage our academic librarian colleagues to add more faculty blogs to their regular regimen of blog reading.

In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

The goal of the Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse Project (DREW) is to create a large database of reference transactions so that researchers might better understand the process and then create tools for measurement and evaluation that managers of reference services could employ.

VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

his site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any CMS system here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

Wesabe is a community site that makes managing your money easy. Enjoy secure access to all your accounts, painless tools for taking control of your money and reaching your goals, and members’ tips and discussions to help you find the best values.