The Distant Librarian

CFP: IRSQ - special issue focusing on social software and libraries

Michael Stephens has posted that he's editing an upcoming issue of Internet Reference Services Quarterly:

Internet Reference Services Quarterly, a refereed journal published by The Haworth Press Inc., invites proposals for a special issue focusing on social software and libraries. The issue (12/3) will tentatively be published in Winter 2007, edited by Michael Stephens, Instructor, Dominican University and blogger at tametheweb.com.

Proposals of no more than two (2) pages should be submitted to Michael Stephens at mstephens7 (at)mac.com no later than August 1, 2006. Other dates:

First drafts by November 1, 2006
Final drafts by Feb 1, 2007

Check his full post for additional details.


Technorati Tags: Scholarship, Library_2.0

Technorati Tags: Scholarship, Library_2.0

Huge collection of ebrary screencasts

ebrary has used Camtasia Studio to put together a very comprehensive list of brief screencasts on how to use their product.  Nothing too fancy, but it saves me from having to build 'em, so thanks Janet at Ebrary!  From their email to customers:

ebrary is pleased to announce that we have launched the first version of our online training site.  Available at http://www.ebrary.com/corp/training.jsp, it includes a “movie” of an end user actually using each of ebrary’s key features. We will continue to build upon this site, and we welcome your input.

Technorati Tags: Screencasts, ebrary

Controlling Intellectual Property: The Academic Community and the Future of Knowledge

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is presenting a conference in Ottawa Oct 27-29, 2006 on the future of Intellectual Property:

From Friday, October 27 to Sunday, October 29, 2006, academic staff, students, policy makers and members of the general public will gather to discuss and debate the place of intellectual property in the academic environment and the role the academic community should play in controlling its presence on campus.

More Information.

Technorati Tags: IP, Intellectual_Property

Podcasts about Podcasts and Podcasting

This AM on the way in to work I finished listening to a podcast version of Greg Schwartz's SirsiDynix session, A Beginner's Guide to Podcasting: Part 1 - A Consumer's Guide, and if you're at all interested in learning about podcasts I recommend it.  I've been on the podcasting bandwagon since it left the station, and while I already knew most of what Greg covered, I did pick up some tips on a few new tools and services. 

Part 2 - A Creator's Guide has just been posted and I'm downloading it now.  This one promises to inform about how to put a podcast together, and while I have not plans to actually start one I'm curious to learn how Greg does what he does, so am looking forward to it.


Technorati Tags: Podcasting, Tutorials

CFP: Academic Exchange Quarterly articles on Online Learning

A Library Writer's Blog has another DE-related CFP for you - The Academic Exchange Quarterly is soliciting articles for an issue dealing with Online Learning.  Submissions are accepted until the end of August.


Technorati Tags: Distance_Education

iPod has new role as educational tool

I love it when my tech/gadget fetish crosses over into my everyday world of education.  For example, Engadget reports that Pearson Education has just announced plans to release downloadable study guides for their textbooks.


Technorati Tags: ebooks, iPod, audio_books

Finding a Screencasting Tool for Mac OS X

I have been asked several times if I knew of a solid screencasting tool for the Mac, and while for a short time Qarbon offered a version of ViewletBuilder for the Mac, there didn't seem to be any packages nearly as nice as the Windows heavyweights.  Duane points to a package called ScreenRecord that looks like it'll get the job mostly done.  Unlike the oft-mentioned vnc2swf, ScreenRecord has the ability to include audio with your screen captures.  ScreenRecord is currently selling for $20, but it looks like you may also have to pick up MediaEdit Pro along with it if you want to edit your screencasts after the initial capture.  Not sure if you can include captions/thought balloons, and the brief manual says ScreenRecord can "export to any QuickTime compatible movie" - I suspect that doesn't include Flash :-( Hmm, poking around a bit more on the same site I also see ScreenAction Studio, which seems to do pretty much the same thing - will have to try them both.

