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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.
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!
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.
Another new site has popped up around here. We now have a site for our popular reading collection - a collection that’s been a huge hit so far! The site let’s you browse by cover, write reviews, share comments and recommend new purchases. Very cool - I’m busy spreading the word to students. Check this site out for more info.
I’m not sure how this one snuck by me, but it seems our catalogue now offers RSS feeds for saved searches! No more checking to see if anything is new, I can save the search and if any new material comes in that matches that search, I’ll get the results via RSS feed. Cool! More about this new feature here.
A fine idea (sorry for the pun)! Instead of paying for your fines, students are given the option to bring in canned goods. Every canned good brought in removes $2 from their fines to a maximum of $20. The canned goods go to the student food bank centre, where students in need can go and get help when they need it most. The only thing I might do would be to increase the frequency of this project and extend it out to local food banks too (1 time campus, next time local, etc). More info on this program here. Wonder if we could get this started here?
Well, this has made it to the ACRL awards page, so we can now share the news. McMaster University Library has won the Excellence in Academic Libraries Award! We’ve had lots of changes over the last year and have done a bunch of new and exciting things. Congrats to everyone involved! It’s nice to see all the hard work recognized.
Update - Here is the press release. Did I mention that I think we’re the first Canadian university to win the award?
Yes, I’ll join the growing amount of discussion on library 2.0 since John Blyberg wrote a post re-examining the library 2.0 movement. Like most, I’ve had mixed feelings about the whole web 2.0 movement and libraries - sometimes seeing great potential and other times wondering if it really meant anything to our users. I agree with Meredith Farkas when she suggests that we really need to consider the needs of our users. Do they care that we offer 2.0 applications? In many cases, the answer is no.
That being said, I believe that it is important to experiment with these 2.0 applications/technologies. For the most part, there is little cost associated with them. I beleive that libraries do need to be proactive rather than reactive and this is where Meredith’s comments on assessment are vitally important. If it’s not working, reassess and if it doens’t make sense, stop investing time in it.
I work in an academic library and I think there are some great 2.0 apps that our students and profs could use. I’ve often asked at the research help desk if a student is familiar with certain apps/technologies (del.icio.us, zotero, even blogs) - the answer is a resounding no. Facebook, yes (although I met a student yesterday who confessed to not having a facebook account and was lambasted by her friends). I think this is a role that academic libraries could play - introducing useful applications to their users - not just any 2.0 application simply because it’s 2.0. This requires knowing our users and perhaps even survey their needs and wants (not a revolutionary concept but one that is often forgotten)
Personally, I’d love to see (and hope to see and I don’t think I’m alone in this) drop-in sessions for such tools and liaison introducing faculty to them. I know this is being done elsewhere and it is this use of 2.0 in libraries that I think makes most sense.
Yay! Science had decided to leave JSTOR, which would have caused problems for future access to the journal. It seems they’ve changed their minds and will continue to place archived copied in JSTOR. For more details, check out the Chronicle of Higher Education (may need subscription).
I’m the liaison for First Year Experience and am familiar with the term helicopter parents. These are parents who hover around their children, contacting the university to keep tabs on their children. We’ve all heard of the extreme cases (ie. asking to go on job interviews with their children). A recent study however, suggests that those students with close ties to their parents are more satisfied with their university experience. On the flip side, these students often have lower grades. An interesting point - are the parents involved because the students need extra help or is the relationship hurting the students but not allowing for full growth?
I’ve grappled with what role we should have with parents. I’m not convinced that over involvement at the university level is a good thing but it is a fact that students still approach parents and friends as first line help. I’d considered holding a parent’s orientation, and this year our marketing, communications and outreach librarian held our first parent’s night and it was a success. Parents appreciated knowing where to send their children for help. I think that’s a role we can be happy with. Parents want to see their children succeed and often don’t know how to help - by having a night to highlight the support available to their children, we’ve played an important role but not one that has to perpetuate the helicopter syndrome.
