The Distant Librarian

Most students will be taking some courses online by 2014

One more find by Stephen Abram; a Campus Technology report indicating that by 2014, the number of US students taking at least some of their courses online will rise from 10.65 million in 2009 to 18.65 million.  If true, there should remain plenty of opportunities for librarians supporting distance or blended learners!

Thoughts on the Kindle in Canada

Today it was announced that the Kindle will finally be sold to Canada.  Not IN Canada, but TO Canada. Hate to just be a complainer, but here's what's not right about this launch.  I'm sure some of these will be addressed in time, but until pretty much all of them are, it won't be on my wish list.  

1. We have to pay duty to have it shipped from the States to Canada.  It should be shipped to me from within Canada.
2. The Kindle app isn't available in the Canadian iTunes store.
3. I pay the same US price as you do in the States, but my Kindle won't have full wireless capability.
4. Only four Canadian newspapers currently available.
5. I can't buy books for the Kindle from Amazon.ca - I was seriously set to buy (ironically) The Case for Books right now.  It is available for the Kindle at Amazon.com
6. I don't think that Canadian authors / publishers can publish to the Kindle platform.

How have I been coping w/o the Kindle?  Just fine, actually.  I've read well over a dozen novels on my iPhone this year.  My preferred ereader of choice is Stanza (ironically now owned by Amazon) - can't think of a single thing to do to improve it.  I buy most of my books from Fictionwise.  There's also the Canadian option of Shortcovers, with both a store and ereader.  Shortcovers just hasn't been quite as seamless as Stanza/Fictionwise for me.

For newspapers, yesterday I discovered PressDisplay.  It's got my local paper and an iPhone app, though if I do decide to subscribe I'll probably choose to read my morning paper on the laptop.  For me, I think newspapers and magazines on an ereader would be killer, and that's one thing I was hoping the Kindle would do for me.

It does indeed frost my shorts that I can't share the books I've purchased with anyone else.  I haven't yet, but will probably explore options for cracking the DRM in order to do so.

What am I missing, eh?

Webinar: The Future of the Library - How the Library Ecosystem is Evolving to Support 21st Century Information Demands

Library Journal has another interesting-sounding webinar coming up this week (11/18/2009 12:00 PM EST): The Future of the Library - How the Library Ecosystem is Evolving to Support 21st Century Information Demands.  From the registration page:

Libraries are continuing to evolve and are using new technologies to expand their presence as virtual knowledge centers for information sharing communities. Patrons conducting research remotely are increasingly using mobile devices and accessing resources in multiple languages.

Librarians as 21st century knowledge technologists as well as electronic information experts need to offer easily accessible library-specific solutions tailored to the unique data and information needs of their users. Technology solution providers are working with publishers and are moving towards more sharing of data, interoperability standards and electronic workflow required to meet these needs.

Listen to three industry notables share their view of how the industry is responding and changing to meet these evolving needs of the library ecosystem using today's emerging technologies to meet the needs of patrons today and for the future

PANELISTS:
Peter McCracken, Co-Founder & Director of Content and Business Development, Shipindex.org
Rob Mercer, General Manager, Serials Solutions
Andrew Pace, Executive Director, Networked Library Services, OCLC

You can register for free, and the event will also be archived.

ACTA - Quite possibly the biggest threat to your internet to date.

There's been a lot of traffic about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in the last week or so, but not nearly enough.  In a nutshell, instead of proposing legislation through transparent and traditional channels (Congress, Parliament, etc), member countries seem to be pushing to enact legislation via an international treaty which has so far been withheld from the public.  If the treaty is signed, wham-bam, thank-you ma'am, we've got a new law.  And know what?  It's not really about anti-counterfeiting as much as it is about copyright reform. 

Want some more background?  Take your pick on where to start reading. 

Want a number to make you sit up and take notice?  According to a statistic being passed around on twitter, the population of countries negotiating ACTA is 1,178,504,491 ... public with access to text: 42.

