Minnesota's seasons - winter and construction. We're almost finished designing a new library home page that should launch before long. By the end of the summer we'll have some new organization for many second-level pages as well.
Social networking software has been getting a lot of attention lately, from Library Thing to the ubiquitous Wikipedia. Historian Roy Rosenzweig has just published some interesting ideas on "open source history" and Nature, the prestigious science journal, mulls over turning peer review over to the "wisdom of the crowds." Of course, one could argue libraries and scholarly work have always been about social networking - from the conversations that happen around the new books shelf to the books themselves that draw ideas from one another.
Speaking of social software, we'll be trying out chat reference next fall. We love the face-to-face interactions we have with students at the reference desk, but sometimes they may have a quick question that we can answer more conveniently. Quite a few of the libraries that have adopted instant messaging clients for reference questions chat with students who are in the library; they just don't want to give up their seat at a computer.
If you have questions over the summer you can always contact us the old fashioned way - by e-mail.