Second Life should be approached with caution by academic institutions as there are numerous ramifications to consider. Second Life is not always a peaceful, quiet place - it is filled with sex, gambling, and griefers and depending on personalities, one may become addicted to the virtual world. We can control spaces we own in Second Life but we can not prevent students from leaving our space and entering more virtually dangerous areas. As academics, we must consider what it means to bring a student into this atmosphere. This is not the first time academia has encountered this muddy area though. The Internet’s birth is similar in a number of ways - it started out clunky and often with sex and gambling as a major portion of content. As with Second Life, the Internet can be an addictive space. We have since learned to work in this space and to use it effectively. In fact, many of us cant imagine working without it. Perhaps we will be the same with virtual worlds in the future.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had an article cautioning academic use of Second Life. I think that it is important to consider what it means to bring students into Second Life, what are the ethical concerns of this virtual world? That being said, I don’t think that that should scare us away from exploration. We need to caution and educate students as to what it means to be in a virtual world - what are the protocols, how can we behave in a virtual world. One of the important parts of exploration is discussion and we should have a discussion at all levels - departmental, administrative and campus wide. Consider what it means to you and your students to be in a virtual world and approach with caution.
Well, the campus is thriving again, the student centre is chaos, and there is noise again in the library. Yes, it is the first day of classes. Yesterday was our annual Clubsfest and we handed out 1125 waterbottles (pic to come) in an hour and a half! The bottles promoted both our campus libraries and the local public library. Students were asking for them all day! Guess we’ll have to order more next year, although I hope to do more with our welcome week, something more akin to the Ubiquitous Librarians‘ events.
It’s a busy fall ahead, with my distance course to teach, instruction to do, new responsibilities as a liaison and presentations to prepare for.
We’ve been busy at the library. We’ve relaxed our food policy, started an online group study room booking system, are constantly updating our website to function better and are working have a new popular fiction collection. And, I’m going to buy I bought a Second Life Island today! We have 5 new librarians with 2 more on the way and 4 interns to help shake things up too. It’s going to be a busy and interesting fall!
update: I forgot to mention that we added Amazon links to our catalogue and have gotten our first self-check-out machine! - there’s just so much happening!
I created a wiki to go along with the First Year Experience Liaison work I do. The Mac Library Experience provides important information to first years and those new to Mac in one convenient place. Presently, you have to apply to leave comments but I’m questioning that decision at the moment. Check out what the UL has to say about it too (sorry, a little pat on the back).
Oh, and a personal shout out to my mother and grandmother who are celebrating their birthdays today 
Update: The wiki made the Daily News. Also, I’m on vacation, so posts will be infrequent. More when I get back!
There’s a great article in the new issue of Educause which shares the result of a recent survey of librarian and faculty views of libraries (quick, now go read it). Most of the results are not surprising and it suggests that librarians and faculty still don’t always see eye-to-eye. I found it unsurprising that faculty are using the library less frequently but that’s not to say they’re not using our resources. While faculty see the library becoming less relevant they do not want library funds to be directed elsewhere and still see the library serving a preservation need. Libraries provide essential resources and this role will unlikely change, it is the manner in which we offer these resources and even our services that will change. Unsurprisingly, both faculty and librarians see electronic resources become an increasingly dominant format.
One thing that I tend to disagree with is that the article suggests that librarians generally see their role remaining unchanged. This may be what the survey suggested but many of the librarians I know, myself included, do not feel this is the case. A session I attended at CNI on the future of academic libraries also suggested the need for libraries and librarians to start reconsidering their positions and roles and I think many of his predictions, although they may be hard to take, may not be far off the mark.
I do agree with the idea that libraries need to take a leadership role in a number of areas, including preservation and collections (the future of the e-book and the move to online journals).
Surveys such as this are essential in reminding librarians that faculty may not have the same opinions on important issues. Libraries are a’changin’ and we as librarians will need to change too.
I’m a bit behind the times. A short while ago we launched our Endeca-powered catalogue and I’ve been playing with it when I can. Check it out on our homepage! Amanda Etches-Johnson has a great post that sums up Endeca (better than I ever could. I’m still learning all of the ins and outs of this new interface). I think there’s a lot of potential with Endeca, however, I am discovering that I was far more attached to booleans than I had previously thought. I think students will enjoy this new interface. This summer will be spent refining my Endeca skills and updating all of my instruction for the new interface.
