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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.

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.

For May 2006 we share highlights from the 7th Annual Virtual Reference Desk Conference, pointers to resources on instant messaging reference, and examples of virtual reference consortiums.

This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose.

WikiRef is a collaborative review of databases, books, websites, etc., that are part of the collection of Reference Resources available at or via the Butler University Libraries. It functions like a Reference User's Group that facilitates discussion between and the empowering of reference users.

Technology is transforming the way in which researchers gain access to archives, not only in the choices archivists make about their uses of technology but in the portable technologies researchers bring with them to the archives. This essay reviews the implications of electronic mail, instant messaging and chat, digital reference services, Web sites, scanners, digital cameras, folksonomies, and various adaptive technologies in facilitating archival access. The new machines represent greater, even unprecedented, opportunities for archivists to support one of the main elements of their professional mission, namely, getting archival records used.

Connotea [1] is a free online reference management and social bookmarking service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group [2]. While somewhat experimental in nature, Connotea already has a large and growing number of users, and is a real, fully functioning service [3]. The label 'experimental' is not meant to imply that the service is any way ephemeral or esoteric, rather that the concept of social bookmarking itself and the application of that concept to reference management are both recent developments. Connotea is under active development, and we are still in the process of discovering how people will use it. In addition to Connotea being a free and public service, the core code is freely available under an open source license [4].

Our profession has been talking a lot lately about centralization of cataloging efforts, digital library efforts, and even IT services. In retrospect, the conversation about centralized reference services was a bit premature, but a new distributed—but as yet unmanaged—infrastructure seems to be emerging. (Perhaps a new cottage industry opportunity?)

So I was in a OhioLINK meeting yesterday, and one of the committee members told me that her colleague, Andrew Whitis, had gotten a meebome widget to work with Pidgin. They use Pidgin instead of Trillian to connect to multiple IM clients. Being able to connect to the meebome widget through my IM client sounded like a dream come true, so I decided to check it out. For libraries who staff IM with Trillian, a Meebome widget with meebo, and skype with skype, logging into to three different things can be quite the ordeal. Even NASA doesn’t have to start as many programs when launching the shuttle. I’ve written before about using multiple clients, so this seems to help get rid of the need to log into meebo. I downloaded and installed this plugin, and thus far it seems to be working great.  Here’s what I did. 

Get acquainted with Twitter, a social networking application that is finding traction in the online communication world.