Friday, May 4, 2007

Radical Reference - Jenna Freedman & Eric Goldhagen


Summary & My Thoughts: This session was an introduction to the Radical Reference Service http://radicalreference.info/ and the technology it uses to operate it’s online presence. I love the idea of this service and their efforts to not only operate a website but get out in the street and into communities to support activists and information seekers. While attempting to support activists they seek to create an authoritative site that librarians and information seekers will trust & utilize. It seems to coincide with the social software and increasing communication movement that is a major online trend. RSS Feeds/Email updates, Wikis, and other aspects of 2.0 have been included in their website to offer a high level of communication and interaction with site users.

They use open source software as a technological basis; Eric advocated for libraries and others to use these tools to increase collaboration, free access, etc… while also offering tips and ideas for getting started and using these resources successfully. He displayed links to lots of useful information on this topic and a slide that demonstrated open source tools that may replace different types of proprietary software that I found particularly helpful.

Tools Mentioned:
Open Office, Drupal, Ubuntu, and more, check out the presentation link online at http://radicalreference.info/jenna/masslibassn

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