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Upstaged again?

August 6, 2008 by 2 Comments

First of all, I saw this on TechCrunch today. I’ve mentioned the use of twitter for reference before and have heard people speak on it at conferences. As always, it seems libraries have taken a back seat. toanswer is a mashup of twitter and answers – exactly what reference should be doing. It seems many of our services are promoted better by others. What we have here is a marketing problem. We also have another issue here – the idea of the one big library. If libraries and librarians came together to offer one centralized reference service, how would we fare against these services? I think there is potential here for libraries but it is heavily reliant on cooperation. We see this happening, Second Life reference service is offered by librarians from around the globe, but I think we need to pursue these ideas a little more aggressively.

I’m off to IFLA to present with Amy Buckland next week. I’m quite excited – I’ve never done any international conferencing before. No doubt there will be a recap of the conference experience when I return.

library - reference - Second Life - virtual worlds

Google Gab

July 10, 2008 by 0 Comments

Google is often the fodder of much discussion among librarians. The vast majority of librarians I know love and use Google frequently (I use Google Reader, iGoogle, gmail, gtalk, Google maps, Google Scholar and Google Books). Librarians have often struggled to figure out the relationship they have with Google – some see great potential while others see Google as a threat. Google sought a partnership with libraries for their Google Books project and suggested they would like to continue the relationship, even starting a newsletter for librarians. As Steven Cohen and others have pointed out, they have not kept up this relationship. The Chronicle of Higher Education has since picked up this story. There is some great discussion occurring on the story, so take a look and consider what you think of the matter.

Google has also become the talk of librarians thanks to the release of Lively, Google’s virtual world. I’ve already jumped in and started looking around (I’m Darrwyn if you happen to be in Lively). At first glance, it seemed to be more like IMVU, a 3d chat room, than a virtual world. It wasn’t as intuitive as I thought it might be either. I found it a little odd that you choose your room before creating your avatar. I found it interesting that you can be in multiple rooms at once (simply tab between rooms). Rooms do show who is visiting, which will result in less empty world syndrome, a phenomenon that is commonplace in Second Life. It is also Windows only at the moment – I’m hoping this will change soon. I think there is potential though. I will be spending some time in there for the next while, learning the ropes, creating rooms and seeing how it compares with Second Life. One of the nice things is that Lively rooms can be put on a webpage – could this be a new step for virtual reference (I’ll have more on this idea later, so stay posted). We already have meebo widgets on our webpages, perhaps there will soon be a Lively room as well.

Update – It’s much easier to move around when using a mouse with my laptop. If I had started out this way, I may have felt the interface was a little more intuitive than I originally did.

Academic Librarianship - library 2.0 - projects

Peace and War and So Much More

June 30, 2008 by 0 Comments

There’s always something afoot at my place of work. Here’s another great project that just finished up – Peace and War in the 20th Century. Go check it out! Congrats to Nick and the rest of the team working on the project! More on the project can be found here.

Not sure if I mentioned this one, but it’s worth repeating if I did. Amanda recently launched the 2.0 Toolbox for faculty to create wikis, blogs and other 2.0 goodness. More info here.

Oh, there’s also the major digitization project that’s going on of our rare books. More info here.

There’s lots of other projects on the go – more on them in the future.

Academic Librarianship - conferences - library 2.0 - unconference

Unconference Goodness

June 29, 2008 by 0 Comments

Sitting outside, blogging. I love summer. Summer also means conferences but I attended my first unconference. The One Big Library Unconference, hosted by York University Library’s Emerging Technologies group, discussed exactly that – how can we create the One Big Library. I really loved that the unconference idea means that there are more round table discussions rather than presentations. It was all done sans powerpoint, which is something I’ve been leaning more and more to in recent days, although I find it hard to actual achieve. The unconference was great – a lot of great minds got together and had some great discussions (did I mention is was great?). Here are some of the highlights and my thoughts. As with all sessions, there were too many great topics all at the same time.

The first session was on Zotero. I have used Zotero for quite some time now and think there is a lot of potential. The most exciting news is that syncing is coming in the very near future and there are other neat features common soon. I recently talked about Zotero and its possible uses for gov pubs 2.0. It can take a snap shot of the top page which would be a great way for libraries to save ever changing gov pubs pages(or at least prove they have changed). I’d love to know if any one else is considering Zotero for this kind of use.

The second session was on educating for the one big library. This topic was a little too huge for the time slot – it might have been best to identify a group (staff, library students, all others). We started by trying to define one big library only to discover there is no one way at this moment – is it one big library, one big virtual library, is it sharing collections, is it using technology, is it more than a set of trends, is it even possible to do, is there even a library in one big library? Needless to say, there were no definitive answers but there was some interesting discussions, including how new tools and technologies are changing the definition of librarians.

Other sessions I attended included a discussion on open access and copyright rights; cataloguing, the semantic web and folksonomies, and one big library on one little device. When talked turned to institutional repositories in the open access talk, it was raised that there has to be  need in order for people to want to participate in such movements. It also has to be seductive – flickr is seductive and it fills a need. Institutional repositories on the other hand, are not seductive and while we think they fill a need, many faculty have not recognized this yet. The cataloguing discussion raised some interesting points about tagging and the possibility of using tagging on Library of Congress Subject Headings. This also got me thinking about other ways tagging can help students find their info needs. Wordle is hot right now and cloud tags have been around for a while. I’d love to see cloud tags at the side of search results – showing words searched, related and relevant subject headings, and if you’re already doing it, tags that other users have contributed to your records. Most relevant hits would show in bigger text. I’ve mentioned this to our systems librarian and will be bugging him about it again in the future. If you’re using cloud tags in your library catalogue, let me know!

