Libri & Libertas

fivebooks.com - great collection development / RA resource

2010-11-23T11:21:00.001-08:00

Five Books compiles expert recommendations for the best five books in all kinds of fields: Nordic crime fiction, cookbooks, Chinese politics. I checked out the areas I know well, and the contributors are really quite eminent. It's a great way to get started with a topic.

On-the-fly web guides

2010-11-16T13:14:00.000-08:00

bit.ly bundles

Lifehacker featured a new service offered by the URL shortening service bit.ly. You can assemble a list of URLs, rearrange and rename them, and sent them on as a single, simple URL. It sounds perfect for on-the-fly creation of custom research guides

during instruction sessions,
to summarize a virtual reference session, or
for patrons who rely on their phones for web access.

2010-06-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

Old issues of National Geographic, that bane of collection development, can actually have a use after all - as shelves.

Diversity in YA Cover Art

2010-02-07T10:33:00.000-08:00

The blogosphere has had an ongoing controversy over the cover images chosen to represent characters of color in young adult novels - most recently at Feministe, but also, and extensively, at Alas, A Blog. At issue is not just the fact that not only are people of color rarely represented in the text of young adult fiction. On top of that, when non-white protagonists do appear, they are too often "whitewashed" - depicted as white in the cover art.

How can librarians develop a collection that speaks to and about young people of color - without accepting whitewashing?

One possibility is to buy alternate editions of the books with more accurate cover images. In the Feministe post linked above, blogger Chally shows the UK and Australian editions of affected books. Neither of the alternate editions clearly shows characters of color, but at least they don't replace those characters with white people. However, foreign editions are more expensive, and may not always be an option.

I'm not sure I have an answer, but readers do judge books by their covers, and inclusive, accurate covers are an issue in developing an inclusive collection.

#onw2010 Using Technology to Reach More Students in Tough Times

2010-02-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

An Analysis on Five Semesters of Data Connecting Students with the Information Literacy Skills They Need to Complete their Assignments
Steve Borrelli & Alex Merrill, Washington State University

How do we respond to enrollment increases with steady staff levels?

Students' main points of contact with the library are the reference desk and the one-shot instruction sessions. The one-shot session is inadequate.

Too much info to absorb
Not enough time to cover everything
No assessment (without cooperation from faculty)
Often poorly timed related to assignment schedule
Students are absent from session and miss their one chance
No opportunity to develop rapport
Difficult for students to apply what they learned (often not enough time inside the session)
Unrealistic expectations from instructors
Widely varying levels of student experience in any one session
Students' inaccurate assumptions of their own competence

"The one shot is not information literacy. It's a familiarization exercise that can serve as a doorway into information literacy."

WSU set 6 goals for the BA, 1 of which was information literacy. Faculty actually targeted specific courses in majors as the place of intervention for IL instruction. This was supported by President Obama, and complemented by a CMS (Angel) for every course, making hybrid learning the norm.

For librarians, hybrid learning means

Multiple opportunities to reach students
Creation of content & assignments for courses
Providing online resources that allow to reach more classes

WSU increased the number of students receiving library instruction by 62% from 2006 to 2008, mostly through online interactions.

WSU uses ILE - Information Literacy Education Learning Environment. This was developed in-house, by a librarian, student employee, and IT staff member. It's a flexible tool for collaborative assignment design, that is not itself a tutorial but draws on tutorials available on the free web. This allows it cover a much wider range of topics than a single house-made tutorial.

The classes are designed to inform students what they need to do, educate them with tutorials, assess their learning with multiple choice quizzes, and asses their ability to transfer the information with short answer questions.

As a librarian adds tutorials, they also add quiz questions. Each class in ILE defaults to 4 modules, corresponding to the required proficiencies.
Each tutorial has associated quiz question banks, which the system draws out to create a single unified quiz for the class. Which questions are used is randomized. The quiz bank also shows how students did on the question in the past, giving a benchmark to compare a single class's performance to. You can also create custom questions for a specific class. Custom settings include how many attempts the students can make, due dates, etc.
When students log in, they can register for the class. Then they see the list of assignments (including pre-tests). They work through the modules of tutorials - instructions and learning objects. The essay portion has a WYSIWYG editor and autosaves.

The advantages of this approach is that it allows for rapid customization, using the best available learning objects, and builds in assessment data that the library can examine and respond to.

The library having an in-house system provides stability when the entire campus shifts CMSs. The tight focus on just a few features allows it to be easier to use at those specific tasks. But the general idea could be implemented in any LMS.

Total cost was approximately $24,000, grant funded. Early drafts of the tool encouraged large later donations.

In the courses that used the system, 82% of the students used ILE. As of this week, 1401 students participated just this semester.

In some classes, particularly huge large lectures, ILE is the only method of instruction. For other classes, like 300-level history or English composition, librarians grade assignments and/or provide in-person instruction. For basic composition, the tutorial covers the basics of library services, so that the librarian knows going in what the strengths and needs are. Another customized possibility is to customize the tutorials offered depending on which questions the student got wrong in a pre-test.

Students did the best at questions related to evaluating information, and the worst at accessing information (a statistically significant different). This suggests that the reason sources like Wikipedia show up in Works Cited are not that the students inaccurately evaluate them, but because they don't know how to find anything better.

Within the question categories: In evaluation, the students did best at distinguishing between primary and secondary sources, and worst at identifying services by name. The implication is that we shouldn't be cute in naming catalogs or IRs. [LCC is doing well at this - our catalog is just the catalog; LibGuides are labeled as Research Guides.] In ethics, the students did best at fair use, and again worst at name recognition and local knowledge.

In sum, the contributions of ILE are to reach more students in more classes, and providing better assessment data to understand the students.

****

Part of what this custom interface provides is stability in the face of shifts between WebCt, Blackboard, Angel, etc. Lane CC seems to be stable with Moodle, so the custom interface probably isn't as useful to us. How can we take advantage of this concept without reinventing our interfaces?

#onw2010 Web Traffic & Campus Trends: A Multi-Institutional Analysis

2010-02-05T13:41:00.000-08:00

Jon Jablonski, University of Oregon (soon to be UC Santa Barbara)
Robin Paynter, Portland State University
Laura Zeigen, Oregon Health & Science University

The project evolved from the Orbis Cascade Alliance Research Interest Group. All three universities had web traffic data, which raised the question of whether different university types would have different traffic patterns. The existing library literature didn't establish comparisons or benchmarks, and Google Analytics's library benchmarks doesn't indicate which or what type of libraries.

Many different methods can be used to analysis web logs. Most existing research uses conceptual frameworks, an inductive method so far mostly used on OPAC searches.

This project is a transaction log analysis (not a search log analysis). Common measures include number of hits, unique visitors, page views, etc. Remember that hits includes each different component of a page (images, etc.), and so has been discredited. Also remember that page views includes refreshing, but that pages from Back and Forward aren't counted because they're loaded from cache. Dynamic IP addresses and computers with multiple users complicate the measure of "unique" visitors.

The good part of web log data is that it is a direct behavioral measure - users can't idealize their own behavior. The bad part is that it doesn't tell you about intention or satisfaction.

Cookies are a good source of data, but users often delete them. Flash cookies are more durable.

RSS feeds aren't counted in web logs unless the user clicks through; campus portals and mobile device versions may or may not be counted. And different analysis packages give different results, because they handle corrupted data in the log files differently.

