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.
library 2.0
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!
Fun with Wordle
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.
Twitter Answers
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).
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.
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.
Facebook and Library Catalogues
Well, it seems Ryerson University Library has added a Facebook application that allows you to search their catalogue. Kudos to them! I’m going to have to give it a full test run, but my brief search seemed to bring back good results. I thought I had read earlier that some libraries were having difficulty getting library catalogue applications added to Facebook, so hopefully this one will remain. If you have a Facebook account, check it out!
A Word on RSS
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!
Let the Blogging Begin!
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!