library+instruction+technology

I finally installed the new WordPress app tonight. I like it so far.

Still love my Droid and still very busy at work. I worked with six classes this week. My favorite class was International Trade. They had to find a wide range of statistics.

This is a shameless plug for my committee's discussion forum at Midwinter. If you are not going to Boston or not interested in "discovery services" then go ahead and mark this post as read.

The RUSA/MARS Local Systems & Services Committee invites you to join our discussion forum 'Discovery Systems: Solutions a User Could Love?' at Midwinter.

When: Sunday, January 17, 2010 from 1:30-3:00 pm
Where: Westin Waterfront, Faneiul Room (Mezzanine Level)
425 Summer Street connected to the Boston Convention and Exhibit Center

Panelists include:

• Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technology and Research, Vanderbilt University who will provide a brief "Overview of Discovery Systems."
• Cody Hanson, Technology Librarian, University of Minnesota, who will briefly discuss "User testing and feedback on Primo at the University of Minnesota."
  
• Frances McNamara, Director, Integrated Library Systems and Administrative and Desktop Systems, University of Chicago, who will briefly share experiences of the "LENS Discovery System, based on AquaBrowser." and; 
  
• Barbara DeFelice, Director Digital Resources Program, Dartmouth College who will discuss "Summon @ Dartmouth College: the User View."
  

Our panelists will highlight the experiences of libraries that have implemented "next generation discovery tools" that provide access to disparate library collections from a single search box. Panelists will focus their comments on user response and subsequent assessment of the local implementation. 

Discussion forum participants will be able to share their experiences with discovery tools and ask questions following the panelists. A summary of the key ideas gleaned will be posted on the MARS Local Systems & Services web page following Midwinter.

Photo credit: The photo "Magnified" was taken by Jake Bouma (jakebouma) on March 9, 2009 and uploaded to Flickr on March 10, 2009 with an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License. The photo was downloaded on January 3, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakebouma/3345296623/ 

Every librarian and faculty member should read the CIBER briefing paper Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (2 MB PDF). CIBER conducted this research for the British Library and JISC . The report focuses on information seeking behavior of students born after 1993 (the Google Generation). The paper also ties in research from OCLC's Perceptions studies. You may also want to listen to presentation given and Q&A's when the paper was released on January 16, 2008.

Found via Stephen's Lighthouse. 

Data curation has been a topic cropping up at conferences I have been to this past year. I've heard it mentioned in sessions at ACRL and ALA, mostly by librarians from the big ARLs. 

"Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all."

"The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore."

I still have to wonder how this will be monetized. Or, will this project be underwritten by Google's main revenue stream? Guess those institutional repositories will still have some room in them after all.

Read the full story with links to more details at "Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data" on Wired Science.

Here's another one to add to your informationista bag o'tricks. Classes draw nigh and people are starting to freak out. A religion paper is due tomorrow and one of the required readings is in a reference book. Unfortunately, someone is currently hiding in the building with the book and their laptop, hidden the book, or walked off with the book (unlikely). 

On a whim, I went to Amazon and found that the AWOL title is available on Amazon with Search Inside. The student looking for the book needed a specific article. We quickly brought up an image of the page he needed to read. He mentioned that he didn't know Amazon offered such a feature.

I don't normally talk about Amazon during instruction. I do sometimes talk about Google Book Search and/or the related copyright issues with GBS. Do you make a point to talk about these commercial discovery tools with classes or individual students?

I now have an answer (kind of…sort of) to one of the questions I posed back in April when talking about Second Life.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a study on home broadband adoption in the US. Pew reports that 47% of US adults have broadband at home. We still don't know if these are fat tubes or skinny tubes running into houses around the country. That would be interesting data that may exist. I haven't really looked for it.

There are certain demographic categories for households with broadband and it shouldn't come as a surprise. "In particular, broadband penetration remains high among Americans ages 18-49, those with annual household incomes over $75,000 and college graduates." These people tend to also live in urban (52%) or suburban (49%) areas.  (p.4)

Hat tip to Stephen Abram. 

and so is this post. I have had a copy of David Weinberger's new book, Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder, checked out from my local public library for six weeks. I finally made myself finish it this week. I know that David has something important to say. However, I could hardly get past the use of the card catalog and Dewey as examples of the second order of order that we must overcome in the age of the third order of order to get through the book.

Yeah, I know his point is that our old school ways of applying control over the ones and zeros zipping around on the series of tubes is in the best interest of no one. I agree that users should be able to tag their content and share their knowledge online. I am a user of Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and many other digital disorder tools. I do my best to educate our students and faculty about these tools. However, I wish David would have thrown us a bone and commented somewhere in the book that librarians are finally getting on board. Most librarians will agree that our roles have evolved tremendously over the past few years. I know many are still focused on metadata, but that is a necessary evil when you are standing with one foot in the digital world and one foot in the print world. I would hazard to say that a fair number of academic librarians have embraced the new third order of order, okay maybe not everyone . 

