LISNews: Librarian News

This week's program brings a telephone interview with author Dan Flynn of FlynnFiles.com who wrote a piece at The American Spectator that was commented upon by The Annoyed Librarian. After that there are a couple examples provided by federal agencies of how not to do public service announcements. There is no news miscellany this week and there is a bit of an explanation as to what went wrong one way or another.

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The new issue of code4lib as a interesting article "Tools for Reducing and Managing Link Rot in LibGuides".

From abstract

"This article describes tools for managing links in SpringShare’s LibGuides, a popular web platform for libraries. LibGuides includes a built-in link checker for only some links. Instructions are provided on how to run an automated link checker on all links within a single guide. Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), hyperlinks which are maintained centrally and rarely break, are recommended for library electronic resources. Special consideration is given to the fact that many libraries using the LibGuides platform may not have easy access to in-house information technology (IT) personnel. A method is presented for implementing PURLs entirely within the LibGuides platform."

The automated link checker suggested is Xenu Xenu Link Sleuth which is fairly well known though clear instructions are given.

The second part of the article using LibGuides “Redirect URL" feature coupled with "Friendly URL" feature is pretty clever though, allowing you to create a PURL using just Libguides.

Full article here

http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/7019

Aaron Tay

We were expecting this after it was announced Google bought over Meebo, but here's final confirmation.

Of interest to librarians, Meebo Messenger, Meebo Me, Meebo Mobile Apps will be shutting down July 11th, 2012. All embeded widgets will stop working and you can download all chat logs at https://www.meebo.com/chatlog-download by July 11, 2012.

For more details see http://www.meebo.com/support/article/175/

Meebo Bar will continue but I don't think many libraries use it. Meebo Me widgets of course are used by many libraries to provide IM reference support.

Other free chat widget alternatives exist including AIM, Chatango, Plugoo , Gtalk etc. 

EDIT : Others I see mentioned include Zoho Chat, ChatWing,  Digsby  , Spark 

Depending on your needs you could get away with free accounts on Zopim, Olark etc though you probably will need to pay if you use the service heavily. -- Read More

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