Archive for the ‘Change & Innovation’ Category

A Scandinavian event called the Living Library which lets patrons borrow human “books” is making its way around the UK according to the Times Online. During these special events, library readers are able to check out a person for up to 30 minutes for a one-on-one chat which will offer them the opportunity to learn about a different lifestyle, culture, ethnicity, etc. The books cataloged for the events include a wide variety of stereotypes including Gay Man, Police Officer, Person with Mental Health Difficulties, Muslim, Vegan, and Ex Gang Member.

In response to the new WebShare initiative which is offering free access to the complete online Encyclopaedia Britannica to bloggers and Web publishers, I had a chance to ask Jorge Cauz, President of Encyclopaedia Britannica, a few questions about the program.

Ellyssa: The WebShare initiative comes fast on the heels of Wikipedia’s 10 millionth entry, was this new program a response to the growing popularity of the free online encyclopedia?

Jorge Cauz: No, we’ve been in business for almost two and one half centuries and have been publishing on the Web for almost 15 years. We develop new plans, products, and features based on what our customers want, our judgments about where they are headed, what technology is available, and what makes sense for us to fulfill our mission, which is to be the preferred resource for people seeking and sharing learning, knowledge and understanding. Britannica does best when people are engaged with our work and use it in discussions on issues that concern them. Today, the people who are publishing on the Web are helping to shape and drive those discussions as never before, and we want to see our products and valuable knowledge in their hands. It’s good business for us to do this, and it’s good for web publishers to have access to our products. That’s what the WebShare program is about.

Ellyssa: Why did Britannica make the decision to focus on “Web publishers” to receive free access?

Jorge Cauz: The Internet is increasingly the place where public discourse and discussion happens today, and the people who write and publish there are an important force in driving public conversations. Since Britannica has a great deal to offer in the way of context and background for these discussions, we want to make our work easily accessible to the people who can make good use of it in their own work and by doing so let the world know what kind of accurate, trustworthy and up-to-date information Britannica has.

Ellyssa: Does this include professional journalists and writers for major publications such as The New York Times, or just bloggers and citizen journalists?

Jorge Cauz: Yes, we’ve generally given free subscriptions to mainstream journalists who want them. That’s been true for some years.

Ellyssa: The Britannica WebShare program is offering quite a collection of widgets for blogs and websites offering non-account holders access to subject-focused encyclopedia articles, as well as a daily tweet from Twitter - are there any additional plans in the works to incorporate other social tools or emerging technologies?

Jorge Cauz: We do have a lot of plans already in the works, though nothing that we are ready to announce just yet. But please stay in touch with us or come visit us to our site(s) over the coming weeks and months. We’ll have plenty of innovative features!

Ellyssa: WebShare is opening up access to a lot of Britannica’s content, could this be a first step in making this a free resource, open to everyone, at some point in the future?

Jorge Cauz: No, we are not planning for that.

Mike Eisenberg writes about The Parallel Information Universe: What’s out there and what it means for libraries in the May 1, 2008 issue of Library Journal. In his article, Eisenberg discusses several different 2.0 technology types and conducts a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for each, as well as provides some advice for taking those next steps.

“The major lesson for librarians from all this is that “it’s an information world out there!” More and more, it’s not about the technology; it’s about information—finding, using, creating, combining, sharing, and evaluating it. There is an underlying information base to every aspect of life and a need for information institutions in society—that is, libraries. Libraries must continue to play our traditional role, but we also need to assume responsibility for being the information institutions in our communities and organizations.”

Ryan Deschamps, at The Other Librarian, blogs about Sustainability and Libraries: Is Anyone Challenging Our Assumptions about Digitization? He talks about taking a look at the TBL - triple bottom line - with regard to libraries which involves looking at economic, environmental and social criteria for measuring success. To be leaders in this area, Ryan suggests that libraries need:

• Research
• Benchmarks
• Innovation
• Partnerships

C|Net reports that Encyclopaedia Britannica has launched a new initiative called Britannica WebShare which allows free access to the complete online encyclopedia to those who publish regularly on the Web, such as bloggers. Those interested can apply for access through a short form on their website. Here is the program description from Britannica:

“A special program for web publishers, including bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet. You get complimentary access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online and, if you like, an easy way to give your readers background of the topics you write about with links to complete Britannica articles…This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.”

The New York Times covers local public libraries which are offering downloadable e-books, audiobooks, and video to patrons in their article What’s New at the E-Library. Area libraries are contracting with services such as Overdrive, Recorded Books, and TumbleBooks to offer these new services. And over 100 of these libraries subscribe to a service called Next Reads which sends personalized book recommendations to patrons’ email inboxes.