This was announced a little while ago but I’ve only decided to blog about it now. I know there has been a lot of interest in this topic. We’ve hired our Immersive Learning Librarian, who will be looking into virtual worlds, gaming, and other immersive environments. Congrats to Shawn McCann! I hope to be working with him on our Second Life presence and I’m sure he’ll have some great ideas to help our presence grow there.
Congrats to the other librarians we have also recently hired:
- Communications, Marketing and Outreach Librarian - Catherine Baird
- Digital Strategies Librarian - Nicholas Ruest
- Digital Technologies Development Librarian - John Fink
Starting tomorrow, we will be offering virtual reference service in our space on Cybrary City! Thanks to the 5 volunteers who have agreed to help me out! This is a pilot to see if such a service is necessary and how it might be staffed. We are just starting the summer term here, so we will be running the pilot for the extent of the term. Feel free to stop by and ask a question! For more info, check out our post in the Daily News.
This was probably the most controversial session I attended, but forecasting is often controversial. David Lewis outlined what he thought would occur over the next 25 years.
- we need to finish the migration from print to electronic, particularly reference collections and journals and start planning for move to ebooks
- retire legacy collections (ie. put jstor journals in storage)
- create diversity of user study spaces
- reposition information tools, resources, and expertise - be where the students are (google), embed librarians - less routine interaction and more technology and personal relationships, provide new services for research and scholarship
- move from purchasing material to curating content - this will be the result of open access scholarship, partons will be less reliant on local collections. Lewis predicts that while we spend 80/20 on material purchase and content curating, this will change to 40/60.
While this may seem difficult to achieve, Lewis believes it can be accomplished. He stresses repositioning oursevles and change our service model. He sees a hybrid model of librarian/technologist/instructional design with skills including teaching new information skills, develop and manage information support systems and building collections of curated content. This transformation will take some time to achieve.
Other thoughts included meeting the needs of the undemanding before addressing those of the demanding. I’m not sure this is possible, as the demanding are often the impatient ones who will make life difficult. Another point was to watch what patrons are doing rather than asking them. This makes more sense, as patrons often don’t realize what they want and asking puts them on the spot.
Alan Levine, Bryan Alexander and Cyprien Lomas summarized 6 of the trends noted in the annual Horizon report. The report examines technology trends and hypothesizes which will affect libraries and education in the near horizon (adoption in the next year, 2-3 years, 4-5 years) . The process to narrow down to technologies is difficult at best but the trends include:
- user-created content
- social networking
- mobile phones
- virtual worlds
- new scholarship and emerging forms of publication
- massively multiplayer educational gaming
It was a great candid discussion and we were asked if we felt the trends were “out there” or not. While many libraries are starting to look into these technologies I think they were right that these will be the major ones that will be adopted in the next few years. Adoption is the key term - there are a number of other technologies that may be examined in the near horizon but adoption will likely go to those we are already getting comfortable with. The question will be whether we adopt them in time or whether our patrons will have moved on to the next big thing as we adopt them on their way out. I think it was a good thing to note the type of technology (social networking) rather than a particular product (we’re already seeing MySpace use decline). What do you think?
Information Commons can vary dramatically but Joan Lippincott highlighted the trends she’s seen in information commons around the country. These included:
- technology for users
- services bridging physical and virtual spaces
- special spaces
- design and aesthetics
This was the first time I heard mention of teamspot - a software that allows students to hook their individual laptops into a common (usually larger) monitor and all contribute to a project - great for collaborative group work. Joan also stressed that signage was essential when sharing services - make it clear what is available (ie. laptop loans, multimedia equipment available, etc). Some of the special spaces were quite interesting - one commons offered binoculars and a bird book for bird watching!
Unfortunately we ran out of time for discussion of assessment of info commons.
The session was a great way to see the variety of interpretations for information commons and also reinforced that our Learning Commons is moving in the right direction.
This great session was presented by Lisa Hinchliffe, Karen Schmidt and David Ward of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They’re doing some great things around gaming and should be an inspiration to other libraries considering this path. The session began with background on gamers, stressing that many of us are gamers, including grey gamers and our students - for this reason we should be considering gaming.
