January 2012
70 posts
ACRLog » Convenience and its Discontents: Teaching... →
Pull quote: “Discovery is not the tool for every task. Controlled vocabularies don’t federate well, and the student asking very specific questions of the literature is better off going straight to the disciplinary index. Known item searches proceeding from partial information are a recurrent challenge. We must be careful with the way we describe the scale of discovery to students. In our...
Innovating the Library Way - Grant McCracken -... →
Pull quote: “The librarians, facing stiff and seemingly insurmountable competition, found a mechanism that takes advantage of the library’s Achilles’ heel, that makes a virtue of its anti-virtuality. My local library is bricks and mortar. It’s a very actually place in a very real world. This allows it to stage events that matter in ways that digital experiences cannot.”
Making Sense in a Digital World | Peer to Peer... →
Pull quote: “The much-tweeted news from the conference was that some publishers are realizing that DRM is frustrating their customers and may be counterproductive. You really didn’t have to go to a conference for that insight. We’ve been telling you that for quite a while. The most puzzling thing I’ve encountered in tweets from the conference, though, is the gee-golly enthusiasm for hot...
Cool Tools: Material Libraries →
Pull quote: “Art, architecture and design centers in colleges and universities have begun creating material libraries that rival the depth and usefulness of book libraries.”
QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of... →
Pull quote: “In the instant cost-benefit analysis I do every time I see a QR code, it has yet to make sense for me to fire up the decoder app I have installed on my phone.”
What could we do in a month? →
Pull quote: “Develop and deploy the killer app for Federated Searching — something that would allow for search and retrieval across all the various silos of content (Library Catalog, licensed databases, e-book packages, digitized collections, etc., etc.); AND would have an awesome interface that would make sorting through the inevitable massive results lists intuitive and intelligent. (Note:...
Go To Hellman: Unglue.it Preview All Systems Go →
Pull quote: “You can’t really plan for a launch. Things always happen that you don’t expect. It helps to have had a good night’s rest, but other than that…”
What If We Asked the Librarians? Or, How The... →
Pull quote: “In short, the Code doesn’t provide answers; it provides tools that help librarians ask the right questions.”
Some Associations, Scholars Protest Bill That... →
Details on the announcement by the Modern Language Association’s opposition to the Research Works Act.
Fair-Use Guide Seeks to Solve Librarians’... →
Pull quote: “Despite its well-meaning mission, the code is not devoid of controversial statements: It says explicitly that it was not negotiated with rights holders. Mr. Butler said the group chose not to include them because negotiations between rights holders and professional communities often result in what he called ‘really weak tea.’ The groups usually only agree on...
Twitter RSS Feed Cheat Sheet (Redux) →
A great resource from librarian Val Forrestal.
Continuing the Conversation: 10 Steps to a... →
Nice set of links accompanying a workshop from Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches-Johnson.
Using the Serials Solutions APIs for the MyReading... →
Once again, Dave Pattern and his colleagues at the library at the University of Huddersfield have cooked up a really neat tool to expand the use of library resources. This time, they’ve launched a tool that helps instructors (and maybe students?) assemble reading lists for courses.
Who do you work for, faculty author? →
Regarding Oxford University Press and efforts to make chapter contributors in edited books use a work-for-hire agreement.
Pull quote: “The other thing that having these contributions classified as work for hire would prevent would be prior licenses. As more faculties adopt open access policies, which usually take the form of a prior license to the institution for repository deposit, the...
Open and Shut?: Elsevier needs to get out more →
Pull quote: “If Elsevier is indeed now committed to Open Access, and if its publishing services really do — as it maintains — provide good value for money, it really needs to demonstrate as much. And to do that it needs to step out from its Amsterdam publishing tower and talk to people. Rather than lobbying behind closed doors, and communicating by means of press releases and statements, it...
Academic publishing is full of problems; lets get... →
Nancy Sims does a great job fisking the FUD in a recent Atlantic Monthly piece on problems in academic publishing.
Search strategies and tactics →
A great round up by Google search guru Daniel Russell.
Sometimes You Just Have to Start Over →
Pull quote: “Today, libraries don’t so much work with their ILS as around it for the majority of what they license and purchase. The ILS does not easily or inherently manage database licenses, PDA agreements for eBooks, link resolution, or assessment of the digital materials.”
