The Distant Librarian

Social Networking in the Academy

I had the pleasure this morning of speaking on a keynote panel at our annual Faculty Technology Days here at the U of Calgary.  My fellow panelists were D'Arcy Norman, Dr. Maria Bakardjieva, and Todd Andre, and we were billed as "experts" on social networking as a communication and learning tool.  You can see the outline of D'Arcy's intro to Social Networking and my brief outline for how libraries are using Facebook specifically on the wiki page dedicated to this talk.  I found the session really interesting - we'd structured it to get a lot of audience participation (72 or so registered), and we did, including interesting thoughts from students (Todd) and teaching faculty.  I hadn't realized how overburdened some of them feel w/o having to learn about new social networks and how to work them into their curriculum.  Not that I'd recommend sitting through the whole thing as the quality of the recording is low, but I created an account with ustream.tv and we streamed the session live, and recorded it as well.  It's here if you want to give it a crack:

Open Doors and Open Minds: What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution

SPARC and Science Commons have released "Open Doors and Open Minds: What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution." The new white paper assists institutions in adopting policies that ensure the widest practical exposure for scholarly works produced, such as that adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in February. Full Press Release.

Boolify

Nothing earthshattering, but an Boolify is interesting little site that might help some conceptualize the concept of boolean operators.

Librarians, teachers and parents have told us how hard it is for students to understand web searching. Boolify makes it easier to for students to understand their web search by illustrating the logic of their search, and by showing them how each change to their search instantly changes their results. ...Its primary audience is Elementary and Middle School children, but it may find relevance with others. Ultimately, its goal is to increase learners’ ability to perform effective web searches.

Might be cool to hack it (or ask them) to use it to search a basic library database...

Digsby for Social Media Concatenation

A few weeks ago I started using Digsby on my work machine to tie in all my IM, email accounts and Twitter.  It seems quite stable, and I think it's a keeper.  Major bonus that I haven't even explored yet is that just like Meebo, it offers a flash-based embeddable chat widget that then connects to the desktop application.  I'm not sure how it shows up at my end, or if it has any limitations, so let's see, shall we?  Feel free to pop in for a quick chat if I'm online...

Windows only for now, but they say they're working on a Mac and Linux version as well.

Technorati Tags: Digsby

The evolution of my original outboard brain

Many many years ago I acquired a small digital voice recorder that soon became indispensable to me.  It was a low-capacity Voice-it, and I think I had three over the years, each with more capacity than the last.  For some reason VXI stopped making them, and now the VT-300 goes for a small fortune on eBay.  What I loved about the Voice-it was how small it was; very easily fit in the pocket, and that it was instant-on - as soon as I had a thought worth remembering it was a quick press and automatically record.  I could also listen w/o headphones or any other interface.

So when my last unit finally died I went looking for some sort of replacement and ended up with an iRiver IFP 790 which has an internal mic and accepts an external as well.  It worked well, but was a little bulky for the pocket and not very intuitive, so I pretty quickly gave up on that.

I was intrigued enough when ThinkGeek listed a credit-card-sized digital voice recorder earlier this year to buy one, and it seems to fit squarely between my other two little brains.  It's even a little smaller than the Voice-it, which is great, but it's still not quite instant on, and the controls are a little small and I'm never quite sure if it's recording or on standby.  I have to hold it right up to my ear to hear through the speaker, and the headphone jack is a proprietary size, so I can't just use the phones I have with me for my iPod.  It plugs in to the puter via USB to recharge and to transfer the WAV files, which are actually really clear; I'm pleased with that.  All of the recordings show with the same recording date, which is also a little frustrating.  So I'm carrying it and using it from time to time, but not as often as I did the Voice-it.  I'm hoping that it becomes second nature to me again; it's really useful to me to quickly record those fleeting thoughts, especially during those creative periods when they start to flow.  If anyone's curious about the unit, here's a scan of the one-page instruction sheet.

Here's how the units compare size-wise:

Right after I bought the little white one (which really is the size of about 3 credit cards stacked up) I read about this Olympus unit, but when I checked it out in a store it's still too bulky for the pocket.

I suppose if I had a cell phone that had a quick voice record feature that'd work for me, but does anyone else have any other recommendations?

SUNY Press allows you to choose - $75 or $20

Sue Polanka at No Shelf Required notes that SUNY Press is now allowing customers to download frontlist titles as PDFs for only $20. Check her link for more details.