My iBook is currently dead, but when I get me one of them fancy new MacBooks I'll be sure to give this a whirl and report back.  (ha!  now I have to get one 'cause I just told the whole world I was going to!  ;-)


Technorati Tags: Screencasting, OSX, Tutorials

New Peer-Reviewed Journal: Journal of Web Librarianship

Library Writer's Blog reports the announcement of a new peer-reviewed journal called the Journal of Web Librarianship.

Examples of topics appropriate for the Journal of Web Librarianship include but are not limited to: web page design, usability testing of library or library-related sites, cataloging or classification of Web information, international issues in web librarianship, scholars' use of the web, information architecture, library departmental web pages, RSS feeds, podcasting, library services via the web, search engines, history of libraries and the web, and future aspects of web librarianship.

Internet Librarian 2006 program announced

The program for Internet Librarian 2006 has just been posted.  To be held Oct 23-25 in Monterey, CA, I attended for the first time last year and found it to be one of the best conferences I've ever attended.  Full of cutting-edge ideas and interesting people.  I'm honored to be speaking with Meredith Farkas on Tuesday afternoon on the topic of "The RSS & JavaScript Cookbook: Creating One Stop".  We'll be looking at tools like Feed2JS to allow folks to incorporate content inside Course Management Systems like BlackBoard and WebCT.  New this year (courtesy of Meredith, of course) is a Conference Wiki.  Have you been to IL in the past?  Let the newcomers know how best to experience the conference and Monterey!

Ruining yet another social opportunity (I'll have to attend this instead of chumming around with new pals ;-) is the Tuesday evening session on Scholarship in Chaos; a panel session including representatives from Google Scholar, Microsoft, and Elsevier Scirus.  Haven't had a chance yet to look closely at the rest of the sessions, but even w/o looking I'll bet you a donut that there's a bunch of winners in there.


Technorati Tags: IL2006

walkaway, walkaway...i will follow

A couple of weeks ago I was teasing Brian because he had used the word "ubiquitous" in about three separate posts/projects, and I suggested he rebrand himself as The Ubiquitous Librarian.  Imagine my surprise when I saw in my aggregator that he's abandoning AltRef to start up a new blog called.... The Ubiquitous Librarian!  From Brian's introductory post:

This blog asks you to rethink the role and traditional values that librarians hold. This blog seeks to break the stereotype and explore the possibilities of a new identity. This blog asks you to step outside the library and become ubiquitous.

Along the same lines, Pam Ryan, Assessment Librarian at the U of Alberta, is ditching her personal blog to expand to a community blogging project called libraryassessment.info: A blog for and by librarians interested in academic library service assessment, evaluation, and improvement.  There are currently a dozen librarians on the list of contributors to this blog.  No real postings yet, but stay tuned!


Technorati Tags: Librarians, service, Ubiquitous_Librarian, assessment

Some thoughts on 'Scan This Book'

Other people have dissected Kevin Kelley's Scan This Book! article from the NYT much more effectively than I ever could, but I still wanted to jot down some random thoughts and quotes I lifted from the article.  If you still haven't read it, I think you should.

Here are some of the quotes/figures I found really interesting:

• "From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages." -- I was honestly surprised that there have been more books published than songs!  He doesn't say where those figures come from, so I don't know if that means recorded songs or songs printed on sheet music since they started that gig, but still, it takes a lot longer to publish a book than it does a song, so that surprised me.
• "Superstar, an entrepreneurial company based in Beijing, has scanned every book from 900 university libraries in China. It has already digitized 1.3 million unique titles in Chinese, which it estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language since 1949." -- We're always so focused on North America over here, and I don't read blogs in Chinese.  I know that France and the EU are discussing digitization projects, but now that I read it, it comes as no surprise that the Chinese would be working on this too. 
• "The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages." -- Coooool, I think...
• "At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums, the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages." -- OMG - can you imagine trying to teach someone how to search for information in this type of environment?!?  Out the window with the old "this is what you'll find in a peer-reviewed publication, and this is why you'd want to search for a book on your topic...
• And an interesting analogy when considering the publisher's lawsuit against Google, Kevin points out that, "In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another." -- it's not a perfect solution to replace today's monetary publising system, but it was an interesting point to me...

