LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

This week, I'm going to mention a few blogs you'll probably want to keep up with if you're interested in keeping up with what's new in the world of virtual reference:

If you only had to choose one blog to follow on this topic, I'd say the obvious choice would be Caleb Tucker-Raymond's blog. Caleb is the coordinator for L-Net, which is the collaborative virtual reference service in Oregon. They use QuestionPoint, but Caleb writes about every virtual reference option in the spectrum. I've learned a lot from his blog.

Here are a few other librarians who frequently write about virtual reference:

• Informational - by Char Booth, who writes a good deal about video virtual reference
• Digital Reference - by Stephen Francoeur, an academic librarian in NYC. If I had to pick just two blogs on this topic, this would be the second. Stephen doesn't post too often, but it's almost always about virtual reference (and all aspects). I frequently get very good ideas from his posts.
• Walking Paper - by Aaron Schmidt, one of the first people who strongly promoted IM reference in public libraries (back when it was a really radical idea). He doesn't post as much as he used to, but many of his posts are still about IM reference and are quite interesting.
• Distant Librarian - Paul Pival was a distance learning librarian for a very long time, so he's really focused on technologies to meet the needs of remote learners. While he writes about a bit of everything, he frequently highlights interesting new technologies that librarians could be using for virtual reference (particularly in the chat widget and co-browsing arenas). He is always finding cool applications I've never heard about before and neat things you can do with tools I'm already using. His blog is definitely one of the most useful I'm subscribed to.