Public library computers with the library page as the home site inflate the page views count.

What are the key performance indicators for library websites? Most current benchmarks are focused on commercial sites, which isn't accurate. For example, is a short time on the site good, because that means that people found what they needed, or is a long time good because they're more engaged. More unique visitors might be better for September, and more return visitors in April. Different library staff have different interests: designers might want to know which browser is being used, but librarians are more likely to want to know paths.

OHSU logs show that the number of new users per month increased steadily from 2005-2008, peaking each year in February and May.

This project's data only includes basic web traffic - not the OPAC, digital collections, databases, or institutional repositories. This highlights that library websites are portals to other types of sites. For example, the UO Library homepage has 42-47 links, and 6 link off the site (catalog, main UO page, etc.)

Comparisons Across Institutions (2008-2009 academic year)
The 3 have very different calendars of traffic. UO and PSU have almost the same enrollment, but UO has much more traffic (nearly 2 million a month versus around 325,000 a month). UO's traditional students show more extreme peaks and valleys for spring and winter break. OHSU is more steady around the year.
Comparing this data to research on journal use shows similar patterns in time and across institution type.
Comparing on visits per days of the week shows more similarity - peaks on Monday and Tuesday, declining steadily to a nadir on Saturday with an uptick on Sunday.
At PSU, 79% of traffic was to top-level pages (home, "About", etc); at UO, it was 57%; at OHSU it was only 14%. OHSU has a very long tail of content - the pages deep inside their website get much more of the traffic. PSU's pattern is due to an active attempt to take no more than 3 clicks to get to needed information. This difference could be due the number of public terminals with the library's page as home: there are many more of these at PSU and UO.
Over the quarter, PSU has high use early in the quarter, drops to nearly nothing at mid quarter, and peaks at the end of the quarter. OHSU is very consistent across the quarter. UO shows consistent use across the quarter, except for graduation week and the week after.
Some of the difference may be due to different software analyzing the raw log data.

Conclusions
This can point to needed services. For example, PSU had a lot of hits on its map finding aid, but has no map librarian.
UO showed a lot of use of its electronic Asian books. Are there similar hidden gems?
This could also be a guide to service provision - for example, mid-quarter might be a fine time for PSU librarians to take a vacation.

#onw2010 Embracing Your Inner Rachel Ray: What TV Chefs can Teach Librarians about Presentation Style

2010-02-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

Anna Johnson, Mt. Hood Community College

This session will include clips from FoodTV!

When, how, and from whom did librarians learn public speaking skills?
Nearly all of us facilitate trainings, demonstrate resources, and teach to groups, but almost none of us took public speaking or acting classes.
How would you feel if you needed to demonstrate a new database in 30 minutes? A few would be enthusiastic, but most would be hesitant. Public speaking as one's self (not acting a character) is an emotional experience.

Most librarians are closer to Ben Stein than Rachel Ray, although instruction librarians get closer. Personality can shape our career focus, but all of us can improve our public speaking.

Television cooking shows rely on both personality and structure - the shows are demonstrations. Typical library presentations also last about 30 minutes. Both chefs and librarians have years of experience and are experts on their subjects, and we're also able to teach other people what we know, step-by-step, energetically and enthusiastically.

Personality
1) Energy, enthusiasm, and/or passion for the topic
Rachel Ray is able to be fun and enthusiastic about nothing. Sometimes she's got to kill time during preparation, but the energy stays high.

2)Willingness to share your own personal feelings and experiences
This makes us more accessible and relatable. Personal stories can also fill dead air, like in between one-on-one assistance. For example, tell them what you personally have checked out from Summit.

3) Expert knowledge from getting paid to do what you love
Our audience already knows that we're expert - that's why they come to workshops. Don't waste time establishing expertise.

4) Ability to explain what you're doing while you're doing it
This either comes naturally or it doesn't. For people who struggle with public speaking, this is a challenge - how to both do something and narrate it simultaneously.

Structure
1) Let the audience know why they should care about this skill and do it themselves.
2) Explain what you're doing and why - and what to avoid
Include explanations about how to rescue from problems.
3) Prepare examples ahead of time
On-the-fly searches are good for engaging an audience, but require intense familiarity with database/catalog being searched. We have to be open to stopping the middle of a presentation to scale appropriately. For example, zoom into the important part of a screen using Control+.
4) Be prepared to skip steps to maximize your time (like a chef's mise-en-place).

Q&A

What about students who are required to be at a workshop (can't change the channel)?

Try to find a connection; relate it to their class.

What about when you don't know the baseline knowledge of the audience?

We still need to own our structure: don't let their level of knowledge derail you. This is where preparing helps; you can refer people to different sources.
A participant suggests using a quick SurveyMonkey question sent out ahead of time to gauge knowledge level.

What about presenting to faculty - can we assume they respect the expert knowledge?

Depends on whether they've invited you (which is easier) or you're hosting an open house. Projecting confidence and owning your own expert knowledge establishes expertise. Confidence helps you be fun.
A participant points out that developing a connection with faculty over repeated interactions as a subject liaison supports their perception of expertise (like fans following a specific tv chef). Ideally subject liaisons should correspond to the librarians' experience and passions.

Don't be so concerned about being serious and cramming all the material in there. Feel free to use movie clips to make the presentation more accessible (try The Simpsons).

How can we develop different presentation personae for different audiences?

Be okay with a bit of artifice. An alternative persona can make it less intimidating to speak in front of groups.

It's okay to show mistakes and move on from failures. It helps the users see how to dig themselves out of their own mistakes and makes you more personable. Having stories prepared can also help cover dead times.

A participant reminds us to be visually interesting - use props, gesticulate. Props are fun.

How do you know when your audience is engaged?

End your presentation with where to find more information and more help. It makes it easier for them to capitalize on their own interest, but if they don't want the tools, there's only so much we can do.

Another participant suggests being enthusiastic about surprising discoveries.

How do you deal with disciplinary interruptions?

Remember that tv shows have commercial breaks. Don't do 1 thing for more than 10 minutes without shifting gears, and recap and forecast every 10 minutes. This allows for easier recovery from disruptions, and induces fewer disruptions. A participant suggests including irrelevant image slides for breathing room.

Another participant uses metaphors to persuade students that they care about the information and examples that are relevant to their own lives.

How can we as a profession help librarians develop public speaking skills?

#onw2010 Library in Your Pocket: Online Northwest Conference

2010-02-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

Kim Griggs, Hannah Gascho Rempel, (and Laurie Bridges) of Oregon State University

Show of hands indicates few libraries represented have mobile sites now.

Background data
Over 4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, but only 1 billion land lines. 85% penetration rate in the US, but it's higher in many countries. 51% of undergrads own a web-enabled phone, and another 12% plan to buy in the next year. 250 libraries use TextALibrarian. EBSCO, IEEE, and PubMed are the databases with a mobile-optimized option.

OSU Experience
They began by looking at best practices from W3C. They recommend that mobile access gets its own design - desktop/laptop design doesn't work on feature phones or smart phones. The site gets shrunken and difficult to navigate. This is especially problematic when big real estate is taken up by non-essentials (like new exhibits). Mobile users have specific interests - more immediate goals for specific pieces of information.
OSU also checked other websites, from both libraries and commercial firms. Mobile sites are not just miniature desktop sites. Mobile sites should have many fewer graphics, and more linear structures - avoid multiple columns and put the most important stuff at the top. Mobile sites have less information total. Consider how far the user is willing to scroll. Consider the differences between a feature phone and a smart phone - the optimization is different. North Carolina State University Library has an excellent example of both.
OSU saw the problem as the fact that their patrons were using their mobile phones to access the usual website, but that was cumbersome. The solution was to design a mobile-specific version.
They started with scenarios for three user groups: students, library staff, and the general public.
Based on the scenarios, they decided to include:

Time saving applications, like floor maps linked to call numbers
Location sensitive information
Native capabilities, like autodialing or videos
But not everything.

