Archive for July 2007

Change is afoot at iLibrarian…….with a new blogger coming on the scene soon to share news and resources on Library 2.0 and the information revolution.

Ellyssa Kroski is a Reference Librarian for Columbia University as well as an independent Information Consultant. Elyssa brings a comprehensive range of knowledge and skills to iLibrarian, and she is know globally for her valuable and information-rich blog InfoTangle.

Be sure to follow Ellyssa’s thoughts right here at iLibrarian ….. and spread the word! I know I will, and look forward to the extra ideas to help my blogging at HeyJude.

By the way, big smiles to all the readers who helped to get iLibrarian underway.

Latest posting from the Educause Librarian is “7 Things You Should Know About Augmented Reality”.

Augmented reality adds information and meaning to a real object or place. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality does not create a simulated reality. Instead, it takes a real object or space and uses technologies to add contextual data to deepen students’ understanding of it. To the extent that instructors can furnish students with a broad context for understanding the real world, students are more likely to comprehend and remember what they are learning. Through exposing students to an experiential, explorative, and authentic model of learning early in their higher education careers, augmented reality may help shift students from passive to active learning modes and thus become more successful learners.

The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, how it works, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use ELI’s “7 Things You Should Know About…”  briefs to gain a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In addition to the “7 Things You Should Know About…”  briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more visit the ELI Resources page.

Talis is fast becoming a name to watch in the library world.  Subscribe to the Talis Library Platform News if you want to keep up to date with their activities.

The Talis Library Platform, and the network that is forming around it, will help libraries and library staff to share, collaborate and learn from each other so we can work together to solve the challenges faced by libraries in delivering the next generation of services to their customers.

Web 2.0 is on everyone’s lips. It isn’t really necessary anymore to explain it, there are a lot of more or less compact definitions.

This development redefines the position of libraries in the information society. Libraries are no longer just mediators of information literacy but also of media literacy. As a result they have to deal with technical innovations and their influences on the daily librarian affairs and they have to rise to the new challenges.

This is just why Infobib team used the World Book and Copyright Day as an opportunity to start an experiment - LibWorld.

The idea was to call bloggers from all over the world to give a review about the biblioblogosphere in their country and to post these guest articles in regular intervals at Infobib.

Libworld is a series of postings in which guest authors introduce the library and library related blogs of their particular country. It started on the World Book and Copyright Day on 23rd of April, 2007.

If you don’t see your home country in the list why not consider writing an article about your country’s biblioblogosphere.

The first Recording Studio in a public library “anywhere in the universe” is proudly promoted at Palmerston North City Library. For only $5 an hour, you are able to book the recording room and use the iMac

• which is loaded with ProTools and Garageband
• has a 4-way headphone amplifier
• and a very cool MIDI controller keyboard. This means you can mix tracks you’ve recorded elsewhere, or record your own tracks in The Library.

There are academic libraries around with similar facilities. For example, there is a great media centre at Earl Gregg Swemm Library. With a full-time staff, loanable production equipment, and the Media Studios’ array of industry-standard software, The Media Centre is capable of supporting a wide range of multimedia projects from production, post-production to digital/analog distribution.

These are nice models that can work for all sectors of library services. School libraries are great places to set up facilities like this, and integrate particularly well with media delivery systems such as Clickview for storing and distributing student media work developed in the library studio.

I’ve got to agree with Justin Ashworth’s thoughts on The School Library Journal:

Have you been to School Library Journal’s newly designed site? If you haven’t, I suggest you check it out. SLJ online has undergone a major facelift, and I can honestly say that the site is more useful for those in the field. I’ve gone from never checking their site at all to visiting it on a daily basis.

They’ve moved content around, overhauled the navigation and layout, and have added a couple of new features that have me addicted. Take for example their new blogs/talkback/podcasts feature. Four bloggers (Chris Harris, Diane Chen, Amy Bowlann & Brian Kenney) regularly make posts that connect teacher librarians to new ideas and new tools that help with instruction and keep you on the bleeding edge.

