All Things Electronic
As I mentioned, in her first lecture Professor Joyce Chen opened our eyes to the abundance of open access resources available from Taiwanese sources. Well, she prefaced her second day of remarks with an addition to her initial presentation that took the form of an entire page of links to open access Chinese dictionaries. Accessible from this page, there are both standard Chinese-Chinese dictionaries as well as more specialized ones, including a dictionary of Chinese proverbs that is searchable in English and even includes a tiny bit of help in English for that function. The focus of her talk was the many digitization projects that originate in Taiwan. Taiwan Baseball 101 is both fun and technologically impressive, as are the National Digital Archives, which include an English interface. How many digital archive projects in North American include a Chinese interface?
The UW's Tim Jewell and Diane Grover continued to share their experience with us in the concluding installment of their two-part lecture on licensing and managing electronic resources. Despite having a lot of territory to cover in order to give us a crash course in their topic, they were generous in allowing us to interrupt frequently with numerous questions.
Nancy Huling, UW Libraries' head of reference, introduced us to virtual reference in the afternoon. In keeping with the high standards of these Institute classes, she had planned her material carefully. First had scheduled a colleague to send her an instant message early on in her lecture, which allowed her to demonstrate the Meebo service, a free web tool that federates IMs from numerous services and one that we also use for IM reference at NYU. She also demonstrated OCLC's QuestionPoint service, both its e-mail functionality (which we also use at NYU, although we do not cooperate in its use with other libraries, as UW does) and its new Qwidget chat widget. Here again she had a colleague ready in the chatroom so we could see an almost-real-world example of its use. Finally, she passed around the printed text of an e-mail reference transaction that had gone somewhat awry, which was an excellent way for us to learn the potential pitfalls of cyber-reference.
Our day culminated with another exciting vendor demonstration. We saw e-collections of Chinese yearbooks, newspapers, e-books, and reference books, and then were given monthlong trial accounts in each one. Yet another great takeaway that I look forward to enjoying myself and sharing with faculty. Even nonreaders of Chinese will be blown away by the cool newspaper reading software, which emulates the experience of flipping through a real print newspaper and includes the option of listening to background music while you do!
The UW's Tim Jewell and Diane Grover continued to share their experience with us in the concluding installment of their two-part lecture on licensing and managing electronic resources. Despite having a lot of territory to cover in order to give us a crash course in their topic, they were generous in allowing us to interrupt frequently with numerous questions.
Nancy Huling, UW Libraries' head of reference, introduced us to virtual reference in the afternoon. In keeping with the high standards of these Institute classes, she had planned her material carefully. First had scheduled a colleague to send her an instant message early on in her lecture, which allowed her to demonstrate the Meebo service, a free web tool that federates IMs from numerous services and one that we also use for IM reference at NYU. She also demonstrated OCLC's QuestionPoint service, both its e-mail functionality (which we also use at NYU, although we do not cooperate in its use with other libraries, as UW does) and its new Qwidget chat widget. Here again she had a colleague ready in the chatroom so we could see an almost-real-world example of its use. Finally, she passed around the printed text of an e-mail reference transaction that had gone somewhat awry, which was an excellent way for us to learn the potential pitfalls of cyber-reference.
Our day culminated with another exciting vendor demonstration. We saw e-collections of Chinese yearbooks, newspapers, e-books, and reference books, and then were given monthlong trial accounts in each one. Yet another great takeaway that I look forward to enjoying myself and sharing with faculty. Even nonreaders of Chinese will be blown away by the cool newspaper reading software, which emulates the experience of flipping through a real print newspaper and includes the option of listening to background music while you do!