They broke the project up into stages, and defined their users. Then they identified which content to make mobile by looking at analytics, and through a poll on their desktop. They highlighted fast, easy, and fun content that would be easy to transform.

They also decided which devices to target. 85% of use is on feature phones, particularly with international students.

Key content

Hours
Ask A Librarian (chat, email, ref desk hours, phone, SMS)
Address & phone (with Google Maps)
How do I?
Where is it? (floor maps)

They then returned to scenarios. A main goal, indicated by the polling, was to connect the catalog to physical location. They also linked the available lab computers to a map, so users can figure out where to head to use a desktop right now.

There's also a mobile specific catalog interface, including reserves. The results privilege title, location (including call number), and availability. It gives the option to text or email a record.

User studies indicated that 100 users per day stayed for 4 minutes. iPhones were 75% of users.

Mobile specific URLs - multiple, guessable addresses - help users find the site, as did mobile directories, library news, and the home page.

To develop a mobile presence:
Consider the available resources.
Choices:
1) Do nothing.
2) Miniaturize using CSS.
3) Create a mobile-specific site.
A mobile-specific site has a 64% success rate. Users on mobile devices have the same limitations as users with disabilities on the standard site.

Adaptation, or multi-serving, delivers data for each device, although standards are converging. Media types in CSS offer "screen" and "handheld", both of which are used by different mobile browsers - ie, Blackberry is handheld and iPhone is screen. Screen supports more images and more complexity.

php detection algorithms can direct mobile users from the desktop site to the appropriate media type. Don't, however, force the user - allow a way back to the main site, and a way to remember that preference.

An XML file called wurfl at SourceForge can let you know the exact capability of the user's phone, which helps direct them appropriately. Allow feedback from users to improve the directions.

Content can auto-adapt with open source tools, like Wireless Abstraction Library - a mark-up language to use with wurfl. It avoids the requirement for separate copies.

There are mobile site conversion tools for libraries with less programming capability:

Google Conversion Utility
MobiSiteGalore (free)
InstantMobilizer
Drupal Mobile Tools

Another option is to use RSS feeds.

For iPhones, create a specific stylesheet. Use the tag that creates a iPhone link to add to the user's home screen.

Design Recommendations

No more than 3 clicks
Access key number for each navigation link (so no more than 10 links per page)
URLs short; only alphanumeric
Don't rely on Javascript
Minimize typing with check boxes and radio buttons
No image >80% of screen size
Use tried and true patterns
Continuously valid code with W3C mobileOK test

Since testing on every phone is impossible, start with Opera and Safari. (Be wary of online simulators.) Downloadable simulators from the iPhone, Blackberry, etc are better. You could even ask for help from a retail phone outlet - they might let you use the phones in the store.

Future services OSU plans to add include databases, room reservations, and Text A Librarian.

Q: How much content revision was required? A: Hours is based on a database, so no change, but much else was drastically trimmed.

Q: What about mobile design suggested changes for the main site? A: Nothing yet, but it probably should.

Q: What was the time frame? A: First stage: from December 2008 to March 2009; second stage by December 2009.

#onw2010 Beyond Usability to User Experience - Liveblogging Online Northwest Conference

2010-02-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

Keynote Address by Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path

This address is going from theory to practice, including hands-on.

Adaptive Path has been engaged with user experience for 10 years. Their mission is to help organizations create better user experiences, for everything from entertainment to life-saving work. They invented the word "blog" and Ajax.

User experience emerged as a discipline from the '70s and '80s, from basic functionality on mainframes to basic window-style GUI. In the '90s, Jakob Nielsen helped move the field from utility to usability. What are people used to? What are their expectations? Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things helped move the field to user experience - using analytics to track how visual changes shaped user behavior. User experience shapes the value of the technology, whether profit value or mission value.

Where are we headed? Strategy. How do we choose the right things to develop? What are the right experiences? We can't build everything; there's no such thing as 100% usability. Strategies help us choose.

Example - The first consumer electronics device was the camera, which came with detailed instructions that created barriers to entry for users. The big transition was "You press the button; we do the rest." Eastman-Kodak changed the focus from technology to pictures: only 3 steps.

Example - In 1995, airlines decided to serve frequent flyers with Internet booking. The application was designed to allow for complicated flights, or simple access for simple flights. The goal was to make sure the application was 1) understandable - do users get the point of using it? 2) usable - were they able to complete the tasks? 3) useful - would they use it themselves?
They got 1 & 2, but travelers said they wouldn't use the system. Why not? They were always flying, so they couldn't dial in and needed to rely on travel agents - no time. That's a usability failure. They decided on the wrong experience.

Expected real world value - Usually organizations account for this by comparing development costs to future value, without accounting for risks: technical failure/inability to create, and real world failure/patrons' choice to use or not use.

There's been a lot of work towards avoiding technical failure, but there's still a lot of real world failure - creation of products people don't use.

Four Experience Hacks to Increase Your Chance of Real World Success
1) Get empathy into your organization. Understand your user - who is a different person from the developer.
Typical development goes from data to logic to user interface to user experience. But users black-box from interface to experience. The experience is the product.
Spend time with target users - recruit them from Craigslist, shadow them as they use the system, or screen share for distant users. Ask, "Tell me about the last time you [did the task I'm attempting to program for]."
Learn about their behaviors and motivations - why do they do what they do? Look for how they conceive of their needs, and which needs are unmet. Ask, "Why?" Users often don't consciously know, and may need coaxing to provide their tacit assumptions.
Connect these insights to organizational objectives.
2) Define experiences users will have. Good experiences are sometimes fun (depending on the product), sometimes simple (but not for tastemakers). Think about the brand - how do we look and feel? How do we talk? A style guide keeps the organization's visual brand consistent, but very few organizations think about how they interact. But answering the question, "How do we interact?" creates consistent experience principles. TiVo is an example of a company that did this consistently, as did Google Calender.
Good experience principles are memorable, like a mantra; inspirational for the team; and differentiating, addressing an unmet need.
Kahneman's research in economics shows that people remember the peak (high or low) and the end of their experiences. The average of the total experience is less relevant. It pays off to figure out the one absolute best part, and end strong.
3) Have lots of ideas, in the right places. Ideas are cheap. We think we're inspired, like Newton with his apple. (see The Myths of Innovation) Avoid getting stuck on the first good idea - keep brainstorming before hammering out details. There are a lot of different ways to solve the same problem. Typically, if people brainstorm 6 ideas, the fourth is the best. We typically focus on what we know, putting together the obvious that's similar to the past. Things we don't understand get avoided during the prototyping/design period, and are then ignored. Design the thing you understand least first.
4) Return to the user's context often. How do you know if you're succeeding? Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers argues that people choose by comparison to what they already have, simplicity, and ability to test it out and see others using it. Try a reversible pilot for a trial period. Do a dry run of one with a single potential user.