All in all, a great unconference. The only thing I would have liked a little more of was more discussion on what one big library would be – how are people envisioning it? How can we achieve it? The topics we discussed all have the possibility of contributing to the one big library but we didn’t define what one big library would be as a group. I can’t wait for the next unconference!

library 2.0 - memes

Fun with Wordle

June 23, 2008 by 2 Comments

My last day of vacation and my first meme thanks to my colleague Amanda. What is the meme you ask? Well, let me tell you. You may have heard of Wordle – it makes neat tag clouds of text or del.icio.us tags. It’s really a lot of fun. I put in my del.icio.us tags and got this lovely image. It’s amazing how it really does pull out what’s important to you at the moment.

So, the meme is to take your favourite text and put it into Wordle and share the image. I’ve chosen to take Book 1 of the Iliad by Homer. This one is translated by Samuel Butler and taken from Project Gutenburg. Some of you may know of my background in Classics (not music, not literature but ancient Greece and Rome) so I figured this was a fitting example.

I guess this means I have to chose some others to pass this along, so I’ll tag a few of my tweeps: Amy, Michelle, and Julie.


Academic Librarianship

Serendipity or Saving Time?

June 5, 2008 by 0 Comments

We’re having conversations again as we move to new models and bring the library forward, attempting to stay relevant in a world of changing information needs and information access. One of the recent conversations revolved around changes in services, including the ability for patrons to browse our storage area and a stack retrieval service. This in turn lead to a discussion on saving time vs. serendipity.

We all want our patrons to find what they need and this can be accomplished in a number of ways, mainly searching and finding. Searching requires the use of the library catalogue, Google or even a librarian. Finding may also include Google but there is often more serendipity involved. There is an obvious desire for serendipitous finding, hence the feedback from patrons for the ability to browse journals in our storage. Stack retrieval however, may hamper some of this serendipitous finding. Part of the joy of getting a book for your research, at least for me, is going to the stacks and finding another book that fits your research by chance. Are we doing a disservice by getting the book for them? Are we limiting their finding ability? I know many libraries offer stack retrieval and it is certainly something our patrons are asking for – it is a great time saver to call ahead and get the book pulled so that it is ready and waiting for you. Of course, stack retrieval will not stop patrons from going to the stacks themselves but it will be interesting to see how this service will affect circulation numbers.

Despite the question of saving time vs. serendipity, I am glad to see that our library is moving to answer the needs and requests of our patrons. We have lots of other changes in services coming too but that is another blog post or two for the future.

Uncategorized

And I’m back…

May 27, 2008 by 2 Comments

It’s been forever since I’ve posted and feels like forever since I’ve been at work. I’ve finished my research leave which resulted in a paper for IFLA with Amy Buckland (and it’s already up!).

I also presented at workshop on Transforming Information Literacy: Do We Have the Skills at WILU with my great colleagues Karen Nicholson and Shawn McCann in BC. It went well, although as with most presentations, I would change things in the future. Participants seemed interested in Shawn’s demo of World of Warcraft but seemed reluctant to talk about literacies outside information literacy (which is perhaps understandable as it is an info lit conference, but we were introducing other 21st century fluencies such as digital literacy, media literacy, numeracy, scientific literacy, etc). I love WILU as a conference – small and intimate – and this year was no exception. Attended a number of sessions on peer tutoring, something I would like to get started here. I hope to start work on a student ambassador program and will share info as it develops.

Finally, I presented at the CLA annual conference on gov pubs 2.0. I hope to start doing some of the stuff I talked about (del.icio.us account for subject guides, google search for gov pubs and more). This presentation, along with the WILU presentation will be online soon – I’ll post links when they are. I’m also stepping down as convenor of the Access to Government Information Interest Group with CLA. It was a good but long trip in BC, completely with seeing family I hadn’t really seen in 20 years.

Next conference will be IFLA in August. One thing I’m finding with conferences lately is that our library really has become bleeding edge in many cases. Many of the presentations I go to, we’re already doing. When I talk about things we’re doing, many can not relate as they do not have the support to try things as we do. It’s something I need to be thinking when I create my presentations. I really am lucky to be working in my library!

With all of the research and presentations, it’s taking a little while to catch up on work. Summer means First Year Experience work is first and foremost – we’ll be having a scavenger hunt for Summer Orientation and will be included in a parent panel. Once that’s done, there’s just Welcome Day, Welcome Week and Clubsfest to plan.

And with all of my goings on, our library is still doing neat things. We just had a launch for our mass digitization project – a partnership with Kirtas Technologies, Ristech and LuLu. Congrats to all those working on these major projects!

And that’s all I have for now. You may have guessed that I will not be posting on CiL – there’s so much out there now. All you need to know is that it was the best conference eva!

library 2.0 - web 2.0

Twitter Answers

April 15, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’m trying twitter again (it’s about the fifth try) and it’s going much better this time. It is true, if you don’t have people to follow, then there really isn’t much point to twitter. Thanks to all of the great CiL people I’ve met, I now have both followers and people to follow.

I noticed this post in Digg this morning, that pointed to twitter answerme which lets you track your questions. Simply send your question to @answerme. I’m surprised I didn’t hear more about this at Computers in Libraries. I did attend one session on twitter (a very good one), which mentioned that some libraries are using twitter to post about the types of questions they are getting but I didn’t hear a lot about libraries using twitter for actually answering questions. More thoughts about twitter when I post my CiL wrap up (which will be soon – there is much catching up to do still).