Academic Librarianship

Academic Librarianship - CNI2007

Trends in Info Commons

April 19, 2007 by 1 Comment

Information Commons can vary dramatically but Joan Lippincott highlighted the trends she’s seen in information commons around the country. These included:

  • technology for users
  • services bridging  physical and virtual spaces
  • special spaces
  • design and aesthetics

This was the first time I heard mention of teamspot – a software that allows students to hook their individual laptops into a common (usually larger) monitor and all contribute to a project – great for collaborative group work.  Joan also stressed that signage was essential when sharing services – make it clear what is available (ie. laptop loans, multimedia equipment available, etc). Some of the special spaces were quite interesting – one commons offered binoculars and a bird book for bird watching!

Unfortunately we ran out of time for discussion of assessment of info commons.

The session was a great way to see the variety of interpretations for information commons and also reinforced that our Learning Commons is moving in the right direction.

Academic Librarianship - CNI2007 - gaming

Gaming as Learning, Research and Collections

April 19, 2007 by 0 Comments

This great session was presented by Lisa Hinchliffe, Karen Schmidt and David Ward of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They’re doing some great things around gaming and should be an inspiration to other libraries considering this path. The session began with background on gamers, stressing that many of us are gamers, including grey gamers and our students – for this reason we should be considering gaming.

They are collecting games, both new and vintage and are developing appropriate policies. They surveyed students during gaming nights, talked with faculty using games, and read relevant literature. This collection serves both to preserve the object and the experience. By collecting the games, students can both see the object but also experience what it is like to play the game. This experience is generally lost when the only way to play a vintage game is through an emulator.

While they are not actively pursuing creating games, they are considering a variety of uses for gaming. They have offered gaming nights which have been a smash with students. They also highlighted that short games (esp and a bartending game I can’t recall the name of) can be used for instruction and training. I think this is a great idea and can’t wait to try it out in my sessions next term. It breaks the ice, creates an atmosphere of fun and allows for easy conversation into more serious topics, such as controlled vocabulary and customer service.

They are also working with faculty to embed gaming in curriculum where appropriate and are supporting classes which are using gaming. They will be providing copies of Civilization 4 to a class. As one of the first to try this, they have discovered that gaming publishers don’t have a model to deal with this type of licensing and hope to help establish working models.

This is library and are ones to watch for future gaming innovation.

Academic Librarianship - odd stuff

Beaten Again?

April 14, 2007 by 4 Comments

I saw a sign coming home the other day and I keep meaning to take another look at it. It was a text messaging service. All you had to do was text a question, anything they stress, to Just Ask (this is of course if I am remembering the sign correctly). Answering questions – isn’t this our business? Have we been beaten again (see my post on the Find Engine)?

I realize that there are a few libraries offering services via text messaging but I believe it is still relatively low. We can easily offer updates of new content, let patrons know when books are in, and yes, even reference service through text messaging. This is certainly the way many university students communicate and we’ve all heard that email is the way old people communicate! I’d love to know if this service is getting a lot of questions. I’d also love to know who’s answering these questions (which is another reason to take a look at that sign).

As an aside, I’ll be quiet the next few days as I’m off to Phoenix for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Task Force Meeting (inconveniently timed to coincide with Computers in Libraries, which I really must go to sometime). I’m sure I’ll have lots to blog about during/after the conference.

Academic Librarianship

Exciting Statistics

April 4, 2007 by 1 Comment

Is there such a thing as exciting statistics? Take a look at this YouTube video – the first 5 minutes are amazing! I was introduced to it at the Winter Institute for Statistical Literacy for Librarians and recently used it for a reference round table I co-presented on data and statistics. I’ve also used it for the distance course I teach and it really got the dialogue following among my students (often a hard thing for distance courses and even more difficult when the topic is statistics – the normal discourse runs along the line of I hate statistics!). It’s a great example of the power of statistics when used correctly and helps statistics become more exciting I think.

Academic Librarianship - web 2.0

Movers and Shakers

March 16, 2007 by 1 Comment

A big congrats to Amanda Etches-Johnson, McMaster’s newest Library Journal’s Mover and Shaker! She is a celebrity in the library 2.0 world and recently became our User Experience Librarian. Amanda is a colleague of mine (right across from my desk in fact) and it has always amazed and inspired me how much she contributes to librarianship. This accolade is well deserved Amanda – congrats! Keep up the great work!

Academic Librarianship - Second Life

Virtual Excitement

December 3, 2006 by 1 Comment

I’m quite excited. I have been given a store front for my library in Second Life on the Cybrary City section (kindly donated to us to use for experimentation by Talis) on InfoIsland. This will allow me to experiment with how we might be able to offer library services in a virtual world and set up things like virtual office hours. I have a lot to learn, as  presently there is nothing in my store front. Looks like there are lots of Second Life building classes in my future! Feel free to check out the new space on Cybrary City!

Academic Librarianship - library 2.0 - Second Life - web 2.0

Libraries as Friends

November 27, 2006 by 0 Comments

We just had a great talk by Alane Wilson of OCLC here at work, looking at a myriad of things, including the OCLC Environmental Scan, trends and branding. One of the questions after her talk was in regards to social networks and friends. This also relates to the point she made that people inherently ask friends for information first. In order to become a place which people more frequently use for their information needs, we need to be considered friends and to accomplish this we must be in their social networks (ie. Facebook, MySpace, etc). This also raised questions about what a “friend” is becoming in the social web, with the answer being that there are varying degrees of “friends”. Further to this was the fact that many are now finding and creating friends rather than simply finding existing friends in these realms.

This got me thinking about how friends are made in the virtual world of Second Life, which probably isn’t too far off from social networks. In Second Life, I befriend a number of people, particularly librarians involved in the project and I do this mainly so I can find someone to help me out in SL and who I  may be able to approach to bounce ideas off of; since we are both librarians in a virtual world, we likely have similar outlooks. I also befriend newbies and others I have longer conversations with and I do this so that they may have someone to approach again if they have any information needs. My list of friends continue to grow, but in actuality, I don’t know any of these individuals. Little personal information is shared yet friendship is extended. They are simply a name on a list that I may never actually speak to or encounter again.

Libraries may find their Facebook and MySpace pages in the same place, on numerous lists but never contacted. What will be difficult to do is to stay on the evergrowing list of friends or contacts and not be forgotten or overlooked. Yes, it is important to be in the spaces that our existing and future patrons will be and I fully support libraries reaching out to user groups. What we need to do is figure out how to make ourselves important and useful in these spaces and not just a name on a list that is never thought of again. Do I have an answer for this? Not yet…..

Academic Librarianship - odd stuff

Odds and Sods

October 2, 2006 by 0 Comments

Here are some interesting tid bits to pass along.

It looks like open access journals and open peer review have made it onto CTV’s radar. Perhaps the wave of academia’s future?

The Library and Archives of Canada has released their Report on Plans and Priorities 2006-2007.

Update:  This just in: an article from the Halifax Chronicle Herald in Nova Scotia suggests that the Community Access Program (CAP) is cut. Terrible news for the many rural areas (possibly even my small hometown) which rely on the program.