You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'library 2.0' category.
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!
My last day of vacation and my first meme thanks to my colleague Amanda. What is the meme you ask? Well, let me tell you. You may have heard of Wordle - it makes neat tag clouds of text or del.icio.us tags. It’s really a lot of fun. I put in my del.icio.us tags and got this lovely image. It’s amazing how it really does pull out what’s important to you at the moment.
So, the meme is to take your favourite text and put it into Wordle and share the image. I’ve chosen to take Book 1 of the Iliad by Homer. This one is translated by Samuel Butler and taken from Project Gutenburg. Some of you may know of my background in Classics (not music, not literature but ancient Greece and Rome) so I figured this was a fitting example.
I guess this means I have to chose some others to pass this along, so I’ll tag a few of my tweeps: Amy, Michelle, and Julie.
I’m trying twitter again (it’s about the fifth try) and it’s going much better this time. It is true, if you don’t have people to follow, then there really isn’t much point to twitter. Thanks to all of the great CiL people I’ve met, I now have both followers and people to follow.
I noticed this post in Digg this morning, that pointed to twitter answerme which lets you track your questions. Simply send your question to @answerme. I’m surprised I didn’t hear more about this at Computers in Libraries. I did attend one session on twitter (a very good one), which mentioned that some libraries are using twitter to post about the types of questions they are getting but I didn’t hear a lot about libraries using twitter for actually answering questions. More thoughts about twitter when I post my CiL wrap up (which will be soon - there is much catching up to do still).
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.
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.
I just thought I better write something about rss, since that’s what’s up this week in our Learning2.0 program. What can I say about rss that hasn’t been already said? I’m hooked, that’s all I know. Once I discovered them (thanks Amanada!), I’ve been a mad subscriber to rss feeds. I likely have too many feeds now. I love that they keep me up-to-date about what’s happening in our field, technology, and the world. My bloglines account is always open; I probably should seek help. I’ve become very reliant on my feeds but I hope in a good way, as it helps me keep up with my professsion and my patrons. If you’ve just started using rss, watch out! It’s addictive!
We are in week two of our Learning 2.0 and participants are being introduced to and creating their own blogs. People are really quite excited by this program and it will be interesting to read their blogs.
On another note, I’m frantically trying to put the final touches on a presentation I’m giving tomorrow - Learning in a New World: Social Networks and Second Life (I’ll link to the slides once they’re up). The presentation is for the McMaster Learning Commons Partners’ Learning on Learning Forum. It’s been interesting research and I’m hoping all goes well. Then, in an attempt to pretend to be a jet-setter, almost as soon as I’m done the presentation, I jump on a plane and head out to Edmonton for the Winter Institute on Statistical Literacy. More on that when I return!
McMaster has been the talk of the town for a while - mostly because we have a new, exciting, innovative University Librarian, Jeff Trzeciak. We have lots of cool new positions (including a gaming librarian) and we’re doing lots of new things. He’s been very supportive of my exploration in Second Life. It seems we got some media attention for what we’ve been doing too! They even managed to take a picture of the McMaster Library space in Second Life while I was there (I had no idea they were taking a picture or that they were associated with the paper)! All in all - pretty cool.
I just thought I’d warn you that you will see a lot of library 2.0 posts in the next while. This is not a bad thing. Starting Monday, the Emerging Technologies Group will be launching Learning2.0 at McMaster and will last for 12 weeks - each week a new library 2.0/web 2.0 technology will be introduced. Although I have played with many, if not all of these technologies, I’m quite excited by the program. In fact, many of the staff our excited - which is great! We even had Michael Stephens come and give a talk and start the excitement!
On a related note - I’ve finally gotten a hold of Jenny Levine’s Gaming and Libraries report! Can’t wait to read it. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on virtual worlds and gaming and teaching and libraries and have a couple of talks coming up on the topic. I’ll post on that another day.
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…..
I’ve added a new page on the Second Life Library on Information Island, in Second Life of course. Check out the links and feel free to get involved in the project!
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.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (may require subscription), Facebook is planning on opening membership beyond university communities, much to the chagrin of the students. The academic library community has been debating whether we should have a presence in this area and it will be interesting to see if the decision to open membership changes opinions.
I’ve been interested in the place of the library in Facebook and have gone as far as setting up an account but not much more than that. All of this is particularly interesting as I’ve recently discovered a similar student site just for students at my institution, complete with chat and forums for discussions. While browsing the site as far as I could as a guest, I noticed a thread involving the library. I contacted the administrators to see if I could participate and, surprisingly to me, they said yes. I’ve had a lovely response to my presence, which is more than I was hoping for. I intend to check in occasionally to see if there are any library or research questions I can help with. Hopefully it will remain so positive.