Want to listen instead of read? Michael Geist spoke for 20 minutes at the Washington College of Law:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a form you Americans can use to contact your CongressCritter about this issue.

One of the leaks around ACTA suggests that there's a provision which will require ISPs around the globe to monitor and adhere to takedown notices upon mere accusation of copyright infringement, as well as a three-strikes and you're off the internet forever.  You read that right.  The RIAA or whomever simply accuses you three times, and you're banned from the internet for life.  Sounds like a joke, doesn't it?  Apparently it's not.

Happy Friday the 13th :-(

What IS criticism?

Apparently the Annoyed Librarian continues to live up to the name.  I learn this second-hand by reading a post by Laura at Llyfrgellydd, and watching a great vlog post by David Rothman at davidrothman.net.  David, I too encourage you to communicate via this medium in the future - really enjoyed that!

I looked up ad hominem for my own edification - the Apple dictionary defines it thusly:

(of an argument or reaction) arising from or appealing to the emotions and not reason or logic.
• attacking an opponent’s motives or character rather than the policy or position they maintain : vicious ad hominem attacks.

Apparently people want scholarly articles

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a recently-published study that monitored a file-sharing site where almost 5,500 scholarly articles were traded over a 6-month period, "costing journals about $700,000 in that time, or about $1.4-million a year."  Interestingly, the study is freely available online from The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics.  I call BS on the monetary figure, but you can't dispute there's obviously a black market for scholarly material. 

And that's where DeepDyve comes in.  From their site:

Research - Search across 30 million articles from thousands of authoritative journals.
Rent - Rent premium articles for just $0.99. View open access articles for FREE.
Read - Read the entire article in DeepDyve's Viewer.

It's that rental part that's so interesting.  Your $0.99 will buy you 24-hour access to the article, though "Some of DeepDyve's articles are "Preview Only." DeepDyve does not currently have permission from the publisher to rent these articles."  They'll also link you directly to the publisher's website where you can actually download the article (and where people will be shocked at how much these things actually "cost" - Paul).

I signed up for the two-week free trial to see what the reader looked like, and how well the search engine worked.  As I suspected, you can do screen grabs of the articles (rendered in a Flash reader), so the rental part isn't really an issue.  They do chunk up the articles though, making that process and the subsequent re-reading a PITA.

The search engine is a basic single box, though Advanced Filters does offer more options.  Doesn't seem to respect phrase searching in quotes.  Hmmm, through my Account info I can see my viewing history, which while may prove convenient to researchers, certainly raises a big red flag around privacy and confidentiality.  I don't see an option to turn that off.  Wow, I got 87,333 results on a search for "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"! Which is ten less than my search on "supertramp"...  Umm, I think that search engine needs a little more work. 

Overall though it was a pleasant experience, and I predict that as long as they've actually got agreements with the publishers, independent researchers are going to go for this product.

Internet Librarian days 2 and 3

Didn't take many notes on day three, so I'm combining two days in this post.  Even so, it shouldn't be as long as the day one post.  I took these notes for myself, not necessarily for the blog, so they're most definitely not session reports - hopefully some useful links to explore.

I started the day at the Summon-sponsored breakfast where we heard Peter Jacso speak mostly about how awful Google Scholar metadata is, and how whenever he points out a series of errors, Google immediately removes them from the database.  Some examples include a vast number of records with author:methods or author:password  He's just published an article under the title of "Google Scholar's Ghost Authors" in Library Journal.  Good speaker who reminded me very much of my late Grandpa Pival :-)

Day 2 Keynote was an interview OF Paul Holdengraber, who hosts / moderates / interviews people for the Live from NYPL program - I want to search for audio of these - they should be great. (update: This lecture series is available in audio and video with transcripts AND Conversation Portraits in iTunes)  Start at http://www.nypl.org/LIVE .  Paul feels very strongly that the library should surprise people, not necessarily deliver only what people expect.