David writes, "There's something comforting about the sight of cards spooning in a library card catalog. A world of ideas and knowledge, more than we could ever absorb, is waiting for us, carefully indexed in those neat rows of drawers. And yet the second order masks a complexity that the third order confronts head-on: We don't really know what a book is." (118-119) He continues, "card catalogs have value because of what they leave out. Melvil Dewey himself designed the current standard card in 1877…Because it's not very large, catalogers have to make tough decisions about what information to include." (119) David includes yet another reference to the card catalog used by Brown and Duguid in the Social Life of Information, "you can sometimes tell if a card has been heavily consulted by how dog-eared it is." (119)

Seriously, when was the last time you used a card catalog?  For me it was 1988 and it was my local public library in BFE northwest Ohio.  I would have been much happier to see David pick on the card catalog's progeny, the OPAC. Unfortunately, the OPAC is missing and the closest mention is a comment about the "OCLC database of books" (122) being much like a card catalog. I am at a loss as to why he didn't use the name WorldCat or even do some research to figure out the name and that a free version of it is on the web where users can be kind of social and share reviews of books. 

I know, I know…I need to move past the whole card catalog issue. I am sure that Michael Gorman had a hard time reading this book too, but it may not have passed the "scholarly enough" test to land on his desk. David has an entire chapter titled Social Knowing, where he argues that Wikipedia is better than Britannica and provides many reasons why he has taken this position. I can not say that I agree with him totally on this point either, but anything that ticks off the media identified library standard-bearer can't be too wrong.

Karen Schneider's excellent review is on the TechSource blog and additional reactions are available on the book's companion web site appropriately titled, Everything is Miscellaneous.

This was the only invited paper session that I attended. The content was useful. I wish it would have happened a bit earlier in the day. It was given during the last time slot on Saturday and I was mentally wiped out by 4:30. Tracy Mitrano is the Director of IT Policy and of Computer Policy and Law Program at Cornell University. Her talk covered many of the concepts included in information literacy competency standard 5. I found the portion of her discussion on copyright to be the most interesting.

She started by talking about how copyright has not kept pace with technology and how our users want to use and reuse content. The AAP's letter to Cornell about course reserves was discussed along with the development of Cornell Electronic Course Content Copyright Guidelines (PDF). She recommended that we read Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyright Material in the Digital Age from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. A recent public policy report, Intellectual Property And Free Speech In The Online World (PDF), provides an overview of P2P file sharing lawsuits brought by the RIAA and how IHEs are handling the situation.

The remainder of Tracy's talk covered social networking and electronic surveillance (Patriot Act). The social network portion included familiar ground: students putting things on their profiles they shouldn't; criminals using these tools to commit crimes (e.g. pedophiles on Myspace); and politicians over reactions to ban social networking sites. The electronic surveillance section provided a concise review of how we went from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 to the USA Patriot Act.  

technorati tag: acrl2007

It's always nice to see a member of the family present at a national conference. Char Booth from Ohio University presented on a video reference service that is currently being prototyped in Athens. Char has posted her presentation on-line. You can also listen (MP3 deep link) to an interview with her courtesy PALINET. 

The reference team installed a web camera and chat software on a computer on an upper floor of the library. The team hoped to be able to help people on the upper floors so they didn't have to make the trek down to the reference desk. Four video chat clients were tested: Trillian Pro, Windows Live Messenger, Skype, and iChat. Skype was chosen as the preferred client. Future plans include adding video IM as an option on their Ask a Librarian page and installing a walk up video IM kiosk in the newly built student center.

I think video virtual reference is a very cool idea. It may be a challenge to implement at a small academic library based on staffing levels. I do think that video IM would be a good tool for consortial work. 

technorati tag: acrl2007

Michelle Jacobs from UC Merced shared her use of a smart phone to provide service to students and faculty. She is able to search the catalog, databases, and answer questions via instant message. Her smart phone is Bluetooth enabled and she purchased an external keyboard to make typing easier. She recommended looking at CNet for smart phone reviews. 

Michelle told us about answering a reference question during the conference using the internet browsing and IM features of her smart phone. This anecdote was rehashed at the beginning of the April 20 Chronicle article (subscribers) describing the reference panel session. 

PALINET has posted an interviewer with Michelle (MP3 deep link).

I'm interested in trying this out, but may wait since EVDO has not been rolled out locally. I do think this makes a lot of sense. I could have used something like this multiple times this semester when I was working with a student in the stacks or visiting with a faculty member outside of the library (and not near a computer).   

technorati tag: acrl2007