Archive for the ‘Academic Library’ Category

Educause has published the annual ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology for 2009. Some of their key findings include:

• Desktop computer ownership has decreased 27% while laptop ownership increased nearly 23%.
• Despite the state of the economy 8 out of 10 freshman entered school with a laptop which was one year old or less.
• 9 out of 10 students use the college & university library website.
• Over 44% of students have contributed content to video websites, over 41% to wikis, and over 37% have contributed to blogs. 35% of students use podcasts.
• Social networking websites and text messaging were used by 9 out of 10 respondents.

Jeff Young at The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus asks: Could Google Wave Replace Course-Management Systems?

“Google argues that its new Google Wave system could replace e-mail by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document sharing into one seamless communication interface. But some college professors and administrators are more excited about Wave’s potential to be a course-management-system killer.”

If you’re interested in text/SMS reference in libraries, please check out my latest Stacking the Tech column, Text Message Reference: Is It Effective?

“The biblioblogosphere is replete with posts announcing the launch of new SMS (text message) reference services at a steadily increasing number of academic libraries. The appeal of these services is more or less self-evident given the ubiquity of mobile devices on campus.

Journal articles and conference sessions are filled with discussions of products and platforms, as well as strategies to market the new programs including YouTube videos, home page links, and Facebook applications. However, so far little has been gathered about how effective this type of service really is and whether or not it’s something that patrons find useful.”

On October 2nd, Educause will offer a free live Web seminar Emerging Technologies in Higher Education: Big School Solutions to Small School Problems. Presenter John O’Keefe, Director of Academic Technologies and Network Services at Lafayette College will discuss “major developments over the past five years (from Shibboleth to Internet2 to MPLS to iTunes U) that can help smaller schools both address and transform their technology needs.”

Derek Law from the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow Scotland has written Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan for the New Review of Academic Librarianship. It is available for free download for a limited time.

“Libraries are attempting to face a future in which almost every fixed point has disappeared. Users are changing; content is changing; research is taking new forms. Indeed the very need for libraries is being questioned in some quarters. This paper explores the nature of the changes and challenges facing higher education libraries and suggests key areas of strength and core activities which should be exploited to secure their future.”

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Steven Bell at ACRLog posts A Dozen Newspaper Survival Tips For Academic Librarians. This useful guide includes 12 recommendations of ways academic libraries can evolve and thrive in the Internet Age. Here are his top five:

1. Put the Web First
2. Go Niche
3. Offer Unique Content in Print
4. Librarians as Curators and Contextualizers
5. Real-Time Reporting Integration

The UK’s Guardian newspaper covers some of the changes happening in today’s libraries with Louise Tickle’s Academic libraries are undergoing a quiet revolution. The article proposes that “Being a librarian these days is all about technology and customer service; no time to stick your nose in a book”.

“Applying for a job in a university library because you “love reading” isn’t going to get you very far these days. These hallowed repositories of academic knowledge have changed beyond recognition over the last decade, and the people recruited to work in them have to be willing to embrace new technologies and customer service with an alacrity that would likely horrify the shushing custodians of the past.”

The ACRL has published a new environmental scan of academic libraries in the wake of today’s economic challenges. This 8-page guide “considers three important drivers in the current environment and poses questions to stimulate conversations and action in your libraries and on your campuses.”

• Driver #1: The Economy and Higher Education
• Driver #2: Students
• Driver #3: Technology

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

The arXiv repository from Cornell University Library which provides open access to 479,931 research manuscripts in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics, has issued an API. It will be interesting to see what types of mashups are created with this massive amount of quality content.

“The purpose of the arXiv API is to allow programmatic access to the arXiv’s e-print content and metadata. The goal of the interface is to facilitate new use of the the vast body of material on the arXiv.”

via ProgrammableWeb

John K. Waters writes about the learning commons in his article The Library Morphs in the latest issue of Campus Technology. He concentrates on Ohio State University’s Thompson Library renovation which aims to transform the library into “a library for the 21st century”.

“When people describe what they are going to do with a learning commons,” Bennett observes, “they often talk about integrating the services delivered by librarians and information technologists. Sometimes, they even bring in student tutoring services. The result can be a useful space that integrates these services, but it’s still a space in which the service providers call the shots. We’re very slow to break away from that model and admit that what these spaces should be about is the students taking responsibility for their own educations.”

Also in this issue: Wikis, Blogs & More, Oh My! discusses the adoption of new Web technologies by colleges and universities.

Judith Tabron at the Chronicle of Higher Education talks about technology and its place in learning environments in her How to Find What Clicks in the Classroom.

“Our students live online. They fall in love, they shop, they order pizza on the Web. Their iPods, TV’s, and Xboxes are sophisticated technologies. They instant-message their blogs from their cellphones, and they can’t picture college having a place in any of this, because we haven’t shown them that it can.

It will be a dismal future if the only thing our graduates cannot do online is learn.”

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed discusses an ethnographic study conducted by the University of Rochester Library which explores the study schedules and research habits of undergrads. The library hired an anthropologist who used various research methods including videotaping students at work on their computers to collect information. The study has had a significant impact on library marketing, website design, and library renovation. The results of this study will be published in September 2007 by the ACRL in the upcoming “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester“.

Bart Strong, Executive Director of the Learning Technologies Resource Centre at McMaster University provides a roadmap for the strategic planning process in the latest issue of Educause Quarterly. This must-read article offers tips on anticipating technological change and presents a framework for establishing a strategic vision and mission for your organization.

“How is your institution coping with accelerating change? Have you reached the point where you feel a coin toss will give you the same chance of success as a well-thought-out strategic plan?”

Although this article is aimed at academic institutions, the advice within is relevant and applicable for any environment.

“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]

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.