Archive for March 2009

The April 2009 issue of Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights is now available which discusses blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed and more with regard to the library field as well as Google’s Knol, Citizendium, and Wikia. The “Thinking about Blogging” essay raises some thought-provoking issues, here’s a breakdown of some of the themes he addresses:

• Do comments make a blog a blog—and can you deal with the realities of comments (and lack thereof)? Have conversations moved elsewhere?
• Are blogs here to stay? Is the “blogosphere” imploding? If blogging is a maturing medium, how does that affect individual bloggers?
• Why do we blog?
• How should we blog—and what about the auxiliary tools?
• Are blogs plausible replacements for journals?

Other articles in this issue:

• Perspective: Writing about Reading
• Library Access to Scholarship
• Net Media: Beyond Wikipedia

Educators who want to get up and running on Twitter can reference this guide to 100 Tips, Apps, and Resources for Teachers on Twitter. This list of tutorials, guides, suggestions, and project listings includes links to articles such as:

• Twitter4Teachers Wiki. This wiki provides teachers on Twitter and are organized by subject. You can add yourself to the list as well as find others with similar interests as you.
• Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education. While these educators are all working at a level higher than K-12, these professors share valuable experience using Twitter and keep their pulse on what is happening on a larger scope.
• How To Become Twitter Teacher (TT) In 23 Steps Or Less?. From the basics of using Twitter to suggestions for using it in schools, this article incorporates videos, suggestions, and links to other resources.
• The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter. This blog post offers great advice on getting started with Twitter.
• Twitter Etiquette. This wiki page offers tons of information on Twitter etiquette and ways to help manage your Twitter experience.

I will be moderating the Open Libraries track at CIL2009 on Tuesday (March 31st) next week along with Steven Cohen. We have a great program planned with some awesome speakers. If you’ll be at the conference, please stop by and say hello! Here’s the lineup for the day:

Track B
B201 – Open Source Software
10:30 AM – 11:15 AM
Eric Lease Morgan, Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department, University Libraries of Notre Dame
Open source software (OSS) that is free to reuse, study, modify, and distribute is quickly being adopted by libraries today. From office productivity suites such as OpenOffice to library-specific applications such as ILS programs, next-gen catalogs, and Firefox extensions, the open source movement has a lot to offer libraries. This session looks at the many types of OSS available and how libraries are making use of them.

B202 – Open Source Browsers
11:30 AM – 12:15 PM
Jessamyn West, Community Technology Librarian, Randolph Technical Career Center
The best part of using an open-source browser such as Firefox is having the ability to create add-ons and extensions to handle a myriad of tasks and applications. From library toolbars, OPAC searches, and right-click context menus, innovative libraries can offer patrons added functionality through these simple Firefox extensions. This session focuses on Firefox and other open source browsers and their possibilities for libraries.

B203 – Unconferences
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM
Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian, Colorado College
Stephen Francoeur, Information Services Librarian, Baruch College
John Blyberg, Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, Darien Library
Kathryn Greenhill, Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library
The latest trend in conferences is to hold an open “camp” or “un”-conference in which the tone is informal and the program is determined by the attendees. Our panelists have all had experience organizing and hosting such events and talk about the process of coordinating a library “camp,” compare them to traditional conferences, and highlight when these camps are most effective.

B204 – Open Source Library Implementations
2:30 PM – 3:15 PM
Karen Kohn, Collection Development Manager, Arcadia University
Eric McCloy, Executive Director, Library and Information Technology, Arcadia University
The speakers discuss getting ready for a Koha implementation and share their learnings from the evaluation and planning stages. From both the librarian and IT perspective, they discuss why they were comfortable moving to open source software for their catalog, the steps mapped out on the road to migration, and how money was freed up for migration by staggering the process and provide good resources for more information.

B205 – Open Access: Green and Gold
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Shane Beers, Digital Repository Services Librarian, George Mason University
Amy Buckland, Liaison Librarian, Howard Ross Library of Management, McGill University Library Library Student Journal
The two main strategies of the Open Access (OA) movement, which strives to make scholarly literature and other resources freely available online to all readers, consist of green OA, involving the self-archiving of materials in digital repositories, and gold OA, which includes open access journal publishing. Salo discusses OA from the green side, including both institutional and disciplinary repositories. Buckland tackles OA from the gold side and looks at Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems and how academic libraries can support OA scholarly publishing at their universities.