Congrats to everyone involved in the Second Life Libraryon Info Island in Second Life! They’ve won second prize in the Talis Mashing Up The Library Contest! Read all about it from the Second Life Library Blog.
As I try to catch up on the backlog of rss feeds in my Bloglines account, I came across this and thought I would share (for all those gov pubs enthusiasts - and I know you think it’s your dirty little secret but it’s time to be proud of your love for gov pubs). FirstGov now has a list of many of the US government RSS feeds. A nice neat place to sign up for feeds. I’ll pass on any other neat things that I may have missed over the summer.
At least, that’s what it feels like when I start to try to walk or sit in Second Life. My adventures in this virtual world continue. I finally left the island to see what else the world has to offer. I’ve been nervous to leave the comfort of an area I understand.
I’ve signed up to provide some virtual reference on the island. The meetings before the service starts (Sept. 6) have been very interesting. A whole new host of issues to consider in a virtual world, along with the standards (ie. privacy, service standards, etc). I’m not sure I’m sold on the idea that a library has to have a place in a world like this. However, this will likely change, for the good or bad, as I continue to read up on gaming and education and become more proficient in Second Life.
Although it seems to be taking up a lot of my time (so much to learn!), I will continue to write about other issues.
Well, I’m starting my adventure in the Second Life Library 2.0! I’ve created my avatar but she’s still pretty basic. I’m still a pretty wobbly walker and I just learned to sit. I’m hoping to do some virtual reference and maybe even some Canadian gov pubs collection development in the SL Library. I’ll keep you posted. If you’re in the Second Life Library, look for me, I’m Danu Dahlstom
.
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.
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.
I thought I would pass this along for all those podcasters or future podcasters. Here's a link to a Podcasting Legal Guide from Creative Commons. I haven't done any podcasting yet but I'll definitely be looking at this more closely before I do, even though the guide is directed towards US law. Even those who don't know what podcasting is may want to look at this, as it does provide a section on what podcasting is and provides further resources for those with extra questions.
Just thought I'd pass along a couple of interesting library 2.0 stuff to play with. There is now a library 2.0 wiki. Firefox also has an extension for libraries: LibX. I haven't played with it yet, so no comments at this time. Have fun playing!
Update: I should really wait until I read all my rss feeds before posting. Here's another good resource to check out for Library 2.0 stuff.
Well, it's that time of year here. I'm getting ready for my annual review. It's a great way to look back at the year, examine what was accomplished and what has yet to happen. I've managed to accomplish quite a bit this year but it's rather overwhelming when I consider the number of things I still want to accomplish.
Not only are there a number of things to actually get done, there's lots to contemplate in the ever changing world of librarianship. Top on my list of considerations:
The state of government information - There are so many issues when it comes to government publications, especially electronic gov pubs. We're creating an e-gov pubs working group to try to get a handle on some of the issues.
Library 2.0 - yes, more library 2.0. I'll definitely keep following this and consider how we can apply it here. Luckily, we've got a couple of experts in this area already.
Information Literacy - this almost goes hand-in-hand with another concern of mine, liaison work. I think it's incredibly important to reach out to both faculty and students in the form of liaison work. This year the library's trying to get more involved with student orientation and I'm playing a role in it. Hopefully our relationship with both students and faculty will become stronger over the next year.
The year ahead holds many challenges and opportunities. Bring it on!
There has been a lot of free information lately. ArchiveGrid has been discussed in a number of library blogs. This site allows free access to historical documetns from around the world.
Statistics Canada has announced that they will make all electronic publications found on their website (http://www.statcan.ca) free as of April 24th.
Exciting news from my library. We’ve hired Jeffery Trzeciak as our new UL. His presentation was Library 2.0 oriented. Can’t wait to see what we do!
Well, it’s been recent period of milestones. Wikipedia English just entered its millionth entry. iTunes has had 1 billion songs downloaded.
What do these milestones mean for libraries? Obviously, these are technologies that libraries should be thinking about. Our patrons use them, so what can we do with them? This is where the whole library 2.0 debate or discussion comes into play. There are some great blogs out there discussing the 2.0 issues. Be sure to check out Stephen Abram’s Stephen’s Lighthouse and Micheal Stephen’s Tame the Web among the numerous great blogs out there (links on sidebar). More on Library 2.0 to come.