E-Book Privacy

2009-12-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a handy guide to reader privacy on e-book platforms, including the Kindle, the Nook, and Google Books.

Take the EFF's assessment of the Nook with a grain of salt: Barnes & Noble hasn't actually shipped any Nooks yet, so they've based their guide on the general B&N privacy policy.

And these guidelines may operate differently for libraries. For example, readers are less likely to be signed in to their personal accounts when using library computers for browsing than when at home. My guess would be that makes any data collected at libraries more aggregated and therefore more individually private. There's a difference between knowing which e-books are in a library's collection and which e-books a specific person searches and reads.

Still, patron privacy is an important value, and we should consider it when choosing devices and providers.

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - Stop it!

2009-11-04T10:01:00.000-08:00

The US is currently involved in global negotiations in Seoul on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great overview of ACTA, as well as discussion of recently leaked proposed text.

The most glaring problem with this treaty is that it forces Internet service providers to monitor their users for copyrighted content, and then cut off Internet service entirely for repeat offenders. ISPs are typically a local monopoly, and they have a commercial interest in pushing paid content over public domain, Creative Commons, or other user-created content. They are poor guardians of free speech and the intellectual commons.

Here's a copy of the letter I sent today to the White House. Feel free to use it to send your own letter.

Dear President Obama,

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement currently being negotiated in South Korea is terrible for America and must be stopped.

I am appalled at the gross restrictions on innovation, privacy, and free speech this proposed treaty represents. This draconian regime would crush one of the most resilient sectors of our economy, by requiring unsustainable levels of monitoring by growing services such as Facebook and Flickr. By putting enforcement in the hands of Internet service providers - local monopolies - ACTA would have a chilling effect on free speech online.

Moreover, it is appalling that your administration attempted to conduct these negotiations in secret. Not only do citizens have a right to know what their representatives are doing in their name, but it was also inevitable in this Information Age that the contents of the treaty would leaked internationally. The absurd naivete of this "secret" demonstrates the negotiators' rank unfitness to regulate Internet communications.

I urge you and members of your Administration to stand up for Americans' rights and for innovative industries, and scrap all of the Internet provisions of ACTA.

Sincerely,
Laura Wimberley

ACRL Member of the Week: Me!

2009-08-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

The ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) orientation for new members was one of the most useful events at ALA. It's where I met Mary Jane Petrowski, ACRL's Associate Director, who invited me to submit a profile for their Member of the Week feature. So here I am!

Filling out the profile was nerve-wracking. I'm still establishing the content of my professional identity - I didn't feel ready to sum it up in a snappy package for the whole profession! But I'm happy with the result, and Mary Jane's enthusiasm was really encouraging.

The way we were

2009-07-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

Patrons can still hand-write their literature search requests on paper forms at my library, if that's their preference, but we're a lot faster than thirty days. Then again, we're not using print indices and card catalogs to do the searches.

Still, this is pretty. Can the Google homepage look like letterpress?

This is all over the web without citation now, so it's hard to tell, but my best guess is that this first appeared at Boomerang.

#ala2009 And some fun

2009-07-18T15:01:00.000-07:00

In case you think all I did was take frantic notes -

I also hit up the Open Gaming Night (third pic down is me rocking "Blitzkrieg Bop" on Rock Band) and met Neil Gaiman for a signing.

What else can you ask for from a conference?

#ala2009 Liveblogging OCLC QuestionPoint User Group Meeting

2009-07-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 12, 1:30 - 3:00PM at ALA Annual in Chicago

Susan McGlamery & Jeff Penka, OCLC Staff Members - QuestionPoint Service Update

Virtual reference is a way to open many doors to the library. This is a multi-stage process.

Qwidget Evolution - moving into first gen production for August production. Contemporary look and feel with fully customizable CSS color choices. Working on customizing all text. Can pop-out and resize. Improved privacy: on entrance, can require or nudge for email entry to proceed. Working on implementing for Facebook and for Open Web Kit - iPhone, Palm, and Android. Working version available for demo. Remember iPod Touch is also a mobile device for Open Web Kit, and much cheaper than iPhone.

Going Mobile - two touch process to add app to desktop of mobile device. Also working on binding institutions to Twitter accounts, which allows users to access both on phone and other ways. Library creates twitter account and binds it through QP, then gets tweets through QP, with new questions and responses filtered. Will have ability to turn avatars on and off, and adjust font size. This will go into the Ask Module. TinyURL generator is built right into the answering mode.
Facebook wall posts are fundamentally the same, but without the character limit; FB will eventually be integrated into this. The hope is to see this by fall.

Even though this comes through Twitter, that doesn't mean that everyone can see the whole reference transaction. If the patron follows the library, you can direct message them, which is private. However, one issue with Twitter is that excessive direct messaging gets registered by Twitter as spam, so reference transactions need to be shorter.

Network Issues - Locking up, slowing down, or freezing was geographically uneven and had to do with OCLC's Internet provider dropping packets. Over the last month, bandwidth has been increased with a new provider to prevent that. There have also been some configuration problems over the last week as they upgraded security and hardware for better performance - plans next week for an attempt for the best performance ever. This is an outgrowth of the rapidly increasing size of the national cooperation. When a connection is lost (multiple times in a session), right click, get the "About" information, and send it to QP.

LoC has been getting spam through QP. Remember that there are spam utilities like captcha in QP Admin.

24/7 Reference Cooperative - Michigan academic joining this fall; close to 24/7 Spanish coverage thanks to growth in Latin America and bilingual librarians. wiki.questionpoint.org

See Full instructions on the blog for joining virtual group so that you can transfer patrons to other librarians.

Virginia Cole, Cornell - Text-A-Librarian
Began in January, just testing the waters. Even at Cornell, not everyone has a smart phone, so they limited to texting. Contacted last fall by Mosio (now TextALibrarian) to be a test partner.

Students use phones; librarians use web-based interface and login with passwords. Unanswered messages have red answer buttons - luckily no lag after one librarian answered; system is fast enough to avoid duplicate answers. Mosio originally showed cellphone numbers, but Cornell worked with them to get that stripped out and the data not retained anywhere. Interface gives 288 characters. Alternatively, messages can be sent to email or IM, and can be signaled by sound.

The big problem is that the texted questions are often ambiguous - many technical equipment questions - and they expect immediate answers. They only promise to respond 10-5 Mon-Fri.

Rolled out service in stealth mode by only promoting with elevator posters, tabling, limited web page mention. This allowed gradual testing of the technology. For the first month, it seemed fine, but then they realized they weren't getting all the questions. They began doing some internal testing and checking back with Mosio, for several rounds, before they felt confident enough to promote service more heavily, such as putting it on Ask A Librarian page.

Very concerned about training - everything learned about chat will be helpful for texting.

Plan for fall is to integrate with more promotion - getting business cards out to new students via instruction sessions, and getting them to program them into their phones before they leave.

Not sure about integration with Twitter version of QP - depends in part on price from Text A Librarian. Maybe different types of questions via different entry methods - ie, directions from cellphones.

No library represented at meeting is yet using SMS for overdues, etc.

#ala2009 #ExLibrisALA Liveblogging the bX Panel

2009-07-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

My notes on "bX: Users Who Looked at This Article Also Looked At...", Sunday, July 12, 10:30-12:00PM at ALA Annual in Chicago aren't exactly liveblogging - the Hilton doesn't have free wifi. But here they are, for anyone who was interested in the session and couldn't make it.