My piled-up reading list

Getting pretty far behind on my reading list, but here are some recent titles that may also be of interest to you:

Personality traits of individuals in different specialties of librarianship DOI: 10.1108/00220410810858056
Journal of Documentation
Volume 64, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 273-286

Abstract
This paper aims to investigate whether academic reference librarians, archivists, catalogers, distance education librarians, public librarians, records managers, school librarians, special collections librarians, and systems librarians differ in personality traits measured by the Personal Style Inventory: i.e. adaptability, assertiveness, autonomy, conscientiousness, customer service orientation, emotional resilience, extraversion, openness, optimism, teamwork, tough-mindedness, visionary/operational work style, and work drive. It also aims to investigate whether personality traits of those in person-oriented library specialties differ from those in technique-oriented (technical) library specialties. Design/methodology/approach - A total of 2,075 librarians/information professionals were surveyed in non-random sample. The Personal Style Inventory is a normal personality inventory assessing important traits for the world of work. It was used in a two-step cluster analysis for the data analysis. Findings - The paper finds that distinct personality traits were associated with the different types of librarians. There was also a "unadaptive" cluster composed of individuals from all specialties. There were distinguishing traits associated with person-oriented and technique-oriented specialties. Research limitations/implications - Results were not generalizable due to the non-random sample. Gender was not collected. The research has implications for career counseling. Originality/value - There have been few studies of personality traits in library specialties, none measuring both narrow work trait and broad personality trait variables.

Effectiveness of Asynchronous Reference Services for Distance Learning Students Within Florida' s Community College System.
Community & Junior College Libraries; 2007, Vol. 14 Issue 1, p35-61, 27p DOI: 10.1300/J107v14n0106

Abstract:
The provision of equitable library services to distance learning students emerged as a critical area during the 1990s. Library services available to distance learning students included digital reference and instructional services, remote access to online research tools, database and research tutorials, interlibrary loan, and document delivery. Digital reference services appeared to be one of the more significant services proffered by academic libraries although these services were developed often without forethought to goals and assessment. Previous studies evaluated traditional and telephone reference service; however, the literature lacked studies addressing asynchronous digital reference service.

Utilizing WebQuests for Information Literacy Instruction in Distance Education. DOI:10.1300/J106v14n03&#x201703
College & Undergraduate Libraries; 2007, Vol. 14 Issue 3, p45-62, 18p

Abstract:
The increasing use of problem-based learning in higher education affords librarians new avenues for promoting the development of information literacy skills among students. Information literacy instruction supports problem-based learning activities by providing students with skills to locate relevant resources for developing solutions to these exercises. The author created three WebQuests (together with tutorials) aimed at promoting faculty-librarian partnerships to deliver information literacy instruction through a problem-based learning approach in the context of course work in a distance learning environment. These problem-based learning WebQuests can be adapted to various disciplines as well as to traditional learning environments. Lastly, these WebQuests promote the development of information literacy skills in students as well as increase their exposure to problem-based learning.

Course Reserves: Using Blackboard for E-Reserves Delivery. DOI: 10.1300/J474v18n01-09
Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserves; 2007, Vol. 18 Issue 1, p79-91, 13p

Abstract:
Jacksonville State University's (JSU) Houston Cole (HCL) Library has always provided access to required course readings through a reserve system. In the past, this service was only available in print. Now, as JSU's programs move to the online arena, the Library is making its presence felt strongly in this new online environment. Along with providing access to required course readings through an electronic reserve system, Docutek's ERes, HCL also offers faculty the option of using their course-management software, such as Blackboard, to deliver the e-reserves to their students. This article details the technical implications of adding reserves to Blackboard courses.

U. of Houston Study: Students in 'Hybrid' Course Got Better Grades
Wired Campus

Students who took the hybrid class earned, on average, a letter grade higher than students in the traditional class. A report of Mr. McFarlin’s findings, collected over the course of six semesters, was published in Advances in Physiology Education.

One tough CAPTCHA!

Wow, here's one of the tougher CAPTCHAs I've seen...: http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2008-04-07-what-hath-captcha-wrought.html


Technorati Tags: captcha

Tagging Baby Wipes (an interview with LibraryThing's Tim Spalding)

I'm about halfway through another excellent Interview with Innovators podcast with Jon Udell interviewing Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing. The title comes from a throwaway comment Tim made about why people care to tag books, but why they don't tag so much at Amazon. I've never heard Jon laugh like that before :-) I don't use LibraryThing 'cause I don't tend to actually buy a lot of books, but I think I may have to give it another go, even if it's just to generate recommendations on what to read next. A good interview, give it a listen.