They are collecting games, both new and vintage and are developing appropriate policies. They surveyed students during gaming nights, talked with faculty using games, and read relevant literature. This collection serves both to preserve the object and the experience. By collecting the games, students can both see the object but also experience what it is like to play the game. This experience is generally lost when the only way to play a vintage game is through an emulator.
While they are not actively pursuing creating games, they are considering a variety of uses for gaming. They have offered gaming nights which have been a smash with students. They also highlighted that short games (esp and a bartending game I can’t recall the name of) can be used for instruction and training. I think this is a great idea and can’t wait to try it out in my sessions next term. It breaks the ice, creates an atmosphere of fun and allows for easy conversation into more serious topics, such as controlled vocabulary and customer service.
They are also working with faculty to embed gaming in curriculum where appropriate and are supporting classes which are using gaming. They will be providing copies of Civilization 4 to a class. As one of the first to try this, they have discovered that gaming publishers don’t have a model to deal with this type of licensing and hope to help establish working models.
This is library and are ones to watch for future gaming innovation.
I saw a sign coming home the other day and I keep meaning to take another look at it. It was a text messaging service. All you had to do was text a question, anything they stress, to Just Ask (this is of course if I am remembering the sign correctly). Answering questions - isn’t this our business? Have we been beaten again (see my post on the Find Engine)?
I realize that there are a few libraries offering services via text messaging but I believe it is still relatively low. We can easily offer updates of new content, let patrons know when books are in, and yes, even reference service through text messaging. This is certainly the way many university students communicate and we’ve all heard that email is the way old people communicate! I’d love to know if this service is getting a lot of questions. I’d also love to know who’s answering these questions (which is another reason to take a look at that sign).
As an aside, I’ll be quiet the next few days as I’m off to Phoenix for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Task Force Meeting (inconveniently timed to coincide with Computers in Libraries, which I really must go to sometime). I’m sure I’ll have lots to blog about during/after the conference.
Is there such a thing as exciting statistics? Take a look at this YouTube video - the first 5 minutes are amazing! I was introduced to it at the Winter Institute for Statistical Literacy for Librarians and recently used it for a reference round table I co-presented on data and statistics. I’ve also used it for the distance course I teach and it really got the dialogue following among my students (often a hard thing for distance courses and even more difficult when the topic is statistics - the normal discourse runs along the line of I hate statistics!). It’s a great example of the power of statistics when used correctly and helps statistics become more exciting I think.
Calling all Canadian librarians! I’m interested in seeing what types of grants Canadian librarians have applied for (and hopefully received). Please share your knowledge! Thanks!
Well, this might seem like a little gloating, but our new Learning Commons just received an award from the students here. It received the McMaster Student Union’s Rudy Heinzl Award for Excellence, which recognizes an outstanding one year achievement which improves teh lives of McMaster Students. See what others have to say here and here.
A big congrats to Amanda Etches-Johnson, McMaster’s newest Library Journal’s Mover and Shaker! She is a celebrity in the library 2.0 world and recently became our User Experience Librarian. Amanda is a colleague of mine (right across from my desk in fact) and it has always amazed and inspired me how much she contributes to librarianship. This accolade is well deserved Amanda - congrats! Keep up the great work!
I’m quite excited. I have been given a store front for my library in Second Life on the Cybrary City section (kindly donated to us to use for experimentation by Talis) on InfoIsland. This will allow me to experiment with how we might be able to offer library services in a virtual world and set up things like virtual office hours. I have a lot to learn, as presently there is nothing in my store front. Looks like there are lots of Second Life building classes in my future! Feel free to check out the new space on Cybrary City!
We just had a great talk by Alane Wilson of OCLC here at work, looking at a myriad of things, including the OCLC Environmental Scan, trends and branding. One of the questions after her talk was in regards to social networks and friends. This also relates to the point she made that people inherently ask friends for information first. In order to become a place which people more frequently use for their information needs, we need to be considered friends and to accomplish this we must be in their social networks (ie. Facebook, MySpace, etc). This also raised questions about what a “friend” is becoming in the social web, with the answer being that there are varying degrees of “friends”. Further to this was the fact that many are now finding and creating friends rather than simply finding existing friends in these realms.