Oren Beit-Arie, Ex Libris
Robert Gerrity, Boston College
Nettie Lagace, Ex Libris

OBA: bX is new, launched just a few weeks ago. Web as web of users, sharing opinions and navigation aids like tags. Their selections and preferences help other users in e-commerce - why not in academic space? Two ways this happens: explicit user contributions, like reviews, ratings, and tagging, as in a social OPAC; and in implicit contributions, in captured user data.

Examples of implicit contributions: UKSG Usage Factors project, Project MESUR funded by Mellon. This started 2 years ago at Los Alamos to look at a range of measures of scholarly impact.

Evaluation of scholarship is based on print paradigms - authorship and citation. (Is that necessarily print based?) The alternative is usage based. (But this isn't peer review; it allows non-experts to have a say.)

Recommender systems - Wikipedia definition - information filtering system to present information likely of interest to a user

This is needed for scholarly research because of information overload - users need to find relevant information. Particularly for researchers in areas new to them, or in interdisciplinary research (good point).

Other recommenders: BibTip, in BC OPAC; LibraryThing

bX focuses on the core unit of articles, across the distributed academic publishing universe, and structural analysis of use patterns, not just popularity. Derives from research by Bollen and Van de Sompel, partnered with extensive global list of universities.

bX is built on OpenURL. Harvests usage logs from link resolvers (SFX) to build very large aggregations to mine. There are about 3000 link resolvers in the world, about 1800 of which are SFX. All major information providers participate in OpenURL.

Example: user puts keywords in EBSCO database, clicks SFX button to choose article. In next window, in addition to full-text links and OPAC link, gets links to additional articles. Would get identical results if they started from Scopus. (Is that really an advantage? Don't different users prefer different databases? I think of undergrads using EBSCO and faculty using Scopus. Wouldn't originating database be a source of information on user preference?)

Results can be returned as XML, RSS, etc. and be embedded in other portals, etc.

Article relationships are created by observing users' choices within a given session. This is aggregated across all users across many SFX layers.

More types of services to follow: trend analysis for collection development, comparison of citation patterns and usage patterns, Map of Knowledge from Mesur.

(Once we get into claims about evaluation, the idea about "usage" is slippery - just because someone clicks through to an article, or even downloads it, doesn't mean that in the end they find it useful. Not a good way to evaluate scholarship, even if it's a good way to evaluate a collection.)

Conclusion - moving from search to discovery

RG:
Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, MapMyRun - recommender services everywhere so why not in the library?

Usage data is an untapped resource. 283,000 requests to SFX so far this year at BC, over 200,000 clickthroughs. Allows information about usage by time and day, top journals, etc, but there's more. Does require libraries to share data, but at aggregate level that protects user privacy.

OPAC recommend system BibTip see DLIB May 08 - drawbacks are that they're specific to the BC OPAC and take a long time to build.

BC is bX beta tester, Nov 08 to April 09, with subject specialists testing predetermined resources and independent research for both validity of recommendations and user interface. Also tested different versions of bX algorithm.

Tester ratings of quality of recommendations: only 10% not good. Quick and easy to implement through SFX web admin module, used default settings. Requires configuring OAI server to harvest data from users.

BC: About 4% of users who see recommendations have clicked through since May, but no marketing yet. Definition of success is if some reasonable percentage of users find it useful and the rest find it unobtrusive (I agree).

Not many recommendations in humanities yet, since mostly books. Would like to see a feedback mechanism for users to evaluate recommendations.

NL:
Demos from Google Scholar, PubMed, EBSCO

Google Scholar - search, results, click through to library SFX links - next page shows full text links, catalog links, then bX recs with SFX links
PubMed (What I want to know is how similar the bX recommendations are to PubMed similar articles. Which gets more clickthroughs from users - bX recommendations or PubMed similar articles?)
EBSCO - NL points out that the keywords in recommended articles are different from the original article - bX helps identify synonyms

bX setup goes through SFX admin. Register, enter license key, activate target and test, and publish data. $3,000 for a single library. $15,000 for 6-20 library consortium. 30 trials available. Subscribers are strongly encouraged (but not required?) to contribute their users' data. Contributers have the option to get recommendations based just on the users from their institution, although no one has done that yet.

One questioner asked about skipping the SFX window and linking directly to the full text, which users often prefer. NL and OBA answered that bX can be configured to include a link to recommendations in the banner frame so that you can still link directly to the full text.

2009-07-08T18:35:00.000-07:00

Invisible Library is a blog that simply notes the names and authors of imaginary books - books that are mentioned in fiction, some times in passing and sometimes centrally to their plots. It's sorted by the last name of the fictional author, not the real one, which gives the whole site a meta, surreal quality to it - here the imaginary is more important than the true.

(I added my own suggestion to the blog in the comments:

McENROY, Bree - Dark Ages
-from Tanya Egan Gibson's How to Buy a Love of Reading (a new first novel that's Gossip Girl goes Gatsby))

The British illustration collective INK has created a show of real, bound books based on these imaginary titles and authors. They've created cover art and invited participants to write the texts collaboratively. The imaginary will be made real.

What's amazing about this is the depth and richness of the remix. It's easy to think about open culture as a digital phenomenon (The Grey Album, The Phantom Edit), but this is a textual, tactile, handcrafted remix. Open culture, or at least a freer and more generous understanding of fair use, is vital to creating vibrant art with deep cultural resonance both on and off line.

Plus an Invisible Library is much easier to shelve this way.

(Thanks to John at Crooked Timber for the link.)

Roving with Elegance: The Solution to the Nametag Dilemma?

2009-06-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, my library system informally polled us about our feelings on wearing name tags. Like the librarian blogosphere overall, I felt divided. We should be approachable - but we should also be professional, not like waitresses or cashiers.

Luckily, here at a medical library, I had an easy way out - I opined that we should just wear the same official hospital badges worn by everyone from the surgeons to the janitors. Technically, the library staff is already supposed to wear them, but since we're not around lootable pharmacuticals or confidential patient records, no one really bothers. I'm not sure what conclusion they've come to on the main campus.

But for those of you on the fence about nametags, I have a lovely suggestion:

I got this as a graduation gift for my MLIS from friends, who found it at the gift shop of the Vancouver Public Library. It's made by a delightfully traditionalist British firm, Thomas Fattorini (who also make badges and crests bearing titles like Games Captain and House Prefect*).

It is an elegant thing, with a nice weight to it - not chintzy or plastic. It clearly indicates a professional title. (I hold a hope that this might distinguish me from the undergraduate student assistants, something my own appearance is apparently insufficient to do.) I'm half considering wearing it to ALA in the hopes of starting my networking on the plane trip or in the hotel: wearing it inside the convention hall would, of course, be stating the obvious.

What do you think? Is this still too commerical? Is it so discreet as to be pointless? Or could this be a useful compromise?

*They will custom engrave badges, so if anyone is still doing Harry Potter programs, I bet they'll make you one that says Quidditch Captain.

Zotero win

2009-06-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

A Virginia Circuit Court judge dismissed a lawsuit this morning against George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media.

Score one for the good guys!

Doing it in Public: Reading as Subversive Activity

2009-06-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

I just discovered the delightful group library blog Closed Stacks, and one particular (old) post caught my attention: Read and you read alone.

Blogger The Librarienne suggest that one reason Americans don't read as much as we'd hope is that reading is a solitary activity, seen as frivolous and slightly suspect.