First Session - Dreaming, Designing and using mobile platforms - mostly overview stuff in this double session - I left after the first half to go listen to the UMich session (below).  Tom Ipri's slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/Tombrarian/mobile-library-platforms. Also check http://lifeonterra.com/m and compare it to the traditional version at http://lifeonterra.com/.  This is a project of the University of Montana, introduced by Jason Clark. I think Jason mentioned this site makes use of something called meta viewport, which I want to further explore.

Toby Greenwalt mentioned using a combination of Yaz + Z39.50 + PHP = mobile catalogue?  He also talked about using Shoutbomb for SMS alerts.  Red Laser, costs $1.99 in the iPhone app store, but has an SDK so someone may be able to get it to scan our library barcodes...

Designing for content-rich websites - UMich Library
John Creech is the Website Content Manager, Ken Varnum is Web Systems Manager
Use the regular libguides XML data dump to search via Solr, to integrate search results with those from the rest of the Drupal site.
Similar to UT Mississauga, librarians are listed in the catalogue by subject headings (call number ranges) and if there's a high-enough number of matches the subject librarian will appear along with the search results.  In Drupal, taxonomies are assigned to librarians.

An excellent tip picked up from Ken Varnum, Hathi is pronounced "Hot-ty" (that's 98% correct, but a lot better than the way I had been pronouncing it!  :-)

Marshall Breeding on SEO, then Andrew White from SUNY Stony Brook  Scholarly Stats, a service which is supposed to help with COUNTER and SUSHI stats.

Check out Splunk.com - appears to be a real memory and processor hog, but could provide some interesting slice and dice on ezproxy stats.

Kara Reuter, Extreme Makeover - user-centered design of http://worthingtonlibraries.org - they borrowed heavily from the museum world using a "visit" link to contain information about hours, parking, info, etc.   Their navigation choices are Visit / Borrow / Research / Interact / Calendar / About

Char Booth suggests replicating the OCLC User Perception reports at the local level - the survey instruments should be available.  "The more you like libraries, the more likely you are to like library technology" NOT "younger people like library tech"  The report Char was speaking to is Informing Innovation: Tracking student interest in emerging library technologies at Ohio University (147-pg PDF).  Really interesting results, but Char pointed out several times that this is a case study, and that results could be pretty different at your library.

Keynote - Day 3 - Growing up and Grown-up Digital - Net-Gen Speaks
Stephen Abrahms and a panel of teens - see note above about "case study".  Really interesting to hear these three young adults talk about their use of technology and thoughts about libraries, but I wouldn't bet any money that this was a representative sample of America's youth.

Nicole Engard - Library Mashups
http://mashups.web2learning.net (homepage for her recent book, Library Mashups)
http://www.programmableweb.com -- tracks mashups and tools
Mashup Tools - Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com) Jody Fagan wrote an article in Computers in Libraries (2007) that explained it very well for Nicole - also chapter 7 of Nicole's book
http://readingradar.com - NYT bestseller list and merges with data from Amazon.com
http://www.thisweknow.org - interesting local / govt info for locations in the US
Check out "machine tags" on the flickr API
http://mashups.plsinfo.craftyspace.com - Library Mashup Demo site
http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api - Open Library APIs
http://worldcat.org/devnet/wiki/SearchAPIDetails - WorldCat APIs

I could really use an entire session or workshop on Yahoo Pipes! - plenty of reading to do there.

And that's where my notes end.  Overall I really enjoyed the conference this year; especially nice to meet so many twitter friends in person :-)  Might be heading to CIL2010 next April - that'd be my first time there since 1994!

The end of TL Infobits :-(

Aw crap, I just read in the latest issue of TL Infobits that Carolyn Kotlas's position at UNC Chapel Hill has been eliminated, and as a result Infobits is folding as well.  From the editor's note:

This will be the next to the last issue of TL Infobits. My position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been eliminated, and I will leave employment here in December. Since its beginning in 1993, Infobits has always been a one-person endeavor, and so with my departure, Infobits will leave the ITS Teaching and Learning division as well.

