Links of interest 25/3/10

Resources
C-SPAN Video Library "indexes, and archives all C-SPAN programming for historical, educational, research, and archival uses." (Content is primarily US politics but see here for overlap with other subject areas.) All programs since 1987 can be viewed online for free.

Twitter
Following in the popular footsteps of the Fake AP Stylebook Twitter account ("Use a hyphen to join words together, a dash to separate two words that really don't like each other.") come rival accounts Fake AACR2 ("2.17B1. Describe an illustrated item as instructed in 2.5C. Optionally, add woodcuts, metal cuts, paper cuts, etc., as appropriate.") and Fake RDA ("2.3.3 When attempting to parallel title, line title up to proper title, put title in reverse, turn left, shift into drive, turn right.")

Neat stuff

• Embedding chat widgets within EBSCO databases
• Darien [Public] Library offers prizes to Foursquare checkins at their library
• Lincoln University uses their page on Facebook to promote their own Foursquare check-in and to chat with students about famous pranks
• Crowdsourcing: How and why should libraries do it? includes a huge number of examples of successful crowdsourced projects (ie projects where the bulk of the work has been done by individuals of the general public a few bits at a time) and what has made them successful
• Common Craft have made a new "Augmented Reality" video in their "in plain English" series

Links of interest 4/3/2010

Subject Guides
Springshare have created a Best of LibGuides LibGuide to share ideas about "the best of what the LibGuides system has to offer".

Gale notes on Twitter that "We analyzed search usage growth for 5k libraries; 20% of them use widgets. The libraries using widgets had 60% higher growth." Widgets can be built from their website (among other tools for measuring and increasing usage).

Infolit by video
Using video to address an immediate research need is an answer to a faculty complaint with students not researching broadly enough. The librarian put together a video in 30 minutes, posted it on his blog, subject guide, and course management system, and watched the video stats climb as students watched it.

COPPUL's Animated Tutorial Sharing Project collects video tutorials that can be shared among library systems to avoid reinventing the wheel - including project files so libraries can tweak it to fit their environment. The ones I've seen are licensed with a "share-alike" Creative Commons license (meaning you can use it and change it but you have to license your finished product with the same license). You can browse or search for databases eg JSTOR.

Miscellaneous Web 2.0
7 Things You Should Know About Backchannel Communication: Mostly backchannel communication happens at techier conferences but 7 Things points out that: "Backchannel communication is a secondary conversation that takes place at the same time as a conference session, lecture, or instructor-led learning activity. This might involve students using a chat tool or Twitter to discuss a lecture as it is happening, and these background conversations are increasingly being brought into the foreground of lecture interaction."

10 Technology Ideas Your Library Can Implement Next Week "to start creating, collaborating, connecting, and communicating through cutting-edge tools and techniques".

Measuring the impact of web 2.0 (via a colleague via the LIS-WEB2 mailing list):

• The Twitter Experience at Chelmsford
• Twittering at Sheffield library
• Birmingham libraries use of Web 2.0
• Case studies/guest blog posts on UKOLN's Cultural heritage blog
• and the Libraries and Web 2.0 wiki

Links of interest 2/2/10

Foursquare
Not a chain of convenience stores - this Foursquare is a website/application that lets you use your cellphone etc to "check in" when you reach locations like cafes, movie theatres, libraries, etc. At its worst this floods your friends with endless notifications: "Now I'm at the dairy! Now I'm at home! Now I'm at the busstop! Now I'm at work! Now...!" But at best you walk into your favourite cafe and:

• read tips from other customers about what to order or avoid;
• win a prize from the cafe itself;
• discover that your friend is in the area and arrange for them to meet you for a quick cuppa.

Some recent blogposts discussing the value of Foursquare for libraries (read the comments as well!) include:

• Foursquare, Libraries, and Librarians;
• Foursquare and Libraries - Anything There?;
• and its followup Foursquare and Libraries - Definitely Something There!

Publishing scandals du jour
EBSCO buys up exclusive electronic access to a number of popular periodicals which will be removed from other databases that used to provide them. Reactions:

• the breaking news;
• from a librarian to scientists;
• Gale responds;
• EBSCO responds.

During negotiations between Amazon and "big 6" publisher Macmillan over pricing of ebooks, Amazon removed all Macmillan titles (electronic and print) from its database. Reactions:

• the breaking news;
• Macmillan's CEO responds promptly;
• among many many others, authors Charles Stross, John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell, Cory Doctorow weigh in;
• and finally Amazon responds in an obscure location two days after it all happened (this is months in internet-time).

In case you're curious about non-Amazon options, there's a number of online bookstores in New Zealand and I've recently discovered The Book Depository in the UK with free international shipping.