I've never sensed disdain for my own reading in public, and I think there are definitely places where it's widely understood: on public transit, for example, or in coffeehouses. Waiting rooms seem to be precisely one of those places, and I'd get downright huffy if someone tried to interrupt me there, as they did to one of the commenters.

I will freely admit that I've never tried to read in a bar (too dark!). Plus, I openly mocked a fellow who showed up to a bowling alley with a copy of Ulysses, of all things. As The Librarienne points out, reading is a solitary pleasure, and so voluntarily coming to a group social event with a book is just plain rude. (It did not help matters when he tried to use Joyce as a pick-up line.)

But I think the point about reading at work, as opposed to web surfing, is very well put. In the novel of corporate life Then We Came to the End, there's a wonderful passage describing how a quiet company rebel photocopies entire novels so he can read them at his desk, passing them off as memos. Reading seems to somehow more flagrantly flaunt one's duty than playing solitaire or chatting with co-workers.

Even though as librarians, we should value reading more, I've internalized this myself at my own library. On the recommendation of Robin Brown, I just borrowed a copy of Reading and the Reference Librarian. The central argument of the book is that reading widely makes us better at what we do - and I still feel guilty for reading it at work!

But I actually think there's good reason for this. What's different about reading books, what we value about books, is a depth of absorption, immersion in an argument or imagined world. That absorption can cause us to fail to notice patrons who need our attention, or we might be slow to snap out of it and refocus on work.*

But this isn't some hatred of reading, or a desire to stamp out "frivolous" reading. Instead, it's actually a mark of respect for reading and the real power books have over our imaginations.

So what, as The Librarianne asks, is to be done? At work, if the reading really is work related, I think we can try to carve out blocks of time and clearly label the activity - "This afternoon I'm reviewing books for our collection"; "Tomorrow I'm reading for the literature review for my next article on outreach."

For the public in general, I also think that the Dillingham editorial is absolutely right that one of the big problems is noise. If you want to read in a coffeeshop, you can ask them to turn down the music - or just take your business to a quieter place. Ask the receptionist in a doctor's office or the laundromat manager to turn off the television if no one's watching. (You don't have to tell them you're a librarian as you do all this shushing.)

Books captivate us. Some people do have first dibs on our attention (employers), but the general public doesn't. If they try to claim it, you could always start reading out loud. ;)

* (To be fair, this applies to other media as well - a boss who ignores Minesweeper will probably notice World of Warcraft.)

Why ASU might not lead the way

2009-05-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

Steven Bell over at ACRLog worries that the new Kindle DX will encourage universities to follow the lead of Arizona State University in disparaging print collections, library buildings, OPACs, and the whole concept of academic libraries in general.

Daily Show to the rescue! After this story, no one's going to want to be like Arizona State.

(The mention of the library comes in at 2:27. When the "reporter" points out that it's empty, that's another swipe at ASU, not a strike against libraries.)

Digital Library for a Literate World

2009-05-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

The United Nations has unveiled the new World Digital Library. (More information from the New York Times here.)

And it is beautiful - intuitive faceted searching in all seven official UN languages; archival TIFF images; clean controlled vocabulary; global scope. The only other thing I can imagine asking for is plain text files of the manuscript images. But since everything in the WDL is in the public domain, I'm guessing the good folks at Project Gutenberg will be jumping on that opportunity.

I can't wait to see how this grows. As the world becomes increasingly literate, we can think of these texts as a truly world heritage.

Faculty Blog Round Up: Teaching with Technology

2009-04-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

Much of what's going on with faculty is very similar to what's going on with librarians: Conferences are great, highly specialized, but exhausting! Or: Why, oh why, do students not cite sources after we work so hard with them? These experiences, we know.

What we don't usually observe is the teaching, and this is one of the parts we need to stay in tune with. Here I've highlighted three posts with really innovative technology teaching techniques - ideas that you might not have thought about how to support from the library. Or maybe you're dying to include blogging, Wikipedia, and gaming, and you didn't know how to find faculty who are doing it, too. Either way, here's a sample.

Acephalous is the blog of Scott Eric Kaufman, who teaches English at the University of California Irvine; he also contributes to the faculty group blogs The Valve (mostly literature) and Edge of the American West (mostly history).

SEK is blogging with his students in his undergraduate writing course the Rhetoric of Heroism. Because the course relies so heavily on detailed analysis of film and other visual iconography, a blog with embedded images seems like a wonderful way to communicate the material. I expect they're watching and discussing the films together in class, but images are usually not the kind of thing students are accustomed to taking notes on (especially in the dark).

Jeremy Boggs, who blogs at ClioWeb, is a graduate student in American history at George Mason University. He's also creative lead at the Center for History and New Media, so it's not too surprising that he's willing to take on the bete noire - Wikipedia. In his undergraduate American History Survey course, he assigns students to not just use, but create, Wikipedia articles, including citating sources, monitoring for follow-up collaboration, and writing a reflective essay. One of his students wrote the article that developed into the entry for Living Newspapers.

Another history professor, Rob MacDougall of the University of Western Ontario, blogs at Old is the New New (with a charming original steampunk blog theme). Rob uses the game Civilization to frame the course Science, Technology, and Global History. He asks his students to write an essay that reconceptualizes technology not as a serial, linear progress of development - as the game depicts it - but in some other way. How could we play a game that thinks of history as more contingent or branching or cyclic?

In this assignment, the game is laying bare a lot of social assumptions we carry around without realizing, and making them something students can analyze. If you ever need to justify a games collection in your library, this kind of work is a stellar example of such a collection could do.

Next month: the finals crunch.

A CC dean's perspective on the library...

2009-04-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

over at Confessions of a Community College Dean.

The bad news? He's twenty years out of touch, nostalgic for the days when he did his doctoral research, and there's no money.

The good news? He did doctoral research, so he's not one of those "everything's on Google nowadays" guys, and he's ready and willing to listen.

A good primer for people who need to pitch to administrators.

Web Censorship: Find It, Name It, Shame It, End It

2009-02-25T09:26:00.000-08:00

HerdictWeb is a new project of the The Berkman Center for Internet & Society that uses the distributed power of many users to determine whether a site is simply down, or whether it has been censored. When users encounter some kind of "Access Denied" message, they can enter the URL, and Herdict will track which sites are inaccessible from which countries for how long. There's a even handy browser plug-in and a super-cute sheep mascot.

hat tip to Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber

Wikipedia, you win.

2009-02-20T18:36:00.000-08:00

Project Information Literacy, at the Information School of the University of Washington, has released a new progress report on its qualitative study of the research and writing habits of undergraduates. There's a lot of food for thought in there, but I want to highlight the role of Wikipedia.

What's amazing here is how well undergraduates use Wikipedia. As Joan, a commenter over at ACRLog, noted, they're using Wikipedia exactly how one should use any encyclopedia - to get background information and find some initial citations. The students interviewed even called it "presearch."

I have had a quite negative attitude about Wikipedia - I come from a social science background, and social science is not Wikipedia's strong suit. There's something about the Wikipedia community understanding of "neutrality" and "authority" that makes inaccurate claims about the Higgs boson particle or the Batman villian Clayface unsustainable, but that allows an entry like war to become a misguided amalgamation of ideological hobbyhorses.

But if students are going to be as responsible as this new report indicates, then I'm going to have to be responsible too - and that means not giving up on Wikipedia. Instead, I'm going to have to get my hands dirty and edit those entries myself. Good research practice deserves high quality free information, so I'll do my best to contribute.

