The Biblio File

Michael Stephens has an interesting post at the ALA TechSource blog on a presentation he attened on SMS reference. The presenters were Beth Stahr and Angela Dunnington from Southeastern Louisianna University, and they said that even though the number of questions received during the 2005-2006 academic year were relatively low, (84) Stephens reports that

Even with the low numbers, the librarians were positive about the service and believed it had a place in their library. They offered that the service needs to be marketed – and sustained and repeated as students come and go.

I emailed Beth to find out what service they use, which she said is Altarama. I also asked her if they kinds of questions they recieved were the kind that could be answered via a text message, and she said they can almost always be answered in the 160 character limit, and were mostly directional in scope.

For the money, this seems like a (relatively) inexpensive way to add another service level.

Lifehacker reports on a way to get your feeds sent to your cell phone via SMS. Pretty sweet, but I’d have to be pretty selective about what feeds I did this with. Would hate to see the bill for 1000 text messages each month.