This assignment is being handed out today, I’m not sure about the timing. [ETA It’s now been handed out with a change in title: “The Engineering Project Team”. The due date is 5pm Monday 8th March.] Students need to write a short report recommending the members of a project team for a major engineering project, which requires skills of at least three different types of professional engineer. So students need to research engineering disciplines/professions, understand report writing structure, and cite in APA style.

We gave lectures earlier this week but presumably due to the stunning weather less than half the students turned up. So if you get confused students at the desk, check first that they:

• went to the lecture or at least
• have read the lecture notes on Learn (you can log in to show them where to go: [username and password redacted – ask if you need them], then Course Categories > Engineering > [ETA: in the search box] search for ENGR 101 > Week 1 (in the middle section) > Library lecture slides);
• have checked out the subject guide especially the Topic guide page,
• have looked at books on restricted loans and the resources we’re adding to Learn (currently listed under ENGR 101 > ENGR101 Web Resources unless/until the lecturers think of a better place);
• have done their own websearch (reliable web resources eg professional organisations etc are fine for this assignment); and
• know where the APA style guide is (library website > search for “APA” is the easiest).

We’re including books on report writing on restricted loans and some chapters on Learn, but if they have any questions on this side of things refer them to the Learning Skills lecture (I haven’t seen slides yet) or to Learning Skills for individual help.

Deborah

Just some prior notice about the timeline:

• Dave and I gave our first library lecture today to ENGR 101 students, about finding and evaluating resources and about APA citing.
• After our third iteration on Thursday, our slides will be available on Learn.
• On Friday they’ll get their first assignment; by then we should have more resources on Learn and a topic page on the Engineering Intermediate subject guide. There’ll also be books on 3-hour loan and they can use reliable websites.
• This assignment will be due on Monday 8th March (ie they’ll have two weekends).

Deborah

This display cabinet is surplus to requirements at EPS Library – does any other branch want it?

Measurements are: 185mm long; 75mm deep; 106mm tall. The front glass panels unlock and open down to insert/remove display items.

Let us know if you’re interested.

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”.

Deborah

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. To try this out, pop over to http://flockdraw.com/4r5dur and doodle something; all content should disappear once I log out today, unless someone takes a screenshot.

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

“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.

Merry Christmas!

Deborah

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.

Deborah