Bookcovers in LibGuides
Springshare have announced a partnership with Syndetics so we can now use Syndetics bookcover images in our LibGuides. This is just like using the images from Amazon before - when adding a featured book just insert ISBN, click icon, and voila a cover image - but click the "S" (Syndetics) icon instead of the Amazon icon. An added advantage is that Syndetics works with ISBN-13 as well as ISBN-10 (Amazon is limited to ISBN-10).

European theses
The DART-Europe E-theses Portal gathers and provides "access to 123327 full-text research theses from 210 universities sourced from 16 European countries".

Links of interest 13/1/10

Web collaboration

• Tinychat lets you instantly set up a temporary chatroom with its own short url you can share with anyone you want to join you. Once everyone has left the chat it disappears.
• Flockdraw does the same for the virtual whiteboard.

Virtual reference

• Virtual provider pessimism: analysing instant messaging reference encounters with the pair perception comparison method looks at how users vs librarians are satisfied with IM reference sessions. They find that users are frequently happy with results even when the librarians haven't felt confident with how things went.
• Cyberspace or Face-to-Face: The Teachable Moment and Changing Reference Mediums looks at instant messaging, chat, and face-to-face reference in terms of levels of instruction in each medium. They find that "patrons wanted to be taught regardless of medium, and that librarians responded by providing instruction in all mediums." (Although different techniques are used in the different mediums.) "These patrons’ consistently high desire for instruction reinforces the notion that the ideal teachable moment can be found in reference work."

Potluck

• "But I Want a Real Book": An Investigation of Undergraduates' Usage and Attitudes toward Electronic Books
• This Open Access mindmap covers what open access is, what supporters are motivated by, what it applies to, how materials are made available (eg journals and repositories) and organised. Many of the nodes have links to articles for further information.
• Discussion of a simple system a Dutch library set up to encourage users to recommend or 'tag' books as they returned them - and discussion of how this system became so successful that the library discontinued it.
• Karen Schneider writes Reflections on strategic plans that are neither strategic nor plans
• And finally, Beyond the Bullet Points: New Years Resolution says "Let us make a resolution together. Let’s make 2010 the year of the librarian – not the library."

Deborah

Links of interest 23/12/09

"star topper" by LMU Library
used on a Creative Commons
BY-NC-SA license
(Photos of tree construction.)

M-libraries (libraries on mobile devices
Library on the Go (pdf) "explores student use of the mobile Web in general and expectations for an academic library’s mobile Web site in particular through focus groups with students at Kent State University. Participants expressed more interest in using their mobile Web device to interact with library resources and services than anticipated. Results showed an interest in using research databases, the library catalog, and reference services on the mobile Web as well as contacting and being contacted by the library using text messaging."

library/mobile: Tips on Designing and Developing Mobile Web Sites shares "Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries’ experience creating a mobile Web presence and will provide key design and development strategies for building mobile Web sites".

Usability
Infomaki: An Open Source, Lightweight Usability Testing Tool describes a tool developed by New York Public Library to spread the usability testing load among visitors to their website - visitors are asked if they want to answer a single question; if not, they're not bothered again; if they do answer it they're given the option to answer another one. Because it's not asking much of an investment in time a lot of people will do it, and then because it's so easy a lot will answer more than one: "In just over seven months of use, it has fielded over 100,000 responses from over 10,000 respondents."

University of Michigan has made available two reports about the usability of their LibGuides.

Search interfaces
Google Labs is trialling Image Swirl which adds an "images related to this one" functionality to their image search in a lovely visual way.

Happy Holidays!

Opening hours

I have a saved Twitter search for mentions of 'library' within 1000km of New Zealand. It gets people talking about iTunes libraries, programming libraries, and even actual book libraries. Sometimes people just mention visiting by-the-by, and sometimes they talk about good experiences (yay wireless, yay free stuff, yay nice staff!) or bad experiences (overdue fines, book wanted is out, library too noisy).

I've seen a few recently surprised at how late libraries open in the morning, but this one made me laugh:

Links of interest 14/12/09

A library in a telephone booth

"Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes" talks about some common mistakes in creating passwords and suggests techniques for more secure ones.

Customer service
Zabel, D. and L. J. Pellack (2009) First impressions and rethinking restroom questions, RUSQ 49(1) has garnered a number of thoughtful comments, as well as reactions in the biblioblogosphere including:

• Putting on my positive face
• Customer service

Via someone I forget, who pointed out that this works perfectly if you replace the word "computer" with "library/catalogue/database/etc": How to help someone use a computer.

Information literacy
Karen Schneider recommends and discusses the Project Information Literacy report Lessons Learned: How college students find information in the digital age (PDF, 3MB).

Digital natives, scholarly immigrants on the ACRL blog discusses some of the findings of the Journal of Higher Education article University students' perceptions of plagiarism.