Highs and Lows...

2009-02-05T20:17:00.000-08:00

...at the reference desk this evening.

The low: The Interlibrary Loan request for a book cited (accurately) as "in press." Does this guy really not know what that means? Or does she think we have magical genie powers, or some kind of in with the publisher?

The high: A young doctor phoned to ask how to phone a list of articles that cited the out-of-date article in front of him. I walked her through Web of Science, and she hung up, pleased. But ten minutes later, he turned up at the desk in person, puzzled - he couldn't find any citations. I couldn't either, but I did find an authoritative statement that no articles in WoS cited her article. So I showed the good doctor Google Scholar - another new tool for him. There we found only 1 book citing the article - which our library had both electronically and available in print.

An exhaustive search with a clear answer and learning along the way. I do like being thorough.

What's the next microfiche?

2009-01-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

I'm entering my last semester of my MLIS, so I'm just beginning my internship. Yesterday, I got a very thorough tour of the academic library where I'll be doing my fieldwork, including the periodicals room where they keep all the microforms. Said the head of reference, "Of course, we can't wait to get rid of all of this."

How unloved is a format when even librarians are eager to toss it? As far as I can tell, microfilm and microfiche are charmless and universally loathed; even Nicholson Baker wouldn't defend them. Microforms lack both the history of true primary documents and the search functions of digital documents, and they're terribly unwieldy.

Other evolutionary dead-ends don't induce this urge to purge: Betamax and laser discs at least have their defenders who claim their technical superiority to VHS or DVD.

But it would be the height of arrogance to assume that microforms are historically unique. History repeats itself, and we're going to make this mistake again. So what is the current format or pratice that patrons are reluctant - and someday will simply refuse - to use?

My pet peeve is Word documents in websites, that require downloading instead of embedded viewing like an Adobe Acrobat document, but I'm not sure that rises to the microfilm level. Any other nominations?

History Pathfinders

2009-01-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

Timothy Burke, history professor at Swarthmore, has a list of tips for undergraduates looking for primary sources. It's nice to see faculty specifically encouraging concrete information literacy skills, and these are tips that librarians could incorporate into their own pathfinders for history topics.

Lawsuit-proof citation software

2008-10-01T11:14:00.001-07:00

The recent kerfuffle over EndNote-to-Zotero got me thinking:

Is there any way to convert MARC records directly into a BibTeX file en masse? So that a researcher could just download a master BibTeX file with all of a library's holdings (monograph holdings, anyway) already entered?

On the one hand, that sounds like it would be a huge file; on the other hand, it's just text. You could segment it by call number or LCSH, so that researchers only download the records in their fields.

I just think we need to be thinking in terms of pure open source solutions where we can (I know most literature faculty are not going to use LaTeX anytime soon, but data-heavy sociologists might be persuadable).

Edited to Add: I just went to a training session on our new state-wide OPAC. It has a built in feature to export any item to EndNote or RefWorks, but not to BibTeX. :( And when I asked about it, no one in the room had ever heard of BibTeX or LaTeX - at the Bio/Medical Library! This may be a pipe dream for now.

Born Analog

2008-09-16T15:07:00.000-07:00

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in the Chronicle of Higher Ed to gently but firmly disabuse us of the notion of the digital generation, on two counts. 1) They're not all digital, whether due to lack of access or interest; and 2) "generation" is a fairly empty concept anyway.

The article is a good reminder to be thoughtful about which new technologies we adopt in our libraries, and how we do it. Students aren't all demanding them as fast as we think.

Faculty status is about freedom.

2008-09-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

ACRLog has a recent post on the old chestnut of whether academic librarians are or should be "real faculty." This go-round was prompted by Daphnee Rentfrow's essay "Groundskeepers, Gatekeepers, and Guides: How to Change Faculty Perceptions of Librarians and Ensure the Future of the Research Library" in the new report No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century. Rentfrow argues that misperception by faculty is the biggest challenge facing research libraries, and that MLIS programs aren't helping to meet it.

StevenB at ACRLog takes Rentfrow to task for providing solutions that are unoriginal and vague, and he's right that she doesn't provide a lot of actionable steps to take - it's hard to be concrete in combating a vague sense of disdain.

On the other hand, StevenB misses the mark entirely. He argues that we need to prove our faculty status by buckling down and getting on with instruction. In my R1 experience, those faculty that look down on librarians look down on teaching equally: teaching is for grad students and adjuncts. (Note that both adjunct lecturers and librarians are disproportionately likely to be women.)

I propose a different logic about why academic librarians need faculty status:
1. The purpose of faculty status is tenure.
2. The purpose of tenure is to protect academic freedom.
3. Librarians need academic freedom protections.

The commitment to intellectual and academic freedom is in our professional DNA. The ALA Code of Ethics binds us to "uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources." Librarians were willing to risk jail time to oppose sections of the Patriot Act. And I think that an argument that the people developing and preserving your research collections need political cover to include unpopular ideas can appeal to even some of the most inflated egos among the research faculty.

Laptop Security

2008-09-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

Lifehacker has a set of useful tips about how users can secure their laptops from theft when they're out in public. Since the library is one place on campus where laptops are often left unattended, what can we as librarians do to help students hang on to one of their most valuable possessions?

First of all, I think we should promote laptop locks. (Both Lifehacker and one of the commenters endorse this Kensington lock.) If the library has an affiliated bookstore or coffee shop, why not sell the locks there?

Secondly, we should coordinate with campus security. Many campuses offer, for example, laptop engraving, so owners can put their initials or ID number on the computer. (Here's an example, of the services offered by the University of Missouri-Columbia police department.)

Finally, we need to do outreach and reminders on these options. Not just during orientation, when students are overwhelmed, but as ongoing concern. How about adding these reminders to the bottom of webpages and handouts that tell students how to set up proxy servers or VPNs? Those are guaranteed to reach new computer owners.

Libraries should be a source of all kinds of useful information - and we want to be associated with good memories, not "where stuff gets stolen." Let's just help make these precautions things routine and easy.

Free money to good home

2008-08-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

The MacArthur Foundation is offering grants up to $250,000 for projects in digital media that enhance participatory learning. Not only are libraries eligible, there's a separate Young Innovators competition for people 18-25 (like students).

Hat tip to Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber.

Titles

2008-08-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

There's a lengthy discussion at friendfeed - which kicked off another lengthy discussion at ACRLog - about if and when librarians should add "MLIS" or "MLS" after their names. No real consensus has emerged. Academic and special librarians seem to use the degree (and related titles) more often than public librarians. In general, there does seem to be a sense that it makes more sense to emphasize the credential when communicating with faculty, donors, or other outsiders, but that it's unnecessary with other librarians and downright divisive with paraprofessionals.

A number of people have said that librarians need to stand up for ourselves as a profession, and while I agree with the sentiment, I'm not sure this is the place to make the stand. After all, lawyers aren't hurting, but I'd look askance at any lawyer who signed off as John or Jane Doe, Esq. They're technically entitled to it, but it sure looks obnoxious.

I have a Ph.D. in political science, and I'm not sure how to deal with that, let alone the looming MLIS. I know that one big part of what I need to do in library school is acquire a whole new set of norms about professionalism. (Librarians, for the record, are waaay nicer than political scientists, so please excuse me while I exorcise the residual bitchiness inculcated in my doctoral program. Trust me, I'm much happier to be here.) Unfortunately for me, there doesn't seem to be a strong universal norm for me to follow, and that's made me uncomfortable so far.