And the one big glaring thing to me that's not discussed in the article, and is only touched upon in the if:book comments, is the difference between fiction and nonfiction.  All this search stuff is great if you're searching for some information.  But what if you just want to read a story? 

I asked author Simon Ings what he thought of the article, and he pointed out that "treating all books exactly the same makes perfect sense for Google, but no sense at all for a publisher."  He goes on to say, "To reduce fiction to a kind of topical gameplay (reading 'Weight' [his latest book] because it contains the search term 'Mozambique', for example (we won't get into the number of websites now that have me listed under 'Weight loss') is one way of selecting what to read... But it is no replacement for the development of personal taste." 

Hmm, but what if we can reduce texts to the genomic level, ala Pandora and the Music Genome Project?  Now that wold be a good book-recommendation system!  A lot tougher to do, but why not someday?  Right now I still want to read in paper, but once digital paper really works, who knows?  But right now, Kevin's future of searchable books just isn't going to work for the upcoming summer reading season.

Technorati Tags: Google_Book_Search, future, books, libraries, reading

Introducing WISPR - Workshop on the Information Search Process for Research

OK, here's the final post about OffCamp 2006 in Savannah; I saved the best for last ;-), as this was the presentation I gave with Shauna Rutherford, my colleague from the U of C.  The paper was actually written by three of us (though mostly by Shauna and Alix), but Dr. Alix Hayden wasn't able to join us in Savannah. 

We spoke about a project we've been working on for well over a year called WISPR, which is an acronym for Workshop on the Information Search Process for Research.  In a nutshell we wanted to create a tutorial that could be used in a blended learning situation, where students could meet a librarian in class, but then spend some time online learning about the research process at their own pace.  In reality, this could also be an entirely web-based tutorial, but we feel it's important if possible to get some face time with the students as well (though of course that's not always possible with DE).

WISPR is based on the research of Carol Kuhlthau and Alix Hayden, and attempts to present the information search process in a new, visual way.  Kuhlthau describes six stages in the Information Search Process , but they're depicted in her writings as a grid, which seems to fly in the face of her insistence that the ISP is an iterative process.  We wanted to come up with a better way of depicting the ISP, and to that end modified a graphic to come up with the following, which we feel does a much better job of showing the iterative nature of the ISP.

WISPR is almost completely content-customizable, with a simply WYSIWYG interface allowing modifications to the text in any of the six phases.  Each of the six phases is further broken down into the following six areas: Overview, Actions/Strategies, Thoughts/Feelings, Course Specific Activities, Self Assessment, and the Logbook.  In the limited implementation we've had with WISPR, the Thoughts/Feelings section seems to really have piqued the interest of the students, who for the first time are realizing that they're allowed to feel uneasy/confused/anxious about parts of the research process!

We tried to make this a pretty interactive tutorial, incorporating simple "web-based action mazes" built with a piece of software called Quandary.  Think of them as a choose-your-own-adventure, in that you'll get a different response based on the answer you choose.  Of course there are screencasts involved, and we have some hands-on database tutorials that incorporate a multimedia component.  We also really made an effort to keep the tone conversational, and students have told us they appreciate that too.

We're working with our Teaching and Learning Centre (thanks Patrick and Norm!) to continue to modify the back-end, which will make it a more nimble tool to administer (allow different subject librarians to modify content, create new versions for new courses, roster students for the logbook).  At that time we're really hopeful that more of our collegues on campus will adopt it as part of their arsenal, and if we can get it to that point, we'd also like to release the package under a Creative Commons license so folks like you could use it too!