It has been my privilege and pleasure to provide this service to my readers over the years. The newsletter has given me a chance to reach out to the academic community on and beyond my own campus. It has enabled me to take my information hunting and gathering skills beyond just satisfying my own curiosity, thus sharing my interests in IT for academics with others. And, not least, I have been able to meet, although only virtually, many dedicated, interesting people who have encouraged my work with their kind comments.

In the event that Infobits resurfaces in a new home, there will be more information in the November issue.

-- Carolyn Kotlas, Infobits Editor

We'll miss you Carolyn, thanks for the great service over the years.  Somebody please hire her quickly!

Internet Librarian day one recap

I thought I'd try something new this year by not bringing my laptop to the sessions.  I figured maybe I'd pay more attention, and I think it's working for me.  I've still got the Wi-fiPhone for checking email from time to time, but for the most part I'm listening and writing down what ideas I can catch.  With that in mind, here are my thoughts and observations from day one of Internet Librarian 2009.

Surprised to go through the program and not find any sessions specifically on ebooks.  I predict that will not be the case next year!

The opening keynote was an interview with Vint Cerf, who does not like to be called the Father of the Internet.  Very bright guy (no surprise there); I didn't know he was a VP at Google.  Paul Holdengraber, Director of Public Programs at NYPL conducted the interview, and did a fantastic job.  A random quote  from Vint I jotted down, "Our culture is trending towards abstraction and brevity." (Books I have to read: Born Digital by by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan (I know, I know).

The first session I attended was Roy Tennant's Digital Library Landscape.  He delivered a real wake-up call to libraries.  "We're in serious trouble if we do nothing, and serious trouble if we keep doing what we've traditionally done."  "Libraries are in imminent danger" because surveys (OCLC) have shown that people think only of BOOKS when they're asked to think of libraries, but "Google and Amazon are eating our lunch" when it comes to books.  Most of our OPACS are no more advanced than a card catalogue on wheels. He described a process where he went from a blog post, through Worldcat, then to his local public library to learn that a recommended book was on the shelf.  But he wants to go that last step and have the library deliver to his door - that would make libraries more relevant to their users.  (note to self, this might be pretty darn easy for the majority of our university users - profs for sure to their office, and students in residence).  He talked a little about ONIX, which he described as MARC for the rest of the world (publishers and booksellers use it to trade metadata about books).  OCLC is working with publishers on enriched ONIX records, and Roy wonders if next-gen catalogues won't have this same enriched metadata (it looks a lot more useful to me!).

Roy then told us that libraries need to focus on where we add value.  Continuing to do what we've traditionally done is NOT going to cut it.  He talked about how http://escholarship.org is turning the idea of an institutional repository around by focusing on the research and publication process at the University.  Make the fact that papers are deposited in the repository an incidental action, but help the faculty with the problem they have by providing them with tools to help them get published.  (DSpace doesn't solve a problem THEY have).  "Take away their pain and you will be valued."

Another role for libraries is to make sure local parts of the Web are preserved (Internet Archive can't do it all).  He talked about the Web Archiving Service from the California Digital Library.  Syndicate content to where people are found (Flickr, YouTube) - showed an Alexa graph showing the difference in traffic between Flickr and the Library of Congress website - why not be where all the people are?

Next session was Super Search Tips with Mary Ellen Bates.  Random tips and tools I jotted down:

• Google Squared results can be exported to Excel, and further modified.
• OneRiot indexes pages linked to by people on social networks, and thus is very current.
• Search Cloudlet is a Firefox addon that generates tag clouds of works retrieved by a search (Google Yahoo or Twitter)
• A twitter search filter: use filter:links in your search query to return results that include hyperlinks.
• http://uc.princeton.edu - University Channel for educational videos
• http://bing.com/visualsearch (I remember being unable to access this URL from Canada the last time I tried it...)
• Great a twitter alert through Google Alerts by including this in your query (Tara Calishain): site:twitter.com inurl:favorites YOUR-KEYWORD -- this will let you know anytime someone favorites a tweet that includes the word(s) you're interested in.
• http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com - alternative interface to Google News
• http://google.com/finance/domestic_trends - only works in US (or only useful in the US?)
• reQall.com - leave a voicemail, or send IM, email or text to this company and receive a transcribed message in any medium, possibly at the time you request as a reminder.
• Create tabs in MS Office applications http://bit.ly/2saSe (Windows only)