The Dublin City Public Libraries is gearing up for its annual One City, One Book initiative which aims to get everyone in Dublin, Ireland to read and discuss Bram Stoker’s Dracula during the month of April. This year they’ve designed a spiffy new Drupal website which includes information about the book and author as well as related events, a forum to discuss the work, a blog, a poll, a quiz, related bookmarks, plenty of links to other social media websites, and even to a free audio version of the book. There’s a lot to do there and its a great example of what can be done with Drupal by libraries.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a new report titled The Mobile Difference today. The study is based on two surveys which were conducted beween October - December 2007 of over 3,500 respondants. Here are some key findings of the report:

• 8% of adults use mobile devices and broadband platforms for continual information exchange to collaborate with their social networks
• 7% of adults actively use mobile devices and social networking tool, yet are ambivalent about all the connectivity
• 8% of Americans find mobility lighting their information pathways, but have comparatively few tech assets at home
• 61% are anchored to stationary media; though many have broadband and cell phones, coping with access is often too much for them

The Common Craft Show has created another video in its “Plain English” series. This time it’s Computer Software in Plain English, produced in the usual easy-to-understand style.

The March/April 2009 issue of D-Lib Magazine includes the article Profiling Social Networks: A Social Tagging Perspective written by five authors from across the globe. The article analyzes the social tagging behavior of members on Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube from 2005-2007 in order to gain a representative profile of each community. Their dataset includes 1 million bookmarks and 9.3 million tags from Delicious, 300,000 photographs and 1.4 million tags from Flickr, and 500,000 videos and 1.35 million tags from YouTube.

“After analyzing social tagging behavior in Delicious, Flickr and YouTube, it is apparent that tagging activities have increased tremendously from 2005 to 2007. An increasing number of individuals are using online social networks to tag resources for purposes of storage, access, and retrieval, both for themselves and for the purpose of sharing those resources with others. Through tag analysis, it is possible to develop a portrait of the social culture of a network and, in some cases, to identify trends of emerging or waning topical interests among users.”

Author Michael A. Stelzner has published the Social Media Marketing Industry Report: How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses. The report, based on responses from nearly 900 marketers, is available for free, here’s a sampling of the findings:

• Marketers are mostly new to social media: A significant 88% of marketers
  surveyed are using social media to market their businesses, BUT 72% have only
  been doing so for a few months or less.
• How much time does this take? A significant 64% of marketers are using social
  media for 5 hours or more each week and 39% for 10 or more hours weekly.
• The top benefit of social media marketing: The number-one advantage is
  generating exposure for the business, indicated 81% of all marketers, followed
  by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.
• The top social media tools: Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook were the top
  four social media tools used by marketers, in that order.
• Social media tools marketers most want to learn about: Social bookmarking
  sites were ranked of highest interest, followed closely by Twitter.

Peter Tittenberger, Director of the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre and Associate Director George Siemens have published an Open Access Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. The online manual discusses many social software tools in detail as well as provides examples of educational implementations. The handbook has been published using wiki software and allows those interested in contributing to the resource to apply for accounts.

via Wired Campus

According to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, a new Consumer Electronics Usage Survey from Accenture indicates that Baby Boomers are adopting consumer technology nearly 20 times faster than younger generations. Meanwhile usage and adoption by Gen Y seems to have leveled off. According to the report, Boomers:

• Increased reading blogs and listening to podcasts by 67 percent year over year; nearly 80 times faster than Gen Y (1 percent)
• Posted a 59 percent increase in using social networking sites—more than 30 times faster than Gen Y (2 percent)
• Increased watching/posting videos on the Internet by 35 percent—while Gen Y usage decreased slightly (-2 percent)
• Accelerated playing video games on the go via mobile devices by 52 percent— 20 times faster than Gen Y (2 percent)
• Increased listening to music on an iPod or other portable music player by 49 percent—more than four times faster than Gen Y (12 percent)

More coverage:
Twice: Accenture: Interest In Cellphones For Entertainment Is Picking Up - Baby Boomers Leading The Way

TechPulse 360: Older Americans Embrace Technology Faster Than Younger Ones

PC Magazine: Move Over, Kids: Boomers Catching Up in Tech War

Hopefully most students have heard of Google Docs, the online office suite which makes it easy to remotely collaborate on documents with groups. Here are some other relatively new websites that library & info science (and other) students may want to know about.

