Archive for the ‘Philosophy & Practice’ Category

Illustration by Max Scratchmann

Anastasia Goodstein offers some pretty sound advice for attracting today’s tech-savvy, multi-tasking teens to the library in her article What Would Madison Avenue Do? Marketing to Teens: To attract today’s teens, think like a marketing pro in the May 1st issue of School Library Journal. From her experience studying young people’s online habits Goodstein shares the following lessons for dealing with the Millenial generation:

• Teens are multitaskers.
• Teens prefer byte-sized entertainment.
• Teens expect content on demand.
• Teens want to participate.
• Enlist teens to manage your social media.
• Don’t try too hard to be cool.
• Know your audience.
• Don’t sweat the design.
• Support causes that kids care about.
• Use text messaging and IM appropriately.
• Teens love making mixtapes… online.
• Tweens like to break virtual worlds’ rules.
• It’s not just about MySpace and Facebook.
• Beware of anonymous gossip sites and applications.
• Dance videos are all the rage.
• Miley’s YouTube channel.

ReadWriteWeb tackles different approaches to getting email under control in their Five Methodologies to Deal with Email Overload. They cover five techniques which are currently practiced and compare how to implement each of them:

• The GTD Method
• The 4-Hour Workweek Method
• The “Treat Email As SMS” Policy
• The Folders & Rules Method
• The Email Bankruptcy Method

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.

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 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]

Information ethics is essentially concerned with the question of who should have access to what information. The core issues of information ethics include intellectual freedom, equitable access to information, information privacy, and intellectual property. Advances in information technology have made the general population more aware of these issues.

While it is not as hot a topic as the ethics of information technology, some research has been devoted to information ethics for library professionals. How library professionals respond to their ethical dilemmas directly affects their ability to carry out the mission - supporting intellectual freedom and resisting censorship; protecting privacy rights and intellectual property rights; and improving access to information.

Fallis, Don (2007) Information Ethics for 21st Century Library Professionals. Library Hi Tech 25(1).

[From: Digital Library of Information Science and Technology]

Using Web 2.0 Principles to become Librarian 2.0 is a useful Squidoo resource, from Brian Gray, created for a Kent State University School of Library and Information Science workshop.

Students will discover how libraries are using Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, social communities, podcasts, and various mash-ups, to give library users increased ownership in their library interactions. In addition, students will look at how users are creating tools to supplement and/or replace their experience with libraries.

Top this off with his excellent presentations:

• Exploring Libraries (and our users) in the Web 2.0 Realm.

• Using Web 2.0 Principles to Become Librarian 2.0: Blogs