The veteran chat reference librarian

Congratulations to Luke Rosenberger, who notes today that he's officially completed 10,000 chat reference sessions while working for Tutor.com! I've been chatting 2-4 hours a week here at Baruch College since we launched our chat reference service in March 2001 (yes, it will be five years in a few weeks), and although our service is pretty busy (10-15 chat sessions a day), I know I'm not even close to 10,000 sessions.

Keep up the great work, Luke, and keep sharing what you've learned!

Wikis for the rest of us

If you're a bit intimidated by the prospect of setting up a wiki, you might want to consider PBwiki, which is incredibly easy to launch. It is also free, requires no installation on local servers, and offers password-protection for your wiki (if you so desire). I've now used it to set up six different wikis:

1. a reference handbook for our library staff to record our collective wisdom about library policies, resources, and all the tidbits of local knowledge that never seem to get written down otherwise (password protected to read and edit)
   
2. a wiki about interesting technologies that my colleagues and I use to share links, ideas, and thoughts about all the new developments we're stumbling across (password protected to read and edit)
3. a wiki for the web oversight committee I'm on that is working on a redesign of our library web site (password protected to read and edit)
4. a wiki for the Virtual Reference Special Interest Group that I am a co-convenor of (publicly viewable, password protected to edit)
   
5. a wiki for a workshop on wikis that I and a colleague from the library at LaGuardia Community College will be doing next month (password protected to read and edit)
6. a personal wiki where I can post drafts of my master's essay for my advisor to download, thereby freeing up his e-mail from messages from me with huge attachments (password protected to read and edit)

If you're intrigued, check out the PBwiki tour.