Technorati Tags: LibraryThing, Libraries

The Sub Prime meltdown explained (twice)

Two different ways to explain the same weird situation - which one works better for you?

PBS NewsHour (thanks for the link Dad)
The Subprime Primer, explained by Stick Men (contains potentially offensive language)

Hope not too many of you are directly caught in this mess :-/

Podcasting in Plain English

Another CBC Podcast to recommend, or at least a specific episode: Spark podcast.  In the most recent episode they interview Lee Lefever, part of the creative force behind the ...in Plain English series of screenpapercasts.  The title of this post comes from the end of their interview where Lee is put on the spot to explain the concept of podcasting but w/o his usual props.  He did a good job.  Common Craft's latest papercast is Twitter in Plain English, and I think it does a really good job; I'm only on Twitter because other people I care about are on Twitter, and I'm curious to know what they're doing in their day-to-day lives...

CBC To Release Program DRM-Free Via BitTorrent

Cool! Not a program I would've watched ordinarily, but I'll be giving it a shot. Michael Geist points out that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation plans to freely release a high-resolution version of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister via peer-to-peer networks without any DRM restrictions. And in a Naked Conversations moment, Tessa Sproule, CBC's Executive in Charge of Digital Programming, weighs in with a comment.

On a side note, I haven't visited the CBC's home page in a while - check out all the links for podcasts and oooh, the archives. Here's a piece from December 1979 - a Buyer's Guide to Digital Watches (one model even has an alarm!)


Technorati Tags: CBC, Bittorrent

Preliminary Program for WILU 37 announced

This year, the 37th Workshop on Instruction in Library Use (WILU) is held in Kelowna, BC at UBC Okanagan, from May 14-16.  The preliminary program has just been announced.


Technorati Tags: WILU08, InfoLit

Peter Rukavina - Canada's Superpatron?

I've followed Peter Rukavina's weblog for a number of years.  Can't quite remember how I decided he was a kindred spirit - it might have been when I was researching my newly-discovered Croatian heritage and I somehow learned he are one too.  Anyway, he's a programmer geek who appreciates libraries, and from time to time comments on them.  They seem to be at the front of his brain right now though, as he posts twice about some damn good ideas / hacks to improve the service of his local (or any) library.

First up is More fun with Dynix OPAC, PHP and XML, in which he reinvents part of Library Elf and offers the PHP source code so you can do the same with your Dynix catalogue.  Wonder if it can work with Sirsi catalogues?

But even cooler, IMHO, is his next post, in which he laments the lack of an online ILL request form and suggests that libraries should implement a Digg-style recommendation system that would allow the community to vote up the requested items they'd most like to see added to the collection: Digg + Local Library Purchases. 

I love it - who's going to build it first?

Peter, do you know Ed Vielmetti?  You guys should get together, methinks!


Technorati Tags: Digg, Libraries, ILL, Dynix, Superpatron

Some Thoughts on the Future of Print

I just finished reading Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age, by Jeff Gomez.  It wasn't a terribly well-argued book, IMHO (Walt Crawford has taught me to be very wary of large numbers of global statements), but damn did it spark a copious number of questions and ideas for me.

The basic premise of the book is that it's the content, not the medium, that matters, and for the most part I agree.  Gomez posits that it's inevitable that people will shift to reading books in some electronic medium, and that publishers aren't paying enough attention to this inevitability.

I got the distinct impression that the spark for the book was ignited by the quote  from Hesse's Steppenwolf (too long to include here) Gomez uses to close the book in the afterward, which I believe kind of dilutes his entire argument by degrading the quality and utility of the delivery mechanisms around ebooks, but there you go.

I liked Gomez's explanation about why digital copies of ebooks (specifically those that wouldn't include DRM) shouldn't cost way less than their print counterparts, an opinion I've always had.  He points out that the bulk of the cost of a book isn't in its material and shipping costs, but in the costs of editing, promotion, and related quality enhancing features.  In fact Gomez suggests that people might be willing to pay more for an ebook if they truly can read it on any device, access it instantly, search it, and give it to their friends when they're done with it.  That last option seems unlikely to me, but we'll see.  Note, the cost of the Amazon Kindle edition of this book is $9.99, while the print edition is $16.47.

