Archive for the ‘Philosophy & Practice’ Category

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb discusses a 3-part series of posts by Greg Boutin in Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web. The article tackles three big post-Web 2.0 buzzwords, providing explanations on what each of these trends are and where they’re going.

I was thinking that Mashable’s latest post by Sharlyn Lauby titled “Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?” could easily be applied to libraries. Since many libraries have begun adopting social media tools, it stands to reason that some may be considering developing such a policy. The article covers the Five W’s to creating a social media policy:

1. WHY have such a policy?
2. WHAT can social media do for my organization?
3. WHO should the policy cover?
4. WHERE should you let employees know about this policy?
5. WHEN is the right time to implement a policy?

I’d be really interested to hear what else you might add to a library-specific Social Media policy - please add your suggestions in the comments!

John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor have published The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians. The document defines the purpose and role of the library, the role of librarians, and thoughts on the preservation of the library. Here’s just a snippet, be sure and check out the full post for more:

“The Purpose of the Library

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.

The Library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences. The purpose of the Library will never change.

The Library is infinite in its capacity to contain, connect and disseminate knowledge; librarians are human and ephemeral, therefore we must work together to ensure the Library’s permanence.

Individual libraries serve the mission of their parent institution or governing body, but the purpose of the Library overrides that mission when the two come into conflict.

Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.

A clear understanding of the Library’s purpose, its role, and the role of librarians is essential to the preservation of the Library.”

There are over 100 million photos available on Flickr which have been licensed with Creative Commons licenses and Michelle Thorne has published an analysis of them on the Creative Commons blog. Here are a few of her findings:

• 33% of them are equipped with the most restrictive CC License, BY-NC-ND. That means that over 32 million photos are available to download, display publicly, and distribute, as long as the author is attributed and no changes are made to the original image.
• The second most frequent license is BY-NC-SA. It allows derivative works for non-commercial purposes as long as those resulting works are made available under the same license. 29%, or 29 million images, can be used in this manner.
• 76% of all photos bar commercial use. At the same time, it means that 24%, or 24 million photos, do allow for commercial use with minimal restrictions.
• Over 12 millions photos are completely free to use, as long as the author of the image is attributed.
• Approximately 63 million of all available image files allow for derivative works.

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.

Following four months of discussion, Educause has issued their Top Teaching and Learning Challenges for 2009. They have set up a Ning network and a wiki to address these issues:

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
2. Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).
3. Reaching and engaging today’s learner.
4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.

Stepcase Lifehack offers 10 Tips for More Effective PowerPoint Presentations in their latest post. If you have an upcoming talk that you’re planning, you may want to check out the article for more details about their ten suggestions:

1. Write a script
2. One thing at a time, please
3. No paragraphs
4. Pay attention to design
5. Use images sparingly
6. Think outside the screen
7. Have a hook
8. Ask questions
9. Modulate, modulate, modulate
10. Break the rules

If anyone is interested in open licenses, I interviewed Jimmy Wales this morning on that topic. He was kind enough to agree to speak with me as a part of the course I’m teaching at San Jose State University on the Open Movement and Libraries. And since I am making all of my course materials openly available under a Creative Commons license I thought it would be useful to share this for those interested. I have also interviewed Stephen Downes of the National Research Council in Canada, and Nicole Engard of LibLime, and I have interviews lined up with more incredibly smart people so stay tuned.

Here are the questions I asked Jimmy Wales and here’s the link to the (10 minute) interview:

1. You are a member of the board at Creative Commons which is a worldwide project which straddles the gap between full copyright and the public domain, offering new choices for creators, can you start off by telling us a bit about more about that?
2. How is it that you first became interested in Open licenses?
3. Many people, including the authors of the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition and the PLOS’ Open Access Definition insist that commercial uses must be permissible in order for content to be considered free, how do you think this reconciles with Creative Commons’ non-commercial clause?
4. Wikipedia uses copyleft (GFDL) and you are also on the board of Creative Commons, both of which have licenses which demand that derivative works be licensed with the same original license, do you often find incompatibility issues?
5. The Wikia community is also using Open licensing of content, can you tell us a bit about that?
6. Can you tell us a bit about your latest project Wikia Search and how you are using open licensing there?
7. It seems as though you’ve headed initiatives which have contributed or incorporated nearly all of the topics we are covering in our course - open-source software, open access, open education, and open licensing; Why do you think it’s important to promote Open licensing and Open in general?

Social media guru Chris Brogan has written a free e-book titled Personal Branding for the Business Professional which is available for download in .pdf format. Based on many of his useful blog posts, Brogan offers tips on setting up a home base, tracking what others are saying, reaching out through social networks, setting up remote outposts, creating new content, building conversations and community, offering value, and more. A must read for anyone interested in building a brand through social media.

Web Worker Daily has put together a list of tips for increasing our productivity using Microsoft Word. The article walks us through how to accomplish 6 productivity tasks such as:

1. Doing Table Calculations Directly in Word.
2. Compare Two Documents.
3. Deja Vu.
4. Save Multiple Documents Simultaneously.
5. Paste Your Formats.
6. Building Your Styles Skills.

I will build on his Paste Your Formats tip to briefly give you another way to accomplish this - If you use the format painter as much as I do to paste similar font styles, you’ll be happy to know that you can paste the same format into multiple places in your document by simply double-clicking the Format Painter button, the style will then be available to paste throughout the document until you hit the ESC key.

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]