A couple of the suggestions we received from the audience included:

• State minimum system requirements.
• Can Refworks be integrated into the logbook?
• Captivate / Breeze etc don't allow for printing from within the tutorial - make printable/downloadable versions available (I believe this can be done as a PDF - sort of like a ppt handout with each slide being displayed separately)

All of these are great suggestions and we can easily add the first and last suggestion, and will put the second one on our wish list.

There's much more to the project, but I wanted to finally get this introduction to our tool posted!  You can read the paper we wrote for the OffCamp proceedings, and you can take a look at WISPR yourself at http://library.ucalgary.ca/wispr. There's a general version, and several class-specific versions there. Tell us what you think, please!

A disclaimer on the paper, which should also be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Library Administration: All rights reserved.  No further distribution of this material may be done without permission of Off-Campus Library Services at Central Michigan University.



Technorati Tags: WISPR, OCLSC06, ISP, Kuhlthau, Information_Literacy, Calgary

Weather update

I catch flak from some of my U of C colleagues for complaining about the weather here.  To present all sides of the story, it's been lovely for two or three straight days - hot even - and promises to remain so for the next few as well.  Trees are in bloom, the sky is blue, there's a light breeze and it's just plain great!

More thoughts on Facebook and Social Networks from Marshall Keys

I received an email from Marshall Keys on Monday morning alerting me to topical articles that appeared over the weekend in the NY Times Magazine and New Yorker.  The former is entitled Scan This Book!, and is an interesting vision of the future of the book.  A few mentions of libraries, but none of librarians.  I have some notes jotted down but left them in the office so may come back to that one later.

The latter is entitled "Me Media", and is not (yet?) available online.  It should appear in the EBSCO databases in a few days, at which time I will update this post with a link.  It's a pretty detailed look at Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and I learned quite a bit about that site by reading the article over lunch.  But Marshall asked me if I'd post this brief entry containing some of his thoughts about the community aspect addressed in this article, and I'm happy to oblige.  Marshall says he'll follow up in the next couple of days with additional posts on privacy, and then "possibly about the implications of this article and the FB  phenomenon for libraries and information commerce."

Here are Marshall's initial thoughts on this article:

John Cassidy’s article on Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, [“Me Media” in the May 15, 2006, New Yorker) is worth reading for anyone who is interested in the social networking phenomenon. It is making me think about some of the statements I have made about young people, privacy, and community in such places as my talk last month to the Savannah Off Campus Library Services Conference (which should be posted today on the conference site http://ocls.cmich.edu/conference/presentations.htm)

Facebook differs from other similar sites in several respects. Most important, until recently it has not been open to the entire universe but only to a subset of it, college students (originally Harvard students, then students at prestigious colleges, then all college students). Thus the community of which users are a part is automatically a restricted – exclusive – community. The admission of high school students has led to howls of rage.

Facebook has been a gated community, if you will, or a restricted community like a country club or La Cosa Nostra, for that matter, accessible to “people like us” but not so accessible that members feel their connection diluted. This “Our Crowd” mentality is the reason that many of them have been comfortable posting personal details online. In response to complaints about opening up new user categories, Facebook is creating a new Limited Profile that will differentiate between what users expose to the world and what they expose to their self-defined “In Group”. Shades of the line waiting outside a club. Only the cognoscenti will know whether they are seeing the inside information or the information accessible to the Great Unwashed. You may get into the club, but if you don’t get into the VIP Room, you aren’t there.  

This is very different from the kind of open group that Sixties leftovers like me have in mind when we use phrases like “building online communities.” In our internet communities, no one knows if you are a dog or physically deformed or gay or of a different race. All are equal, and what grants prestige is the quality of your discourse. Facebook may be the commercial future, but I think it stinks.

More to follow tomorrow.                   -- Marshall

Has anyone else read the article yet?  What are your thoughts?  Here's what others are saying...

