Scandal du jour (aka the power of social media)
JSTOR’s new interface made searches default to covering their entire database – so results might include articles students didn’t have access to on JSTOR and which wouldn’t even be linked via OpenURL to the library’s subscription in another database. (Meredith Farkas describes the problems neatly.) Librarians complained loudly on blogs, JSTOR’s Facebook page, and elsewhere, and a day later JSTOR has announced that they’ll change the default while they continue work on OpenURL.

Tools
WolframAlpha has added widgets that focus on a specific kind of data and can be embedded into a webpage by copying and pasting the code. Categories cover all kinds of subject areas – some widgets might be relevant in a subject guide. (You’d need to add a new rich text box, then select the plain text editor and copy/paste in the embed code from WolframAlpha.)

Librarian as resource
University of Michigan Library’s search results now bring back subject librarians as well as relevant databases, catalogue items, subject guides, institutional repository hits, and external websites. Their blog about this links to some examples.

eBooks and compatibility
Jason Griffey writes a clear explanation about why ebook filetypes and digital rights management means that purchasing an ebook doesn’t mean you can read it on any old e-reader.

Library instruction
Cooke, R., Rosenthal, D. Students Use More Books After Library Instruction: An Analysis of Undergraduate Paper Citations College and Research Libraries (preprint)

“In Fall 2008, students from first-year Composition I and upper level classes at Florida Gulf Coast University participated in a citation analysis study. The citation pages of their research papers revealed that the students used more books, more types of sources, and more overall sources when a librarian provided instruction. When these results were compared to those produced by students in upper level classes (all of whom received instruction), it was discovered that as the class level increased, the number of citations and the percentage of scholarly citations generally increased and there was a high preference for books from all disciplines, especially history.”

(They compared classes which received library instruction with identical classes which didn’t.)

Deborah

Open Access

• Dave Clemens passed on the link to the Creative Commons NZ mailing list.
• The State Services Commission has released the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework.
• In our brown-bag lunch conversation about open access yesterday we also talked about the digitisation of the AJHRs, the Directory of Open Access Journals, ways/issues with getting more open access content in our catalogue and/or Summon, and a bunch of other things.

Accessibility

• Char Booth writes about e-texts and library accessibility including a great quote that “ebooks were created by the blind, then made inaccessible by the sighted.”
• NZETC has just posted about the 1064 works in DAISY format available in their collection for people with print-related disabilities. (DAISY = “Digital Accessible Information SYstem”)

Library statistics

• Dave Pattern at U of Huddersfield blogs about how “non- and low-usage of library services/resources […] relates to final grades”
• Some results from extending the Angers university library’s opening hours – in French and in Google Translate’s English
• Stats from the Toulouse library’s standard OPAC vs its mobile OPAC – in French and Google Translate’s English.
• And Meredith Farkas writes about “the unsupported interpretations” librarians often make based on our statistics

Miscellaneous

• The first year of research on the Researchers of Tomorrow (pdf) study finds that “in broad approaches to information‐seeking and use of research resources, there are no marked differences between Generation Y doctoral students and those in older age groups. Nor are there marked differences in these behaviours between doctoral students of any age in different years of their study. The most significant differences revealed in the data are between subject disciplines of study irrespective of age or year of study.”
• Assessments of Information Literacy collects links to infolit tests, assessments, rubrics and tutorials available online.
• Christina Pikas lists a Rundown of the new [database etc] interfaces this summer. There were some surprises, including a ScienceDirect/Scopus merger apparently due August 28…

[Edited 12/8 to fix a couple of broken links -Deborah]

“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” –Peter Suber

Got something to share about Open Access, or just curious what it’s all about? Come to a brown-bag lunch next Tuesday 10th Aug at 1pm with me and Ariana and we’ll chat about it and/or any related topics of interest.

We’ll meet in the EPS staffroom with our lunches at 1pm, then go up to Discussion Room 3 with its pretty new flatscreen. 🙂 Totally informal! If you can let me know in advance that you’re [definitely/probably/maybe] coming that’d be useful in case we need to book the larger space, but otherwise just turn up on the day.

Deborah

If you haven’t seen the Old Spice ad that’s gone viral, you’ll have to watch that first: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.

Then check out the spoof created by the library at Brigham Young University: Study like a scholar, scholar.

Deborah

This gets long so I’ll put it behind the cut. Summary – some stuff about reference collections, virtual reference, and a pile of ideas about teaching library tutorials.

Deborah

Continue reading Reference / Info-literacy links of interest 21/4/10 →

Web 2.0
Common Craft has a 3-minute video explaining “Cloud Computing in Plain English“.

UCTV hosts podcasts and videocasts for staff and departments at UC. Users can subscribe by RSS feed to individual “channels” to keep updated.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries and Brown University Library provide a “dashboard” of widgets on their websites displaying current statistics about library usage.

Roy Tennant suggests not making any more mobile websites as research suggests more people (in the US) are getting smartphones that can support anything a normal web-browser can support. (Though I don’t know of any smartphone that supports a 1024×768 screensize…) Smartphone applications seem to be trending instead. The iLibrarian rounds up her Top 30 Library iPhone Apps (part 2 and part 3). Why an application when you’ve already got a website? Phil Windley points out that “If my bank can get me to download an app, then they have a permanent space on my app list.” The trade-off is that whereas a website should work on any browser, smartphone apps often need to be in proprietary formats (the Librarian in Black particularly complains about Apple’s iPhone in this respect).

View from the top 🙂
The University Librarian at McMaster University Library blogs results from their laptop survey. Apparently laptop circulation now accounts for about a third of their total circulation stats; their survey looks into how students are using the laptops.

The Director of Librarys at the State University of New York at Potsdam blogs about “What I’ve Learned” in the first 10 months of her job there.

Scandal of the week…
Barbara Fister summarises recent discussion about EBSCO as the “New Evil Empire” in her Library Journal article “Big vendor frustrations, disempowered librarians, and the ends of empire“. The discussion was kicked off when Meredith Farkas blogged about losing access to a key journal because of EBSCO gaining exclusive access to it. For her library to keep access to the journal, they’d have to subscribe to two databases at a total cost of US$7000.

Fun
Alice for the iPad – one of the ways technology can enhance the book.

Deborah

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

Deborah

We have a foursquare user at UC Central Library: someone tweeted last night that they’ve “become the mayor”, a title awarded to the person who checks in the most at a given location, and thus liable to change if more people start checking in there. See the Central Library entry on foursquare – no categories, tags or tips yet….

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”. (We’re already doing two of the ten.)

Measuring the impact of web 2.0 (via Heather Jenks 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

Deborah

“Storage S” is the location for items (especially journals but also a few monographic series) that are remaining in the PSL building until the mobile shelving arrives/can be built in EPS Library. (This is currently scheduled for something like Easter-ish, but as the psalmist says, “Put not your trust in deadlines”.) Hampers are still delivering to PSL so please put Storage S items in a hamper for PSL.

Any other ex-Engineering or ex-PSL items should show up as in transit to EPS Library. These should all come straight here – if you don’t yet have an EPS Library hamper label, ‘Engineering Library’ will still work. 🙂

Deborah