The Orphan Wars (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE →
Pull quote from James Grimmelmann: “But if the suit does reach the orphan issues, it may have an enormous effect. A ruling for the libraries could give them a broad privilege to start making older out-of-print books available digitally when it seems unlikely that a copyright owner can be found. A ruling for the authors, on the other hand, could significantly limit the scanning of books, ...
Update on What’s happening at Harvard →
Links to lots of other commentary and reporting on what happened at Harvard last week.
Collision Spaces →
Collisions (socially speaking) between different groups on campus can be productive for all. Pull quote: “Social networking has certainly helped many of us make opportune connections in the virtual world. I would be truly sad, however, if our face-to-face arenas for networking disappeared. Day after day my work is enriched by being able to say: hey, it’s great to run in to you! How is that...
A Few Last Notes (and a bit of a theme): Roz at... →
Useful news tidbits from the exhibits floor at ALA Midwinter.
5 Signs That Indicate Website Usability Problems →
A nice roundup of most common usability problems in websites.
A few small concerns about eTextbooks →
Pull quote: “In a print world, students have lots of options: they can buy books new or used, share books with friends, borrow them from a library (for a few hours or for the semester if they are lucky) and sell them back at the end of the semester for at least a bit of what they paid for them.
But digital textbooks generally have a single price point. And it isn’t always cheaper than the...
Escaping the Boundaries →
The online debate between Mike Ridley and John Mediema heats up as they prep for a face-to-face debate over literacy. Pull quote from Ridley’s latest: “Apparently John [Mediema] thinks debating me in a room full of librarians is going to be a slam dunk. After all he says ‘placing boundaries on information is what libraries are good at: classification, indexing, location.’...
Another way to think about geeks and repetitive... →
Pull quote: “In this view of the world, tasks that involve data manipulation (as so many modern chores do) are undertaken by teams. There is an infinite supply of manual chores. Everybody tackles them. Ideally there is one member of the team I call the toolsmith. Working shoulder to shoulder with the team, the toolsmith spots an opportunity to automate some piece of the work, writes some...
Digital media: can’t give it away →
Pull quote: “The question of whether First Sale applies to digital goods has never been clearly determined. There is even baseline uncertainty whether the language governing content ‘distribution’ as the term pertains in U.S. copyright law even encompasses digital content, vs. ‘material’ objects such as books and CDs. Another challenge raised by digital first sale is...
My Web Change Soapbox →
Pull quote: “I think libraries-collectively-fear web site change because we’ve-collectively-managed it so badly in the past. We came late to the usability game, we didn’t do usability as often as we should have, and when we did, we based it on tasks that were important to librarians’ conceptual frameworks about information.”
Linked data is not for books « PWxyz →
Pull quote: “What did make more sense to me, and emerged at the end of our day, is envisioning how linked data might well be invisibly integrated into the workflow of libraries. In the same way that a blogger need not know HTML (or much of it) to write a web page, a library documenting upcoming community lectures, educational outings, author talks, and literacy programs might well be...
Top Tech Trends @ ALA Midwinter 2012 →
Live stream now!
Going deep into the world of web development →
Pull quote: “It seems like the web world is something of a do-ocracy, but our world of professional librarianship is one of slow change, big theories, and a few baby steps forward at a time. It’s structured, hierarchical, and slow moving.”
Wikipedia Blackout and MLibrary Site Search →
Pull quote: “The Great Wikipedia Protest Blackout of 2012 did not result in any particularly significant increase in site searching at the University of Michigan Library.”
Guess what? We're four years old today! →
Pull quote about Library H3lp: “Today, over 300 universities and colleges, public libraries, special libraries, and various combinations thereof pay for subscriptions (thank you!). The state-wide NCknows service migrated fully onto LibraryH3lp, including backup staff, in the summer of 2011. We have servers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. System architecture has been revised to support...
Restructuring →
Pull quote: “If the Loon had to characterize the primary difficulty in a single phrase, it would be creeping malinvestment, of space and staff. Many of today’s research libraries tend to have too many resources allocated to open stacks, underused small physical libraries, in-person reference points, and book selection, relative to the current value of these services to research-library...
Coming Soon–Enhancements to IDS Search →
Good to see that work on IDS Search’s WorldCat overlay is moving along.
Reformat and reinstall approach to organizational... →
Pull quote: “As long as you keep most/some of the people, no matter what you put them through, you will not succeed in reformatting the organization and reinstalling the organizational culture that you want.