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Social_Networks, Marshall_Keys, MySpace, Google_Book_Search, Me_Media 

Down to earth a little

Having spent a lot of time this week thinking about the issues in my privacy and social networks post, I don't want to head home this weekend w/o a brief followup, which comes from an exchange I had with our manager of integrated systems (aka OPAC Wrangler).  David pointed out a couple of gaps in my thinking: first, that offering suggestions based on aggregate circulation data probably won't work very well because items simply don't circulate that much!  At Amazon, a single title can be purchased by lots of people, but in an academic library, a single title, even a very popular one, is only going to circulate a few times per semester, at most.  He also points out that circulation data would miss the large usage of e-resources, though with the right statistical software maybe that could still be factored in.

The big fish-slap to the face though was when he reminded me that regardless of what the "kids" want, we still serve a very diverse population, and the average age of the professoriate is slightly higher than the 13-25 age range I was discussing.  If we went all 3.0 and offered all sorts of cool services, including recommendation services, we'd probably have to have an opt in/out opportunity, which while doable, would make the whole endeavor a little more difficult.

I feel like Icarus - it's neat to fly, but I don't want to get too high ;-)


Technorati Tags: demographics, libraries

Moving Day: Making the Most of Your Message with RSS and Syndicated Content

Volume 52(2) of Feliciter, the Canadian Library Association's bi-monthly publication, is a theme issue on Social Software (RSS, Blogs, Etc - Impact on Libraries, Staff and Clients) and was guest-edited by Geoff Harder at the U of Alberta.  If you want to check out the entire issue and are a subscriber to Academic Search Premier, you should be able to get there via this link.  Just browse to 2006, Vol 52(2).  Most of the articles are of an introductory nature, which may be what you're looking for - nice to have them all in one place.  You can link directly to mine, which talks about using Feed2JS to embed an RSS feed as HTML in another location: Moving Day: Making the Most of Your Message with RSS and Syndicated Content (again assuming you have a subscription to Academic Search Premier).


Technorati Tags: RSS, Feliciter, Feed2JS

WebMeeting tips

Laurie posts her reflections on hosting her first webmeeting (practice session).  Pretty much all of these would stand for delivering remote synchronous instruction as well, so if that's something you've never done you might tuck these away.  She makes it sound like a really scary experience, but I'll bet if you wrote down all the do's and don'ts of your first face to face meeting/instruction you'd come up with a similar scary-sounding list.  Like everything else, It eventually becomes second nature.  Or at least not as scary ;-)


Technorati Tags: webmeetings, Breeze, tips

Browsing Library Collections: From the Shelf to the Online Catalog

I've recently been involved in some planning meetings for our new Campus Calgary Digital Library, and one idea that came up was whether we'd move older materials to storage, and someone mentioned how tough that makes it to browse and thus invite serendipity. I realized (not for the first time) that this is one of the major shortfalls of library service to distance students; we can send them anything, but they still can't really browse the collection (short of scrolling through titles in the catalogue).

The latest issue of Educause Review is out, and it contains a short article addressing this problem: Browsing Library Collections: From the Shelf to the Online Catalog. Robert Kieft from Haverford College discusses a consortial experiment where several institutions are physcially scanning the TOC and several additional pages of older works which are then removed from the collection. The scans are then made available in the bib record of the catalogue so patrons can better decide if this is relevant material.

Robert notes that Google Book Search and the Open Content Alliance may make this an experiment in futility, but I like the idea of integrating the TOC scans in the bib record (making the info available to your local patron as opposed to making your local information available to the world at large, as would be the case with any library info in GBS or OCA).

Technorati Tags: TOC, Google_Book_Search, Open_Content_Alliance, Scanning, Libraries

Thoughts on privacy and libraries and social networks

OK, actually I'm mostly curious about your thoughts, 'cause I haven't sorted mine out yet. 