Next up was Will Kurt from UN Reno talking about the MS Surface touch table (we may be getting one or more of these for the Taylor Family Digital Library).  Programming language is C#, but in a later conversation I had with Will he thinks that any solid web programmer will be able to pick this up.  He really stressed that new technologies need to be perceived as valuable, not novel, especially with something this pricey.  He hasn't programmed any library-specific applications for the Surface - the biggest hit he's built is a virtual anatomy application.  I can't remember if this was his idea or mine, but I jotted down a note wondering about the ability of the Surface to scan the barcode of a library book placed upon the table to automatically provide additional information about that title (links to reviews, multimedia, Amazon, etc).  According to Will and the other speaker from Darian PL, these are very solidly-built tables.

Next up was John Law from Serials Solutions talking about attracting the next-gen researcher (of course a commercial for Summon, but one based in interesting research). He used a great analogy in that library websites are currently analogous to trying to search the web before there were any search engines.  You'd have to know about the content on a given site, navigate to that site, then search the content of that site FROM that site.  Rinse and repeat.  See "Academic Libraries and the struggle to remain relevant: Why research is conducted elsewhere" (9-pg PDF) for more info.

Last session I took notes on was Susan Senese from UT Mississauga talking on "From Library Website to the Learning Commons".  Most innovative thing I noted was that librarians are in the catalogue with barcodes so that they can swipe their library (ID?) card when they go on the desk, and that information (John Doe is now on the Reference Desk) is automatically updated on the homepage - provides a good point of contact with the students, especially those who have favourite librarians.  See also http://www.slx.com

Guest Post - What's in a (SLA) name?

This is a guest post written by two librarians at the U of Calgary about the proposed name change for the Special Libraries Association.  In November the membership will be voting whether to change the name of their organization to ASKPro (Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals).  I have no stake in the matter, but Justine Wheeler and John Wright are heavily invested as the Directory of the Business Library and the Head of the Military Museums Library here at the UofC.

Justine writes:

I’ve been reading the discussion about the SLA proposed name change with great interest. I must admit when I first heard Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals (ASKPro), I was hesitant. My main reservation being that the moniker “librarian” is a strong, identifiable brand that is working quite well in academic special libraries – at least in my opinion. Nonetheless, the profession is moving and *needs* to move to a more inclusive understanding of knowledge work.

I thought I’d ask a student assistant in our library what she thought of the name. She thought it sounded “haughty”. Hmmm. Are we trying to put on ‘airs’ or over value ourselves, or is this yet another perfect example of how we and others devalue and misunderstand our work?

As I’ve been mulling this over, I keep coming back to an experience I had at the beginning of the semester. I was asked to present at a PhD orientation. I was given a short amount of time to discuss the library services and resources available to help PhDs conduct their research. When the Associate Dean Research introduced me she said something pretty close to: “the people at the Business Library are so great, we think of them as colleagues not librarians”.  Hmmm. At the end of the session one of the PhD students asked me: “what is your background, you seem to know so much about business”? Hmmm again. I had after all been speaking on the topic of business research not business theory. Was it that surprising a business librarian could speak authoritatively on researching business topics? Whatever marketing plan we as a profession have had, it just doesn’t seem to be working.  There remains a disconnect between what we do and how we are perceived.

So where am I now? I love the title librarian and I love being a librarian but I believe we do have to take a different approach to promoting our value and what we do. By encouraging those with different skill sets into our association we can expand our own skills, gain exposure to new ideas and create much needed collaboration in the information and knowledge field.  By aligning ourselves with those who are, or should be, our colleagues and collaborators we might even be able to raise our profile and change how we are perceived - thereby strengthening, not weakening, our "brand". Doesn’t sound too bad…think I'll vote yes.

