by Thanks to all those who came to Amy’s and my session on Creating 3D Reference: Adventures in Second Life. It was a tough time slot – the last day, right after lunch on a sunny 31 degree day and up against the Pecha Kucha (which sounded like it was a blast next door). We were honoured to present with the Schanachies (and suitably awed). Here are the slides from our portion of the presentation from il2008. And a big thanks to Amy – a great presentation buddy! More to come on the conference when I return – it’s been amazing.
Academic Librarianship
Peace and War and So Much More
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.
Unconference Goodness
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!
Serendipity or Saving Time?
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.
Browsable Fiction
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.
RSS Searches
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.
Food for Fines
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?
Woo Hoo!
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?
Library 2.0
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.
Science Reverts!
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).