Edited to add - Well, my personal experience has just confirmed StevenB's wisdom. I had added my PhD to my email sig file when I was corresponding with some folks at the Social Sciences Research Network, where I needed the credential and was directly leaning on the connections from my dissertation advisor. But when a classmate in the MLIS program addressed me as "Dr.", it's gotta go.

What Wikipedia is & isn't good for...

2008-07-30T01:48:00.001-07:00

perfectly summed up by the web comic xkcd

The decline and fall of everything, again

2008-07-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

"The democratic youth ... lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything..." -
Plato, The Republic

Nicolas Carr, in The Atlantic this month, asks "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" For those who want more anecdotes and photographs of privileged children to accompany this query, we have a spin-off piece in the New York Times.

Both of these pieces, although they muddle the issue, are concerned about a transition from knowledge to information. Carr even implies, citing Socrates, that the invention of writing may have moved us from wisdom to knowledge, and that our decline has been on an even longer trajectory. Now, for both of these articles, the central concern is that the Web (including search engines, fanfic, and social networking sites) has shortened our attention spans at a fundamental cognitive level.

I'm not that worried. There are two potential trends that I think these pieces skip over, both of which I think librarians can help move in a positive direction.

My first unaddressed concern - and here I do in part agree with the narrative of decline - is the pervasive commercialism that comes with getting all of one's information online. Carr does talk about the incentives Google has for getting us to visit as many different sites as possible, but neither article addresses the omnipresence of advertising on most websites.
One of the huge advantages of real books, and of the libraries that contain them, is that they are one of the few places left in America where no one is trying to get us to buy anything - persuade us of an idea, perhaps, but not actually to acquire consumer goods for cash (or credit). Librarians do our best to build collections that are free from a commercial agenda, and so libraries are a wonderful example of the "third place," and the books in them are a medium that is purely about content - the information, argument, and art. This might be a point of outreach.

As a counter to the narrative of decline, there's a technological hope for long-form reading - the Kindle. I haven't gotten a chance to experiment with one yet, but this is its primary selling point - an ability, unique among electronic devices, to induce "ludic reading." Some people have asked why we need a fancy, expensive device when paper and ink do this perfectly well, but maybe the answer is that it will draw in new readers who are simply used to screens. Technology might be shifting our emphasis to one kind of thinking, but the Kindle is a new technology that might shift it back.

librarian = l33t

2008-07-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

For months, whenever someone has asked me what Second Life is, I've replied, "It's like World of Warcraft, only you don't get to kill people."

But now, librarians can join an immersive world worthy of the name. Catalog that, n00bs!

In all seriousness, I genuinely don't understand the appeal of Second Life, and Google's new Lively looks even worse. Without some kind of narrative or shared understanding of the virtual world, as WoW has, it just seems mundane, and therefore pointless. San Jose State, for example, has an SL campus, but I don't see what advantage that has over class videoconferencing in something like OPAL or Elluminate. Why would I use a fanciful avatar to communicate professionally? If I'm indulging in fantasy, I want high fantasy. Props to Libraryman for bringing it.

"Reading on a Dream"

2008-07-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

Personally, I blame this on "Once More with Feeling."

What I'd like to know is - how the heck do you get so many students to use the library???

(According to the YouTube commentariat, this was filmed in Columbia's Butler Library, so the answer might be "Be in the Ivy League.")

Preserving Scholarship

2008-07-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

Campus Technology has a great interview with Michael Keller of Stanford University Libraries on archival digital librarianship - how libraries can and must preserve the past by both creating digital copies of historical documents and by maintaining born-digital documents.

It's that second category that has a lot of really interesting possibilities. I wonder if one possibility for outreach by academic libraries is to graduate students and faculty on how to back-up and archive their own work, possibly in conjunction with IT departments. I know, for example, that my own dissertation data is in data analysis program format that's already one release behind.

And it's data we should be worried about archiving and releasing. While faculty may have mixed reactions about releasing their articles as open access, there are strong, important scientific norms about providing access to data sets, so it's relatively easy to start with them - but it's also more important. Anyone can just save their article as a .txt file and preserve the sense of it in a universally readable format. (Math-heavy articles are an exception, but those scholars have largely made the move to open source LaTex, which I expect will be accessible for years to come.) Datasets, however, need special handling to be usable into the future, and the files can get much, much larger, making them challenging. They seem like a good starting place for institutional repositories when faculty are reluctant.

Books vs. Journals in Academic Collections

2008-06-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

William H. Walters has an intriguing new article forthcoming in the November 2008 College & Research Libraries entitled Journal Prices, Book Acquisitions, and Sustainable College Library Collections. His thesis is that academic libraries, at least smaller ones or ones that cater to undergraduates, should largely abandon serials in favor of actual books. This is simultaneously provocative and conservative, and I think it's worth seriously considering.

A puzzling piece for his argument is e-books. Walters is no Luddite; he casually yet approvingly cites the use of e-books by science and engineering majors and the inclusion of e-books in Choice's annual list of top books. I take this to mean that he proposes that e-books are part of the solution for college libraries. But one of Walters's major concerns is with "sustainable access" - the ability of libraries to retain rights to previously purchased intellectual property even if they let a subscription lapse. Full fair use and ongoing access through format changes has been major concerns with e-books, so such off-the-cuff promotion of e-books seems at odds with the argument against journals from sustainable access grounds. Open source format e-books are an important resolution to this tension - if you keep your e-books in something simple like .pdf or even .txt format, then this is a lot less of a concern.

I think Walters's inherent conservatism is causing him to miss out on the future of Open Access scholarly research distribution. A good friend of mine who's a physicist in string theory has told me that all the top researchers in physics barely read journals at all any more; they're just there for external validation. All the real physics research is done through the arXiv. (The X is a Greek letter "chi" - get it?) The Social Science Research Network is taking off, now joined by a Humanities Research Network.
On the one hand, Walters argues that librarians must assume "that technological advances, however impressive, will not alter the basic economic, cultural, and legal underpinnings of the current system" - an assumption I think is already false. On the other hand, if we base our budgets on this assumption, but then find ways to add a bunch of free (as in both speech and beer) content, then we come out ahead - lots of books, plus journal-like content.

In the end, I buy much of Walters's argument. There's no need for undergraduate libraries to have every minor journal; the top three or four in each field are probably plenty, with the rest supplemented with ILL and consortia. If this boycott forces database marketers to un-bundle the high-impact from the obscure, all the better.

But I think Walters is grossly overselling college students' preference for books. He says that students see books as more authoritative and resulting in better work than other sources, and that they use those other sources only when they're pressed for time. Newsflash - they're always pressed for time. As Alison J. Head argues in another forthcoming paper, procrastination is ubiquitous on college campuses. Even if you keep the library open 24/7 during finals week, the students will still rely on electronic resources at 2AM the night before the paper is due. This might bring us back to e-books, but I think it's also a powerful argument that online journals are vitally important, because they can be accessed from a dorm room at midnight and at least they're an improvement on Wikipedia.

To sum up, I think that Walters is right that college libraries should probably shift much more of their budgets back to books - not because we can abandon electronic content, but because I think we can use a combination of (as he suggests) market power and (as I and many others suggest) open source and open access to bring the price of journals and other serial content back down.