The Swiss Army Librarian posts a regular “Reference Question of the Week”. One of the latest covers using file conversion websites to help a desperate patron who needs to print out a file in a format that the library doesn’t support.

Sense and Reference discusses three recent blogposts on libraries getting rid of books to create spaces.

The effect of library instruction on student success
Three C&RL papers:

• The Academic Library Impact on Student Persistence: “a change in the ratio of library professional staff to students predicts a statistically significant positive relationship with both retention and graduation rates.” (Note that they show correlation, not causation; in their discussion they’re inclined to suspect that the effect of more library professional staff is an indirect one.)
• Measuring Association between Library Instruction and Graduation GPA: “if more than one or two library workshops were offered to students within the course of their program, there was a higher tendency of workshop attendance having a positive impact on final GPA. The results indicate that library instruction has a direct correlation with student performance, but only if a certain minimum amount of instruction is provided.”
• Why One-shot Information Literacy Sessions Are Not the Future of Instruction: A Case for Online Credit Courses: “Researchers analyzed the pre- and post-test scores of students who received different types of instruction including a traditional one-shot library session and an online course. Results show that students who participated in the online course demonstrated significant improvement in their test scores compared to the other students. This study shows freshman students’ needs for more comprehensive information literacy instruction.”

Serials

• Jenica Rogers names names of vendors with annoying practices. Some vendors responded well; some badly. Jenica posted another followup on Vendors that delight me.
• SCOAP3 is an initiative to set up a consortium that redirects library funds from paying for closed access High Energy Physics journal subscriptions to funding these journals to be made open access. The FAQ goes into more detail about how the model will work.

Conferences

• LIANZA 2011 starts on Sunday – #lianza11 tweets from all attendees will be captured in a set of CoverItLive sessions
• the worldwide online Library 2.011 conference will follow, running from November 2 – 4, with sessions held in multiple timezones.

Deborah

Margaret Paterson, Sara Roberts and I have put together (with the help of Dean Patterson from UC Design) a poster for LIANZA 2011 about the library’s use of AskLive since the earthquakes. We’ll be bringing it around the staff tearooms for anyone interested in previewing it on the following days:

Friday 21st, 10am at MB
Tuesday 25th, 10am at Law
Wednesday 26th, 3pm at Education
Friday 28th, 10am at Central

We’ll also put a copy in the research repository.

Deborah

If you can’t find where to get “Full Text at UC Library” or Endnote citation links any more, it’s because Google’s hidden the preferences behind a “cog” icon in the top right corner. Click on that, select preferences, and then you’ll have the option as usual to set things how you like.

Deborah

If anyone wants an RSS feed of the student newsletter, I’ve hacked one together at http://feed43.com/0062554681368557.xml – will give you a notification that links to the newsletter.

Deborah

This was a fantastic workshop, fun and useful. A lot of what it covered seemed relevant to any planning, including the kinds of strategic planning we’ve been doing recently. I’ve posted my report on this workshop to file:///K:/human_resources/conference_reports_HR030_1/2011/CGPM_2011_D_Fitchett.doc. I also have a copy of the workbook we used if anyone’s interested in a look.

(My current draft of the inspired-by-the-workshop infolit template I mention at the end is at file:///Q:/Deborah/ResearchRubric.doc though I want to add stuff on analysing results, facets, pearl-growing, etc. I may abbreviate it all to try and fit the whole thing to a single A4 sheet for a one-hour class; or may leave it at two sides for the class I get two hours with. I won’t have a chance to test this out probably until next year so would be happy to hear any ideas in the meantime!)

Deborah

Michael S Hart, founder of Project Gutenburg, died on the 6th September – read his obituary.

JSTOR is making much of its public domain material openly accessible. (Library Journal also comments.)

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Information “is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, open-access publication for original articles, reviews and case studies that analyze or describe the strategies, partnerships and impact of library-led digital projects, online publishing and scholarly communication initiatives.” It’s put out a call for submissions for its inaugural issue in [Northern Hemisphere] Spring 2012.

Deborah

For anyone getting questions about accessing a standard, we have an up-to-date guide to the standards we have access to. This includes a lot of online standards, which makes access much simpler.

If you’ve heard that standards are complicated, don’t panic. They kind of are, but most queries are straightforward – if we’ve got online access, all’s good; if you can find a print version in the catalogue (do a keyword search on the code, eg BS 5500 – include the space), it can be requested as normal.

The only time things become complicated is when we seem not to have it – not all our print ones are catalogued, and also often standards are cross-coded, so we might actually have it under a different code. So as a rule of thumb, don’t say that we don’t have it – if you can’t find it, contact me, Dave Lane, Christine McKee, or Anne Milligan and we’ll investigate further.

Deborah

I’ve been posting items to Library news highlighting free resources – there’s a lot of stuff out there so I don’t think I’ll run out any time soon but I do want to make it balanced across all the subjects we support, so please let me know of any resources you think I should highlight or even just if you notice me neglecting a subject area.

I’m particularly interested in resources that are explicitly in the public domain or use some kind of open access/open source license (Creative Commons, GPL, etc).

Thanks already to Erin for reminding me about Mix and Mash (which I used last week), and Tim O’S for suggesting the historic Australian newspapers on Trove (going up tomorrow).

Deborah

McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland has posted a photoset to their Flickr account. Only 13,000 books to pick up, but some of their shelving seems to have failed in new and exciting ways. (Yay for cross-bracing!)

Deborah

This has exploded onto the various networks I follow, so it seems a good time to gather some other links with it:

What students don’t know gives an overview of findings from an ethnographic study of how students at various Illinois universities research, and is a vital read for anyone in the academic environment working with students.

Related links:

• Project home
• The study will be published as a monograph.
• A similar study in 2007 Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester is also available (including a free online version).
• In 1993 Barbara Fister wrote the still-relevant and -mindblowing article Teaching the Rhetorical Dimensions of Research, reading which made me modify a class I was preparing for mid-way through pulling the powerpoint together.
• Ibid, Search: How Libraries Do it Wrong draws links between problems with how we teach search to students and with how we interact with academics and “the small things, the seemingly trivial things, that can drive people to find ways around libraries.”

Unrelated links, on marketing:

• Gavia Libraria writes about all those times people say “So you’re a librarian? So… you… shelve books?…” and suggests Representing Ourselves by telling people what we do (in elevator pitch format – she gives examples) rather than waste time attempting to argue about stereotypes.
• Mr Library Dude collects a bunch of Social Media Ideas & Prizes for Libraries from various libraries.

Deborah