Reading this book made me think back to the minor brouhaha over Kevin Kelly's 2006 New York Times article, Scan this Book.  That argument seemed to mostly be around the different ways fiction and non-fiction are read, a topic that is briefly addressed in Gomez's book.  I think arguments probably really should centre around these genres though; I think this book would've been much stronger had it made the arguments around non-fiction exclusively.  But it wouldn't sell as well then...

It also reminded me of the innovative things O'Reilly media is attempting with many of its offerings, including the ability to buy PDFs for a little less than the print, and individual chapters (DRM-free) for $3.99.  See for instance the store page for last month's recommended title, The Myths of Innovation.  And also tweaked my memory of an article from Technology Review in 2005 where Jason Epstein described what must have become the Espresso POD machine.

And I'm afraid this part may get lost down here at the bottom of the post, but nicely tying all these thoughts together for me was Larry Lessig's 2007 talk at the TED conference on How creativity is being strangled by the law:

(incidentally, the TED conference is held in Monterey, CA, and I recognize the stage Lessig is standing on as the Steinbeck Forum in the Portola Plaza; I spoke on that same stage during Internet Librarian in 2006 - I don't suppose I can say I shared a stage with Larry Lessig, can I? ;-)

Some other related stuff I came across while reading the book, if you want to dive deeper:

• The Slow Reading blog, by John Miedema.
• 30 mostly spurious benefits of ebooks, from Off the Mark, in response to:
• Read an e-book week (March 2-8, 2008)
• I guess I should really re-subscribe to if:book!

First Impressions of ScreenFlow

Heh, I forgot we now have a machine in our office with Leopard installed, so this AM I sat down for 20 minutes with ScreenFlow.  It's pretty nice, and the editing features are really slick.  Very nice callouts and zooms and mirror effects.  But no text can be added, which is a really big bummer.  Nor arrows.  And I'm sure you can add additional clips to compensate, but I didn't see any way to add a title screen during my inaugural run.  It was stable for me on one try though.  I only saw variants of .mov files as the output, but you can upload those to YouTube or Viddler for conversion.  More when I have more time, including some sample screencasts.


Technorati Tags: ScreenFlow, OSX, Screencasting

Harvard faculty votes to post research online

"Harvard University's arts and science faculty voted unanimously yesterday to post their scholarly articles and research online, where they would be available for free to the public, despite concerns that the move would affect the quality of research." - full story from the Boston Globe.

Some interesting quotes in the article, like this one from a VP at the Association of American Publishers, "This is a vendor-customer dispute over price," Adler said. "It doesn't surprise us that all libraries feel their budgets are far less than desirable, but that's a reality the educational community faces."


Technorati Tags: Open_Access, Harvard

CANHEIT 2008 Call for Participation

The Canadian Higher Education and Information Technology Conference (CANHEIT) is a unique event, focusing on those IT issues that are of Canadian significance and of primary interest to universities and community colleges. This annual conference brings together senior administrators, managers, and staff who are responsible for the management and evolution of their campus information systems, learning systems, and infrastructure.

This year, the University of Calgary has the privilege of hosting the sixth annual CANHEIT conference to be held in Calgary, Alberta from June 15 to 18, 2008. "On the EDGE" is the theme for CANHEIT 2008.  It allows for fellow technological trailblazers to share their adventures, and help each other to safely traverse new frontiers in the field of Information Technologies.  It is our hope that “On the EDGE” will encourage innovative thought and discussion among IT colleagues at CANHEIT 2008.

We invite you to present at the CANHEIT 2008 conference. There are three presentation formats to suit your topic and style: standard presentations, panel sessions, and "birds-of-a-feather" (BoF) forums. First-time presenters are always welcome!

The program streams are:
- Security and Infrastructure
- Innovative Technologies and Methods
- Support Models in Today’s Environment
- Management and Strategy
- Research and Learning

To submit your proposal, please visit the CANHEIT 2008 website: http://canheit.ucalgary.ca/proposalsubmission

To review the proposal guidelines see http://canheit.ucalgary.ca/guidelines

The deadline for submitting your proposal abstract (maximum of 100 words) is Friday, February 29, 2008.

Additional Conference Information

- Conference Registration will begin on March 15, 2008.  Check the website for further details: http://canheit.ucalgary.ca/registration
- If you are interested in volunteering at the 2008 CANHEIT Conference, please send an email to canheit.2008@ucalgary.ca

Thank you, from your CANHEIT 2008 Program Committee.