1.) InternshipRatings.com - This is a website where students can rate and review their internships, and prospective interns can research companies and organizations before signing up.

2.) GradShare - A graduate student Q&A community, this website is divided into academic discipline with members asking and answering questions in the areas of Arts, Humanities & Linguistics, Business, Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences.

3.) VisualCV - Create a free multi-media resume and portfolio including video, embedded charts, images, audio, and attached documents such as Word, .pdf, and SlideShare presentations, and then control who sees it.

4.) Springpad - These free online notebooks let you drag and drop items around your page, insert restaurant reviews from Yelp, maps from Google, and much more. They have plenty of starter notebooks to get you going such as the class notebook, grade tracker, job search notebook, and school project manager notebook. My favorite is the weekly meal planner which let’s you grab recipes from all over the Web and then automatically create a shopping list from them.

5.) Moo.com - This site has been around for awhile now, however some still don’t know about it. Create snazzy business cards from your online photos stored on Flickr, Facebook and other social networks. I prefer the mini cards, however they have recently come out with regulary sized cards as well.

6.) Scribd - This website is like YouTube for documents. You can upload your original works such as docs, books, essays, or tutorials you’ve written and share them with others. They can then be embedded on other websites with Scribd’s iPaper document reader.

7.) Slideshare - Just in case you haven’t heard of the world’s largest community for sharing presentations online I included this one. Great for sharing your own presentations as well as searching for conference-related presentations or researching just about any topic. You can also attach an audio narration file to your prez to create a Slidecast.

8.) When is Good? - It’s difficult to coordinate meetings with fellow group members, students, or professors. Check out When is Good which will let you simply find out when everyone is free by quickly clicking on a grid.

9.) 280 Slides - This website makes it quick and easy to create presentations online, and either download them or store them there and present from your browser. You can embed media such as images and videos.

10.) Let Me Google That For You - Since you are going to library school your friends and relatives have probably already started to come to you with all of their research needs. Even the really simple ones which could have easily been looked up on a search engine. Be sure to check out this website which will automatically create a short video of you looking up their query on Google - it then provides them with the search results.

Additional websites that students will want to know about include Box.net for free online storage of just about any file type, Remember the Milk for creating mobile and taggable to-do lists, and E-LIS the open access repository for the field (great for research and for sharing your own stuff). Please list any others you think may be helpful in the comments!

Chris Brogan offers inspiration for bloggers who have hit a dry spell in 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck. The post is divided into suggestions for questions you might answer and fill-in-the-blanks statements. Here are few that I found interesting, be sure and check the full post for more:

• What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?
• How do other industries compare to what my community is thinking about?
• What do I want to know that I can ask my community?
• __ Ways to Convince the Boss to Try ____.
• How ___ is like _____.

Alexandra Levit writes about how to Use Technology To Spend Less Time Working for Forbes.com. This article, along with an accompanying slideshow titled Seven E-Ways To Save Time At Work discusses several methods to increase work-time productivity including:

• Video Calls
• Webinars
• Google Applications
• Networking Services

via Micro Persuasion

Social Media Today discusses the best analytics tools to glean information about tweets in 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams.

Also in Twitter news this week: Smashing Magazine presents a guide to 99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications. And Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, tells us how Twitter is Peaking.

Facebook now has a news stream the likes of Twitter. Your LinkedIn friends can also update their status and post to group message boards. There’s also email to check, IM messages to keep track of, and don’t forget MySpace. If you’re getting overwhelmed with all the places you have to navigate to in order to keep up with online conversations, you may want to take a look at Digsby. It’s a new application that you can install to your desktop which will let you see all of those streams of info in one place.