Stephen Francoeur's Commonplace Book

Mar 12

Chris Bourg, "The great librarian identity crisis of 2013," Feral Librarian -

Pull quote: “But I wonder if there is a way to “change the narrative” (hat tip to Bess Sadler for the phrase). What if the story was that the work libraries do is so important and so cool that everyone wants a piece of it? Or that libraries are such logical places for a broad range of services and resources that of course we need to hire folks with a broader range of education and skills and talents?”

Mar 07

A Library for the Subway -

counterpunches:

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A trio of students from the Miami Ad School—Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez—have came up with an innovative concept that allows people to read the first ten pages of popular books while riding the subway. 

Using near field communications (NFC) technology, commuters select the desired book from a list of popular titles and read its first ten pages—upon finishing, the reader will be informed of the closest library location from which they can pick up and read the rest of the book. 

This is a simple but ingenious idea that can be adopted and adapted to encourage reading in the 21st century, when new technology is changing the way we consume books. 

Mar 05

Heather Piwowar, "Why Google isn’t good enough for academic search," Research Remix -

Pull quote: “Google isn’t an acceptable answer to Searching across academic papers (toll access, green OA, gold OA, whatever) because it doesn’t support a way for people to digest the search results, add value, and apply the results in new and innovative ways. Google search results can only be used on Google’s website manually, or embedded as-is in other websites.”

John Mark Ockerbloom, "From Wikipedia to our libraries," Everybody's Libraries -

Pull quote: “So I’ve added some example library resources boxes in a few Wikipedia articles that seemed particularly relevant this month, including those for Women’s history, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Flannery O’Connor. Look down in the “External links” or “Further reading” sections of those articles for the boxes, and view the page source of the articles to see how those boxes are constructed.”

Feb 25

Chris Bourg, "What kinds of experts are important to Faculty?" Feral Librarian -

Pull quote: “My big take-aways are that we ought to be hiring or developing humanities and social science librarians with strong scholarly and technical expertise; which for the social scientists ought to include strong statistical and methodological training.”

Feb 20

Jacob Berg, "Vine and Web-based Library Instruction," BeerBrarian -

Pull quote: “Quick, simple, elegant, Vine offers something more than a snapshot, but less than a three-minute tutorial in which one’s eyes glaze over, or constantly pause and rewind to keep up.”

Feb 09

Whitney Hess, Improving the human experience one day at a time," Pleasure and Pain -

Pull quote: “There are in fact skills that every user experience designer must exhibit, regardless of sector, seniority, or specialization:

Feb 06

Karen Coyle, "Book people v. article people," Coyle's InFormation: -

Pull quote: “If we want ‘equal access to information,’ as we often claim we librarians do, then we need to do something about journal article pricing. I’d be quite willing to pay $2-$4 for an article, but the $30-$40 price range is ridiculous. I’m sure that these journal companies sell very few, if any, full-price articles. As we’ve seen with other media, when the price is right, it becomes as convenient to pay the price as it is to bother to pirate the materials (which in my case means borrowing someone’s academic identity). Surely selling zero articles at $39.95 isn’t better than selling a handful of articles at $2 each.”

Feb 01

Nancy Sims, "What is the government's interest in copyright? Not that of the public," Copyright Librarian -

Pull quote: “For the government to even consider intervening in this case signals (incredibly much more intensely than I have thought in my most cynical moments) that they do not think there are any valid interests in copyright other than that of business entities engaging in commercial, market activities.”

Scott Jaschik, "Library supporters worry U.S. may back publishers in copyright case," Inside Higher Ed -

Pull quote: “Jonathan Band, a Washington lawyer who is an expert on copyright law, said via e-mail that his ‘suspicion is that the Copyright Office has asked DOJ to file an amicus brief in support of the publishers. Hopefully other agencies, e.g., the Department of Education, will weigh in and advise the DOJ that supporting the publishers would be a bad idea from a political, public policy, and substantive legal point of view.’”

Colleen Greene, "Redesigning Our Academic Library Website With OmniUpdate and Springshare," Colleen Greene -

Pull quote: “Despite the use of OU Campus being a mandate from above, my library web team has been generally pleased with the product. As a web developer and systems administrator, I am thrilled with the quality and responsiveness of their customer service and technical support. As a library web developer, however, I have to admit that OU Campus does not fully meet the design and usability needs and expectations of library websites. IMHO, this is because libraries have been using, customizing, and raising the bar on CMSs far longer than higher education institutions — this is just the nature of our innovative and curiosity-driven profession.”

Richard Nurse, "Library data for library users," Libwebrarian's Blog -

Pull quote: “One of the areas that would be useful to look at would be some form of student dashboard for library engagement. So this could give students some data about what engagement they have had with the library, e.g. resources accessed, library skills completed, library badges gained, library visits, books/ebooks borrowed etc. Maybe set against averages for their course, and perhaps with some metrics about what high-achieving students on their course last time did. Add to that a bookmarking feature, lists of recent searches and resources used, with lists of loans/holds. Finished off with useful library contacts and some suggested activities that might help them with their course based on what is know about the level of library skills needed in the course.”

Jan 31

Hyrum Denney, "Sticky Menus Are Quicker To Navigate," Smashing UX Design -

Pull quote: “Participants were then asked whether one of the websites felt easier to use. Six of the 40 participants had no preference, but of the 34 that did have a preference, 100% of them indicated that the website with the sticky navigation was easier or faster to use. Many comments along this line were made, such as ‘I don’t know how the websites were different, but I felt like I was spending a lot less time clicking with the first one.’ Such comments indicated overwhelming favor for the sticky navigation.”

Jan 30

Jonathan Rochkind, "Kinda like Google Books for LP’s," Bibliographic Wilderness -

Pull quote: “It sounds like their approach is fair… …which doesn’t mean it’s legal. The opt-out nature they describe above is similar to the kind of thing that got Google Books and HathiTrust sued…. except it’s actually less legally defensible because they aren’t just using ‘snippets’, they really are selling complete digitized work.”

Jan 29

Chris Bourg, "A feminist defense of browsing," Feral Librarian -

Pull quote: “All of this has me troubled by our tendency (yep, I’ve been guilty myself) to dismiss talk about the value of physical browsing as merely wistful or nostalgic. There is something very real and important there, and I think shining a feminist lens on the issues is likely to help us see what it is, so that the libraries we are building for the future are inclusive of all kinds of learners, scholars, and readers; and so that our discovery environments (online and physical) are built to accommodate not just efficiency, but also joy.”