This got me thinking about how friends are made in the virtual world of Second Life, which probably isn’t too far off from social networks. In Second Life, I befriend a number of people, particularly librarians involved in the project and I do this mainly so I can find someone to help me out in SL and who I may be able to approach to bounce ideas off of; since we are both librarians in a virtual world, we likely have similar outlooks. I also befriend newbies and others I have longer conversations with and I do this so that they may have someone to approach again if they have any information needs. My list of friends continue to grow, but in actuality, I don’t know any of these individuals. Little personal information is shared yet friendship is extended. They are simply a name on a list that I may never actually speak to or encounter again.
Libraries may find their Facebook and MySpace pages in the same place, on numerous lists but never contacted. What will be difficult to do is to stay on the evergrowing list of friends or contacts and not be forgotten or overlooked. Yes, it is important to be in the spaces that our existing and future patrons will be and I fully support libraries reaching out to user groups. What we need to do is figure out how to make ourselves important and useful in these spaces and not just a name on a list that is never thought of again. Do I have an answer for this? Not yet…..
Here are some interesting tid bits to pass along.
It looks like open access journals and open peer review have made it onto CTV’s radar. Perhaps the wave of academia’s future?
The Library and Archives of Canada has released their Report on Plans and Priorities 2006-2007.
Update: This just in: an article from the Halifax Chronicle Herald in Nova Scotia suggests that the Community Access Program (CAP) is cut. Terrible news for the many rural areas (possibly even my small hometown) which rely on the program.
As a back-up for our maps and data areas, I thought I would post this:
As of January 2007, Natural Resources Canada will discontinue the printing of paper topographic maps and will close the Canada Map Office. Our government wants to get out of the business of producing maps.
As of January 2007, Natural Resources Canada will discontinue the printing of paper topographic maps and will close the Canada Map Office. Our government wants to get out of the business of producing maps.
Many Canadians place a priority on the paper map service the Government currently provides. Natural Resources Canada’s digital mapping policy will effectively cut off access to the majority of Canadians. However, our politicians see this issue as a minor one. ACMLA, which represents both the public and research communities, would like to convince them otherwise. This policy will have an enormous impact on the Canadian
public and our map users. The Minister of Natural Resources has a responsibility to listen to our point of view. This is not a minor policy amendment but a major change that has implications not just for map librarians but for the ordinary Canadian who is looking for a map for their cottage or who wants to go snowmobiling or hiking. Canada can be a vast and unforgiving country without a map in hand.
How you can help:
This is a political issue and we must get the message out to as many Canadians and organizations as soon as possible. An independent website has been set up to lobby and inform Canadians. ACMLA asks its members to support this initiative by sending emails to inform associations, university departments, schools, individuals, etc. of the Government of
Canada’s decision to abandon printing paper topographic maps. Let your M.P. and your Minister of Natural Resources know what their constituents think of this decision.
Support Access to Maps for Canadians mapsforcanadians.ca
There’s a radio commercial that I heard this morning for the yellow pages (I think, I’m still waiting to hear the commercial again to confirm this). They are advertising themselves as the Find Engine. This got me thinking about our library catalogues again. The debate has been raging about how our OPACs suck and there is a lot of merit in the arguements for this. The biggest question is whether our students can Find It; are we a Find Engine, should we be? The number of students who come to the research help desk looking for materials in our catalogue, I’d say we are not a great find engine. I’m not going to wade too deeply in the catalogue debate but perhaps we need to think of ourselves as Find engines.
Our library is presently undergoing transformation, a very exciting time as we start surveying all of the exciting opportunities we could be a part of. Part of a discussion at a meeting today turned towards blended librarianship. By considering learning theory, how students and faculty learn, rather than straight librarianship we may be able to move towards a catalogue that acts more as a Find engine. By considering how people learn, how they search, we can design more intuitive catalogues and help simplify the process. I’m interested on how this way of thinking would affect all aspects of the library, especially for instruction. A thought I think I will mull on for a while.