John counters with:

I disagree completely - I think being a librarian engenders tremendous goodwill and political capital that can be leveraged.  Changing the name just seems to be running from a series of identity issues without resolving them.  If anything it makes things more nebulous and waters down who we are as a profession (with standards) and as a function for an organization even more.  I think of what happened in the Canadian and US public services and think this would accelerate a diminishing of the profession by a major employment group. The UK Charter model would be a better step, IMHO.  I think we need to own librarianship and update the word, and in that I agree with the underlying motives for the name change, if not agreeing either with the name or the imperative to change the name. In short, we do need to own what we do differently - I completely agree with you; I just don't think this is the way.

Want to chime in?  Please do!

Politician suggests Public Library should drop p-books in favour of e-books to save money

From TeleRead comes the story of a politician with an interesting idea, but who hasn't explored the economics of ebook publishing.  E-books for libraries pushed by economy-minded Los Angeles councilman.

Cory Doctorow kicks off a unique publishing experiment--and a monthly PW column

Cory Doctorow's trying to run an experiment to prove once and for all that giving a book away while simultaneously offering it for sale will realize more money for the author than simply selling the book in traditional formats.  There's quite a bit more to it than that, but that's the gist I picked up from his inaugural column on the Publisher's Weekly website.  Frustratingly, at this moment there's no separate RSS feed for Cory's column :-(

More about the column:

Read Cory Doctorow's Column Monthly in 'PW'

With the digital revolution well underway, these are interesting—and sometimes uneasy—times for the publishing world. So we are especially delighted to announce that Cory Doctorow—bestselling author, Boing Boing blogger and one of the world's most forward-thinking culturists—will be a monthly columnist for PW. Cory's column, With a Little Help, will run in the first issue of each month and will be freely available online on the PW site. In the column, Cory will detail his specific experiences with his latest self-publishing effort, as well as his broader thoughts on the issues he—and many of you—are facing in the new publishing economy.

At this year's inaugural Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Cory made waves with his presentation (referring to advocates of DRM as "the real pirates")—and we expect he'll make some waves here, too. We know you'll find Cory to be at once entertaining, thought provoking and challenging as well. We realize what might work for Cory may not work for you. But we're certain that the insights he'll deliver will help you think more deeply about your books, your business—and your future.

(btw, there's another guy who's experimenting along the same lines)

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

An emerging list of the top 100 tools for learning in 2009, as picked by 202 learning professionals (and possibly you!).  Pleased to note that I was aware of 87 of them, with most of the new-to-me ones being related to animation and course authoring systems.  I found it particularly interesting to note the changes between 2007-2009, with some obvious risers like Twitter and Slideshare, but some interesting fallers, such as Facebook drifting from 17 in 2007, to 24 last year, to 33 this year, Microsoft Word dropping from 10 to 22 to 42 this year, and Bloglines falling from 12 to 30 to 73 this year!

Well worth a few minutes to look over the list to see what might be useful to you.

What IS Google Wave?

Last week I got my invite to Google Wave, and Chad Haefele and I played with it for a little bit (he's the only other person I know with an account so far, even though I've sent out a few invites of my own).  It's kinda slick, but we were both just poking sticks at it to see what it might be good for.  Today on twitter someone posted a link to this video, which does an excellent job of explaining 3.5% of what Wave is all about (epipheo's stats, not mine)

Incidentally, this is my first time trying TypePad's newest embed feature - it works great - it's the small things :-)

After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about next-generation catalogues.  While the article provides a pretty good background of the issue (IMHO), the comments provide an excellent summary of librarian psychology.  What's only touched upon briefly in the article is the ability for these new "web-scale index searching" tools to search so much more than traditional bibliographic data.  As I mentioned in last week's LJ webcast, at the University of Calgary we want to expose students to the collections of not only our library, but also our museum, archives, and locally digitized material, none of which appear in a traditional OPAC. 

Read those comments.  Where do you fall in your thinking?