This post is a result of the social network stuff Brian Mathews has been working on (honest, this will be the last time I mention him today, unless he does something else interesting ;-).  When I first saw Brian's post about lurking and participating as a librarian in places where students hang out online (MySpace, Live Journal, Facebook, where ever), my gut reaction was that it was somehow an invasion of privacy, and from a couple of the comments Brian got on his orignal post I'm not the only one.  But before posting my summary I emailed Brian and his response made sense to me; that the students he'd contacted actually seemed to appreciate the contact, and that these were completely open and accessible sites. 

Add to that the quotes I grabbed from Marshall Keys' keynote that "Young folks today (13 - 25?) have no expectation of privacy because they do not believe that it exists in an electronic environment.  "If I view it or send it, they will see it, and I don’t care." and perhaps more telling, the note I paraphrased that "Privacy is unimportant - community is important.  This was a strong theme of his keynote, and later he pointed out that libraries seem to care more about our patrons privacy than our patrons do, and this may actually hinder our ability to deliver some of the services our patrons would like to see!"  (I've just emailed Marshall to see if I can track down the sources on those ideas). 

When Marshall said that I remembered thinking how much I agreed that even if we wanted to, there's no way our OPAC would allow us to provide some Amazon-like interesting information (recommendations based on previous circulation, for instance) to our patrons, and the PATRIOT Act is a whole 'nother issue altogether (one that even has a major impact on us up here in Canada - think of where we buy our systems from!).

But what if it's true that our patrons don't care at all about their privacy as long as they get cool and useful services?  Is the fact that the institution (PL or University) is legally bound by privacy legislation going to forever hinder our ability to compete with the social networks?  Does that mean librarians are forced to resort to the guerrilla warfare that Brian suggests if we want to participate even in the smallest of ways?  Do our students even want us there?

Maybe it's all true - maybe offering IM and SMS reference service is the first baby step to understanding how important it is to meet the students on their turf.  I haven't payed any attention at all to the gaming in libraries posts, but that would be part of it too.  The idea of sticking our content in to their course shells is also a continuation of this idea.

I think I'm coming around to the conclusion that if that's where the students are, and if we want to provide them with the best service, we should be there too.  At least until the students tell us to leave them alone, and I haven't heard of that happening yet.  Have you?  What are your thoughts on this, please?


Technorati Tags: privacy, libraries, social_networks, students, turf

Flash in the pan?

Brian Mathews thinks it's a waste of time to create a library profile on Facebook.  You may recall Brian had the neat presentation called Intuitive Revelations: The Ubiquitous Reference Model, in which he created a library identiy in LiveJournal.  In that project he concluded that it seemed to work a lot better when he showed up as himself rather than as his library incarnate, but now he's going further, suggesting that because Facebook is likely to be a fleeting phenomenon (Facebook specifically, but not the idea of social networks), you really shouldn't put all your eggs in their basket.  And as if to back Brian up, Stephen Abram offers this list of other MySpaces.


Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, Libraries, Service

Jasco pans MS Academic Search

I'm really glad the world is filled with people who have more time, and more importantly, more brains than I do, so they can critically analyze new search tools like Microsoft's Academic Search (aka Windows Live Academic, or WLA).  Peter Jasco has reviewed it, and doesn't like it much.  Here's an earlier review he did of competitor Google Scholar (it didn't get a very high mark either).


Technorati Tags: Jasco, Schoogle, WLA, Windows_Live_Academic, Google_Scholar, Reviews

Demand for E-books in an Academic Library – Ellen Safley, U of T at Dallas

My penultimate post from last week's Off Campus Library Services Conference.  Ellen Safley took us on a tour of her institution's exploration of E-book usage. Apparently there will be four new ebook appliances on the market in 06/07:

• iRex Technologies (Philips Electronics)
• Jinke (China)
• Polymer Vision (Philips spin-off) 
• Plastic Logic (UK)

One or more of these promise to use a USB port to add titles from a computer—any PDF file - wouldn't that be nice?  I'll believe it when I see it :-)

NetLibrary was one of the first purchases, and UTD librarians expressed the usual complaints about passwords, one simultaneous user only, one page printing, and limited copy/paste.

