or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk


Tips for Blogging

   July 15th, 2010 Brian Herzog

[Insert Exciting Blog Entry Here]This has been a busy week at the reference desk (lots of people looking for school summer reading books). I didn't have any great ideas for today's post, so I thought I'd go meta - a blog post about blogging.

Here are a whole bunch of links I've been collecting that offer tips on blogging, or blogging better, or running a blog in general. Some of them are for personal blogs, but they apply pretty well to writing for a library website.

I suppose I should read them instead of just sharing them, but it's a start:

From iLibrarian:

From Librarian in Black:

From David Lee King:



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Wireless Network Handout

   May 26th, 2009 Brian Herzog

wi-fiHere's a new little handout to show patrons (and staff) the basics on how to connect to the library's wireless network. Feel free to modify* and use it if you like.

The handouts are designed to be a third of a page, with Windows instructions on one side and Mac instructions on the other:

Since the beginning of the year, I've been noticing more and more people asking for help connecting to the network. It wasn't that our network was problematic - the patrons just seemed like first-time laptop owners, and had no idea how to connect.

We have a more hardcore troubleshooting handout, instructing people to use ip config to release and renew their ip numbers, but that was definitely overkill for these patrons. They needed something plain and simple, that showed the basic steps to search for and connect to networks.

But of course, plain and simple is tricky, since there are so many brands and operating systems out there. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on making this better, or post a link to your own handout in the comments section.

And thank you to Jessamyn for writing the Mac portion - it would have only been half as useful without your help.


*I usually do little handouts like this in PowerPoint, because I already have templates setup - sorry for the amateur desktop publishing



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