Instead, the organizational culture will absorb the change and be transformed by it. People will not forget how they were treated, and the entire history of what happened and how people...
Want to REALLY remain relevant? Stop making our... →
Pull quote: “[I]t is definitely a plea to libraries to take those individual every day customer service interactions very, very seriously. After all, in the end it is the front-line staff who define us in the minds of our community the most. We can work as hard as we want to portray our institutions as vital, relevant entities, but without everyone on the team being on board with ever single...
Thanks to iPads and Kindles, E-Book Lending at... →
Pull quote: “Driven in large part by the proliferation of tablets and e-readers, digital book lending is on the rise, according to OverDrive, a leading supplier of digital content to U.S. libraries. The company, which partnered with Amazon for its Kindle lending program, reported recently that it saw a 130% increase in traffic to its ‘virtual branch’ websites last year.”
What’s happening at Harvard? →
A good intro to the breaking news from this afternoon.
SOPA Protest Outcomes, Activism vs. Everyday Life →
Pull quote: “[T]he content that flooded Twitter, Google, and FB yesterday was largely about SOPA, PIPA, what was at stake, and how to fight it. If those sites had also been down, a powerful platform for activism would also have been unavailable. I don’t know if this was by design, but leaving the big SMS and Google up was a really effective way to both show a little bit of what...
“What do they expect us to do, go to the library?”... →
Pull quote: “And I used the internet like usual, except things weren’t usual. Wikipedia was dark (read this link for some laughs). Reddit was dark. BoingBoing was dark. Cheezeburger network and Craigslist had clickthroughs. Google did a custom logo. In fact I found it a little tough to predict which sites might go dark. The Syracuse iSchool had a very well done page. ALA hadn’t done anything...
Reflections on the Apple Education Event →
Pull quote: “The textbooks that can be produced with iBooks Author and read in iBooks 2 are interactive, in the sense of an individual reader being able to work with an individual text in a hands-on fashion. They do not, however, provide for interaction amongst readers of the text, or for responses from a reader to reach the author, or, as far as I can tell so far, for connections across...
Stallman on E-Book Evils & Privacy →
Pull quote: “As Stallman notes, you can walk into a store and anonymously buy a physical book, often just with cash. At most you might be required to show proof of age for some materials but no record is kept of what you show. Contrast that with e-book purchasing, which requires a logged-in identity that is linked to credit cards, bank accounts, and other hard-to-remove traces. These...
Everyone a user account →
Thoughts about the institutional access proposed in the settlement for Google Book Search. Pull quote: “From an institution’s perspective, would I (at a major research university) be ready to deal with the support requirements explaining that every user of GBS [Google Book Search] must create their own Google account (if where there is no GA4E [Google Account for Education], separate...
Towards Post Literacy: Machine Intelligence →
Definitely go back to the start of the posts between Mike Ridley and John Mediema that are written to lead up to their face-to-face debate over literacy. Pull quote from this post by Ridley: “will argue, in the nicest possible way, that slow reading is a cowardly retreat from the challenge of a hyper-connected, always on, information ecology. That’s the way things are, and will be. Get over...
Jan. 18, 2012: Large Datasets, Identity, & New... →
Latest CNI podcast. I’m always happy listening to Cliff Lynch and Joan Lippincott talking about what’s important and notable.
Four messages from the dark →
Pull quote: “[W]e are better custodians of culture than are culture’s merchants because we understand that culture is what we have in common. We feel pain every time something is held back from this Commons.”
Otlet’s Shelf Tumblr Theme →
I support Otletmania.
ACRL Endorses Forthcoming Code of Best Practices... →
College librarians: put this on the your calendar. “We encourage ACRL members to attend a free webcast, offered by ARL, to learn more about the code on Thursday, January 26, 3:00–4:00 p.m. Eastern time. The Code facilitators—Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University, Brandon Butler of ARL, and Peter Jaszi of the American University Law School—will deliver a...
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SOPA Boycotts and the False Ideals of the Web →
Provocative op-ed from the NY Times by Jaron Lanier. Pull quote: “This belief in ‘free’ information is blocking future potential paths for the Internet. What if ordinary users routinely earned micropayments for their contributions? If all content were valued instead of only mogul content, perhaps an information economy would elevate success for all. But under the current...