Next up was ebrary, which has a subscription model, no selection needed, more generous printing, no passwords.  UTD librarians feel the ebrary supplied bib records have “issues”, and they note that ebrary passes off journal issues as e-books.  But the best quote of the conference was from Ellen, who noted that “In all my years as a reference librarian, I’ve never had a patron complain that ‘I don’t like the quality of your bib record!’”

They also looked at Safari TechBooks the History Ebook project, and something called EBL.  With EBL, titles are handpicked, good statistical package, bib records from OCLC, reserve module, Service Fee, 325 uses each year – when you reach the limit, you need another copy.

Helen offered the following essentials when examining ebook products:

• Always do a trial
• Cataloging is essential for use   
• Using the collection search engine is great, but knowing the individual titles is required
• Check out if records are available and try to broker them as part of the deal…then beware.  All records are not equal
• Loading programs are essential for getting print with online titles together…we want the two formats on the same record
• Check out the statistical packages

It was interesting to note that while UTD librarians reported that lots of people didn't like NetLibrary, it has shown a steady increase in usage since 1999, and Ellen suggested that librarian perceptions were muddying the picture.  Since they often dealt with the password and printing problems with NetLibrary, they assumed the product was no good and nobody liked it, but the statistics suggest otherwise.

Similarly, ebarary statistics showed a 129% increase from year 1 to year 2.

Ellen notes that it's impossible to directly compare use of ebooks with print, (How did they use each format?  Did they open the book?   Checkouts do not always equate to use.  How long are students using each ebook?  Reading vs Factual Information.)  we do know the rate is increasing!!!  As an illustration, she showed a slide that the top-circulating ebook was "checked out" 47 times in a month, and the top print book was 1.4 times.

And now for the payoff - the impact of ebooks on distance learning:

• We are now providing true deliverables for customers needing monographs. 
• Usage is exploding--Similar to the e-journal usage 5 years ago.
• Most collections of e-books are searchable within the collection and within the volume. Very handy!
• Are most students now distance learners?  They are at UT-Dallas.    Gate counts ↓8%/yr

Ellen's ppt is available here.

Technorati Tags: OCLSC06, ebooks

OCLSC presentations now available online

Not every single one, but many of the presentations (mostly ppt) from last week's Off Campus Library Services Conference are now available online.


Technorati Tags: OCLSC06

Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services wiki

Rob Morrison writes to the OFFCAMP Listserv that the process of re-examining the current Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services (ACRL)  is now being managed through a wiki, which can be accessed at http://dls.schtuff.com/guidelines_for_distance_learning_library_services.  But it's not an entirely open wiki:

Editing rights are currently limited to members of the DLS Guidelines Committee. To make a comment or to suggest a change, please e-mail the Chair, Rob Morrison, at National-Louis University: rob.morrison@nl.edu

Rob writes that, "Proposed changes are incorporated into the Guidelines sections (Personnel, Resources, etc.).  You can view the current version of the Guidelines and drafts by clicking on the link to that section.  To view different drafts, go to the bottom of the screen after clicking on a specific section.  Look for the pull down box displaying “Actions.”  Select “History” and all drafts will appear in a list.  The bottom link displays the current version with higher links directing to different drafts; ignore the version number as some were deleted in order to combine proposed changes into a single draft."

Technorati Tags: wiki, acrl, guidelines, distance_education

To whom do you teach?

Meredith Farkas is a newish distance education librarian, and has just posted a very good essay in which she comes to the conclusion that before she markets library resources to her students, she needs to market very heavily to faculty.  Without faculty buy-in the students aren't going to use the library no matter how good the instruction or resources.  Meredith, even if it was an obvious conclusion (which it isn't), it's very good to be reminded of it from time to time.  There may be some useful information in Samantha's recent survey of what DE faculty want from the library.  Off to call a faculty member now...

Technorati Tags: Faculty, Librarians, service, DE