Distant/Remote Librarian Employment?

Dear Hive Mind,  I just got an interesting question which I was unable to answer, and wondered if any of you had any suggestions.  The paraphrased question is,

"I have an MLIS, but reside several hours away from the closest university.  I remember hearing about these remote librarian employment opportunities while in Library School. I first went to the ALA website, but no luck. Do you have any  suggestions on entering this field and identifying the colleges, universities and possibly corporations who employ our services?"

I know some big DE schools have librarians in specific off-site locations, but is anyone aware of anyone who hires librarians regardless of their physical location?

Thanks!

EZProxy and OvidSP Round 2 - Removing the Tip Box

Last month I wrote about how to use EZProxy's find and replace feature to change the unhelpful text on a database tab to something more helpful:EZProxy Find and Replace: when the vendor says they can't...  Well the Medical Librarians at U of C had another request; to see if we could get rid of that Tip Box that appears after a slight delay.

The tip box is annoying because the delay in its appearing seems to contribute to the jumpiness of the screen - which is the real problem. There's a delay somewhere and I've seen my students use the system and boxes they tick, or in entering the search strategy, keystrokes don't register as something happens behind the scene and the whole screen jumps around. Tip box or not, they'll have to fix that. I'm hearing it as the #1 complaint on the med librarians' listservs.

I asked Ovid tech support if it could be removed, and they said sorry, nope, even though that's requested even more than the tab name change was!

So again, EZProxy to the rescue.  This one's not quite as elegant, as I was trying to wrap it up on Friday afternoon, but I did some hunting and pecking and learned that there's a javascript being called (after a delay) that's responsible for the Tip Box.  Break that script, and voila, no more Tip Box.

So this time in your EZProxy config file you can use:

T Ovid (or whatever we're calling it)
U http://www.ovid.com (whatever)
DJ ovid.com  (whatever)
Find advertising.js   tips01342.js
Replace advertisin.js   tips0134x.js

Told you it was kinda ugly, but basically we're renaming the called javascript to one that doesn't exist, and thus it doesn't get called.  We tried replacing it with a blank (nothing) but it didn't work, so as soon as we found something that did, we stuck with it.

Here are the before and after pix:

Before:

After:

And no more screen jumping.

Innovation in a book about Innovation

OK, I'm sure it's not really an innovation, but it was the first time I'd ever seen it, and it makes so much sense!  I just finished reading The myths of Innovation, by Scott Berkun, and instead of offering the standard semi-useful bibliography, at the end of this book he provides a ranked bibliography.  The bibliography shows the books from which he took the most notes first.  What a great idea!

It's a really quick read, only 150 pages of actual text, and it did a really good job of sparking some ideas as I was reading.  The colophon is not to be missed either ;-)

Technorati Tags: Innovation, Berkun, bibliographies

What's actually missing from the Mac Screencasting options

...is the ability to edit the recording.  Specifically adding callouts; arrows, highlights, text overlay...  that sort of stuff.  I now have copies of both iShowU and SnapzProX, and they both do a really nice job of recording the screen.  Lots of variables like size of capture, frame rate, sound or not, but neither offers the ability to edit the recording, other than to pop it in to Quicktime Pro or iMovie to add titles, transitions, or trim and cut.  Is anyone aware of a Mac product that allows a .mov file to be annotated with highlights, text boxes, arrows, etc?  Can't wait for Techsmith to step in here...

KBPublisher FAQ database at our library

Today we launched our new FAQ database here at the U of Calgary.  We're now using KBPublisher, an open-source product introduced to me by Chad Boeninger at Ohio U.  In addition to being searchable, and thus way better than one of those long lists with anchor tags, the neatest feature in the whole thing is that should someone decide they do want to go ahead and submit a question, as they're typing in the form KBPublisher watches the words they type and before they can hit the submit button, suggests answers that might actually already exist to answer the question.  If it's wrong, they can still go ahead and submit.

Here's a quick overview of our implementation:


Technorati Tags: KBPublisher, FAQs

JungleDisk for online storage

Does anyone have any experience with JungleDisk for online storage?  Really would love to hear some real-world feedback.

Thanks!


Technorati Tags: JungleDisk, AmazonS3

Alchemist author increases sales by pirating his own book

Neat stuff!

"Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.  He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales."

Full post at TorrentFreak.


Technorati Tags: P2P, Books, Sharing