A CNN newsreport makes mention of a survey of 1200 college students that was taken to find out what they consider to be the "in" by undergrads. Tops on the list: iPod. Second Place: Tie between Facebook and Beer. Pretty telling as to what the students are into at the moment. The survey also provides support for those who want to see the library have a presence on Facebook (the students are obviously there) or introduce podcasting to the library. Oh, and the last time the 18 year survey saw beer dethroned from the top spot: 1997, by the Internet.
We are just finishing up a Reference Week where I work. It's been a wonderful week of getting back to the basics of Reference Service and a great opportunity to find out what's new and what's changed in the world of reference. In this world of fast-changing products and services, I recommend that all take a moment to think about the basics, as well as the best way to serve our patrons. It helps us remember why we wanted to join this profession and can help reignite our passions. This also comes at a time when major conferences are about to occur (CLA, ALA), another excellent means to reignite passions.
As a complete aside, take a look at this article from the New York Times about the US government considering the possibility of Website Companies keeping web use statistics.
A recent post on the blog Alt Ref has gotten me thinking about information literacy in the 2.0 world. In his post, Brian stats that info lit is "very Un-Library 2.0 (the 'proper way vs. your way)". Why is this and how can it be changed?
The IL standards are broadly: Know, Access, Evaluate, Use and Ethics. IL should ideally help the students recognize when they need information, how to get that information, how to use it and do so ethically. The clash comes in the access/retrieval part of the process. Part of the problem is that the resources that we are trying to teach students to use in academic libraries are not library 2.0 oriented themselves. The 2.0 world is very social and database creators and vendors are not following suite with the library 2.0 trends that we see elsewhere (ie. they don't allow tagging, etc). In order to get half decent results, students need to be taught how to use the product. But does this mean that information literacy is un-library 2.0?
Web searching using Google and the like is not necessarily a bad thing. However, we do need to teach students how they can get the most out of the search engines and especially how to evaluate the sites they find. Many students don't look past the first page of returned results. I don't think it's not a bad thing to teach them how to search better. The proper way does not necessarily mean that their way of searching is wrong. Often times, their way of searching leaves them frustrated and in need of help. By teaching them how to search better, or perhaps properly, we are saving them time, frustration, and hopefully they can produce better papers. Furthermore, evaluation skills are incredibly important in the 2.0 world and information literacy is essential in forming this skill.
So how can we reconcile the two (library 2.0 vs. info lit; 'proper' way vs. your way)? Perhaps we can try creating wikis instead of pathfinders, which will help the students identify appropriate resources. Students can add to the wikis and tags can be implemented. We need to let vendors and database creators know that there products are not serving our patrons as well as they possibly could.
These are just some quick thoughts on the topic. I plan to do some more thinking on this. I've got lots of questions, such as: does information literacy need to be 2.0 and if not, is that a bad thing, if so, how can we achieve it? Look for more to come.
Here are a couple of things that have caught my eye in the world of librarianship.
A decision will soon be made regarding the opening of a Nazi archive. Previously, the archive was only open to survivors of the Holocaust, to allow them to track survivors. A panel of 11 international legal experts will be deciding whether or not the archive should be open to the general public. A wealth of information could be opened to historians and other researchers of the Holocaust.
The library marketing blog The "M" Word has a post about personal branding. More companies are pushing the "my" aspect (my card, my Coke). Libraries have often used the copyrighted phrase "@ your library". Perhaps in the age of library 2.0 we should be using the "my library" approach. Some libraries already allow customizable features. Many services that our patrons use now offer such features. Yahoo has joined the bandwagon and is allowing users to customize their page. Customization and self-centeredness are becoming the norm.
An idea I really like is the "my librarian" idea. This sounds very close to the notions of a liaison librarian found in academic libraries. The liaison librarian is associated with a department and the faculty often think of the librarian as "my librarian". Why not promote this notion? It helps promote an idea of personal service. Students of that department or faculty will know who to turn to for assistance. In some universities, librarians are assigned to a particular year of students (ie. all first years). By promoting the My Librarian idea that The "M" Word suggests, we may create a more intimate atmosphere and who knows, we may reach patrons who previously felt intimidated by the library and librarians. Definitely an idea I'd like to pursue.