“Technology is not something we’re afraid of, it’s something we’ve embraced and our patrons have embraced,” Ms. Lapsley said. “Technology is a steppingstone — we don’t know what else is coming down the pike, but we do know that everything we use will allow us to build on that technology and have our patrons build on that knowledge.”

The ALA has published the 2008 State of America’s Libraries report. Here are their key findings:

• Americans check out over 2 billion items annually from public libraries.
• The average user checks out over 7 books/year.
• The average taxpayer bill for public library services - $31/year.
• Public libraries are engines of economic growth, contributing to local development through programming in early literacy, employment services and small-business development.
• Libraries provide excellent ROI, positively impact the local economy, and contribute to neighborhood quality of life.
• School library media centers help students learn more and score higher on standardized tests, but their funding continues to lag.
• Teens are regular users of public library services.
• Almost all of the nation’s public libraries offer YA programs & over half employ at least one full-time staff equivalent in this area.
• Computer and on-line games have become part of the mix at many public libraries, and some use gaming to attract new patrons.
• Spanish is the top-priority language to which libraries devote non-English language services and programs.
• Most libraries serving non-English speakers are in communities with fewer than 100,000 residents.
• Ebooks continued to emerge as a regular feature of libraries of all types.
• Library supporters won an important victory in 2007 when the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to re-open many of the libraries it had closed in the past year.
• College and research libraries continue to find innovative new ways to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the academy.
• Libraries and librarians of all stripes continue to stand up for the First Amendment rights of all Americans, responding in public discourse and in court to unconstitutional snooping and aspiring book-banners. The right to read — freely and in private — remains a core value of the profession.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

The latest issue of Educause Review has an article by Peter Brantley entitled Architectures for Collaboration: Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries in which he discusses the need for change within today’s libraries. In the article he asserts a set of “library mantras” which he feels are key to this change, including:

• Libraries Must Be Available Everywhere.
• Libraries Must Be Designed to Get Better through Use.
• Libraries Must Be Portable.
• Libraries Must Know Where They Are.
• Libraries Must Tell Stories.
• Libraries Must Help People Learn.
• Libraries Must Be Tools of Change.
• Libraries Must Offer Paths for Exploration.
• Libraries Must Help Forge Memory.
• Libraries Must Speak for People.
• Libraries Must Study the Art of War.

“The success of libraries is not to be counted by the number of books, either digital or paper, held by libraries or the number of pretty pictures that libraries can put online. Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. Libraries are successful when they offer new services and when they help others discover services provided by others. By building bridges among these various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation. They will become the architects of collaboration.”

Today at the Computers in Libraries 2008 conference, I presented on the open source content management system Drupal and how it’s being used by libraries and librarians. For those of you who weren’t able to make the conference but are still interested, I’ve created a Slidecast of my talk which is a combination of my PowerPoint presentation and an audio track. You can also just download the presentation and check out the speaker notes if you’d rather.

According to ReadWrite Web, Penguin Books is using new social media tools to distribute six of its titles in a new We Tell Stories campaign. The British publisher is using a LiveJournal blog, Twitter, and Google Maps to post its stories in a serialized format over a weeklong period for each story.

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.”

Trent Batson, Ph.D. at Campus Technology discusses the types of Web 2.0 collaborative technologies his research team employed throughout the life cycle of their project in Research Collaboration in the Ephemera of Web 2.0.

“What technology do researchers use at different phases of the project? With the new options available now and, it seems, each month, we consider all the possibilities. Part of research now is not just the research, but keeping abreast of new collaboration technologies. We all need to be ethnographers.”

The NYPL offers gaming sessions at 18 of their Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island branch libraries, and owns 2,500 copies of 92 different games available for loan to gamers. The New York Times covers their “Game On @ the Library!” initiative in Taking Play Seriously at the Public Library With Young Video Gamers.

“What we’re seeing is that in addition to simply helping bring kids into the library in the first place, games are having a broader effect on players, and they have the potential to be a great teaching tool,” Mr. Martin said. “If a kid takes a test and fails, that’s it. But in a game, if you fail you get to take what you’ve learned and try again.”

The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library has transformed their website into a visually appealing, user-friendly, community environment. The website has incorporated many new Web features including:

• A prominent news slider which rotates featured stories
• RSS feeds everywhere
• Tag clouds
• Highest Rated, Recent Comments, and other techniques which surface valuable content
• User Profiles which aggregate authored content
• Multimedia such as library photos & videos
• Embedded IM widget
• User Comments

Be sure and check out the “before” and “after” websites to see the full metamorphosis. David Lee King has more.