So if you’re trying to wade through the Internet sludge and determine which resources and web tools are valuable enough to grab a few seconds of your time, put School Library Journal’s website high on your list.

“(Federal Judge Richard) Posner . . . speculates on how the Internet and other relatively new technologies will shape the future of plagiarism. He takes the counterintuitive position that plagiarism will become much harder to get away with. In fact, ’student plagiarism may be becoming less common as more colleges and universities adopt plagiarism-detection software,’ such as Turnitin (pronounced “turn it in”), an online service several thousand colleges use.”

Read the review of The Little Book of Plagiarism, by Richard A Posner at the New Atlantis.

Find many more reviews from the Critical Compendium - a daily dose of book reviews from around the world. Pretty neat! A good service addition from your library today?

Folksonomy has become an important part of information sharing structures via the web - formal and informal. Folksonomy is the “vocabulary” or collection of tags that results from personal free tagging of web resources for one’s own use and the aggregate collection of tags that results from a group tagging project. Tagging systems are possible only if people are motivated to do more of the work themselves, for individual and/or social reasons. They are necessarily sloppy systems, but for an inexpensive, easy way of using the wisdom of the crowd to make resources visible and sortable, there’s nothing like tags.

Tagging for Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing explores these issues and shows the power of tagging to encourage conversations.

Coming up with the perfect tag is the problem- or is it? Subject analysis does not come naturally to the folksonomy crowd. Tags and the Power of Suggestion is a light-hearted consideration of some of the underlying influences of ‘natural’ approaches to organisation.

If you just want to delve further into tagging, then The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools might be just what your are after:

Tags - for some, one of the best ideas on the web, for others, merely a visual distraction. Yes, we’re talking about those loosely defined categories which are usually organized into cute little clouds. Looking for tag-related resources can be tough, so we’ve dug up 30 tools and resources that every seasoned tagger should check out.

“The Journal of Library Metadata is a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles on all aspects of metadata applications in libraries. The journal is published quarterly by The Haworth Press, Inc.

Previously titled the Journal of Internet Cataloging, after a change in title and editorship, JLM will now focus on metadata, an exciting, timely subject of importance to all libraries. The journal will publish three categories of articles: standard, peer-reviewed articles; shorter, scholarly, non-peer reviewed articles; and short viewpoint articles”

[From: Peter Scott's Library Blog]

Everyone knows that widgets are the new black. They are cool, they are slick, they are playful. The rise of widgets was caused by several factors including the adoption of RSS, the expansion of the blogosphere, growth of social networks, fashion of self-expression and the democratization of the web at large.

A major development in the history of widgets occured just this week; the W3C published a draft of the first widget specification. The goal of this effort is to standardize how widgets are scripted, digitally signed, secured, packaged and deployed in a way that is device independent, follows W3C principles, and is as interoperable as possible with existing market-leading user agents on which widgets are run. The spec is very raw, and mostly based on desktop widgets rather than their web cousins, but it is already showing the direction where the W3C thinks widgets should evolve.

[From: Read/Write Web]

Like all librarians, I am curious about the informaton architecture behind search tools - infrastrucure and alogorithms. As I am not a mathematician or a technologist, some answers can become too complex.

However, I have found a couple of gems about Google. The first takes us back in time to Stanford University and two eager students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, working on a large-scale prototype search engine. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine introduces some key ideas that we are now familiar with - but which were revolutionary and which underpin the force of Google today.

We know from The Google Story just how different the Google setup is. David Carr in How Google Works explains:

Google buys, rather than leases, computer equipment for maximum control over its infrastructure. Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt defended that strategy in a May 31 call with financial analysts. “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures,” he said.

Google does more than simply buy lots of PC-class servers and stuff them in racks, Schmidt said: “We’re really building what we think of internally as supercomputers.”

Previous search engines had not analyzed links in the systematic way that Google did - all part of the original ideas of the two young researchers. If you’d like more answers to your question, How Does a Google Query Work, provides a few clues.

I’m always tempted to read handouts and presentations from various library conferences. However, here is one that I totally missed knowing about even though it is right here in my own state.

So the power of Web 2.0 to the rescue - via my trusty Del.icio.us network. Metropolitan Public Libraries Network of NSW held a seminar Identify - How to brand your Library.

I have no date for the seminar, but recommend the presentations - particularly Branding Library 2.0 by Christine McKenzie, of Yarra Plenty Regional Library Learning 2.0 fame, following on from the work of Helene Blowers - Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks.

I can’t resist commenting on BOOKS as we continue to skip down the yellow brick road to Web 2.0, Web 3.0 or whatever!

Here is an excellent visual list of the Top 10 Banned Books of the 20th Century. Needless to say, each tells a story - and the cultural shifts around some of them have been profound. Books still have a significant place in our world - and perhaps this is why they still figure in Web 2.0 developments to make books easily accessible to buy and read.

5 Alternative Ways to Browse Amazon provides an array of alternative visual search tools for….. well yes, for finding and buying good books. Very good read.

Developments in visual search tools seem to be gaining pace. You will be amazed at what is happening at Space Time, currently in Beta and only available on a PC. But what a WOW! way of searching “at the speed of thought”. “Watch as your information converges in one space at one time”.

But even more interesting for a library professional is the presentation about the Semantic MEDLINE Visualization Prototype which incorporates the semantic web and natural language processing - manipulating information as well as documents to respond to a searchers needs. It connects knowledge from various resources from PubMed and Medline - and natural language processing will summarize and produce a visual network or relationships between the material you are interested in.

Much is written these days about Second Life and 3D virtual worlds. Every day there is a new story about online worlds providing new learning environments. Articles and books are describing how a generation raised on video games is invading the workplace and demanding new online learning environments. Unfortunately, for those not on the bleeding edge of game technologies, all this talk of virtual worlds, avatars, MMORPGs, metaverses, and microworlds seems right out of a science fiction novel and, in some cases, it is. Karl Kapp’s article Defining and Understanding Virtual Worlds very deftly puts Second Life into the broader context of online virtual worlds.

By knowing more about this broader context, it becomes even easier to see and understand the potential of Second Life, and the pressing need for some of our libraries to ‘get into’ the metaverse.

In fact, Wade Roush from Technology Review at MIT suggests that the Second Earth will be the World Wide Web absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth. A very complex and challenging article that pushes the possibilities of the metaverse into the future.

Meanwhile we continue to explore the world of Second Life. According to Erika Smith many academics are using it for research and in the classroom. About 2,000 to 3,000 educators from universities and colleges around the world have a presence in Second Life.

At present, there are over 40 libraries in Second Life. And the list is growing. Most can be found in a place called Cybrary City on Second Life’s Info Island - a purpose built space where libraries can establish their own virtual library presence to showcase their local resources, and where they can provide their services and learn new skills associated with 21st century librarianship.

So I was interested to read that University College Dublin has extended the boundaries of traditional library services with the UCD James Joyce Library being established as the first Irish library in Second Life. At the Second Life branch of the UCD Library you can search web resources using a virtual PC, consult several e-books, view library presentations, complete a visitor survey, leave comments and suggestions, and even watch Sky News.

It is hoped that over time the virtual library branch will develop further to perhaps include a regular staff presence that would teach visitors new skills and ways of availing of the services offered by the UCD Library.

The Texas Library Association’s annual conference was held in San Antonio, Texas April 11- 14, 2007. This conference showcased a wide range of strategies, techniques and technologies for promoting and ‘evolving’ library services.

School and academic libraries were included in the ‘conversation’ and as a result the materials emerging from the conference provide a rich resource of ideas and inspiration. Presentations about cataloging, searching, course management, e-learning, fiction collections and more are available at the TLA 2007 Electronic Handouts.

[From Janice Greenberg on FaceBook]