The Distant Librarian

Free And Premium Video Hosting Platforms – Best Of

Looking for somewhere to host your videos or screencasts besides YouTube? Hongkiat.com has a nice annotated list of 19 video hosting services for you to take a look at. 

How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box

A preprint from College & Research Libraries is well worth your read, even if you're not a webmaster: How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box (from NCSU, Cory Lown, Tito Sierra, and Josh Boyer)

Abstract

Academic libraries are turning increasingly to unified search solutions to simplify search and discovery of library resources. Unfortunately, very little research has been published on library user search behavior in single search box environments. This study examines how users search a large public university library using a prominent, single search box on the library website. The article examines two semesters of real-world data, totaling nearly 1.4 million transactions. Findings include that unified library search is about more than the catalog and articles, though these predominate. Additionally, a small number of the most popular search queries accounts for a disproportionate amount of the overall queries. Also discussed are the merits of ongoing evaluation of library user search behavior.

(it's not nearly as long as you'd think upon initial download; the last half of the PDF are the images and a couple of pages of references)

Call for nominations - Springhare Innovation in Academic Libraries Award

The Academic Division of SLA is very proud to present for the second year an award for academic libraries, sponsored by Springshare, Inc., creator of LibGuides!

This annual award recognizes a new program or service that demonstrates an innovative approach to academic librarianship. Please feel free to distribute to all innovative academic libraries you may know.

Award
A certificate and a $500 US award, donated by Springshare, are presented during the Academic Library Division Business Meeting at the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference. The winning library is also recognized through the Academic Division’s various public relations outlets.

Criteria
Projects nominated for the award should demonstrate recognized innovation, creativity and quality. Nominated programs or services can have been developed in any facet of the library’s activities, including but not limited to:

• reference and research assistance;
• information literacy and library instruction;
• collection development;
• cataloging and/or technical services;
• space planning; or
• marketing and public relations

Eligibility
Academic or research libraries in a higher education institution are eligible to receive the award. Recipients must have implemented their program or service in an academic or research library no more than two years prior to the nomination submission deadline. Nominated libraries do not have to have a SLA or an SLA-Academic Division member on staff.

Submissions
Nominations must include a 500-1000 words description of the innovative program or service and must demonstrate usage and/or success of implementation using accepted assessment methods. Include any other supporting print or electronic documentation that would assist the committee in evaluating the purpose, content, impact, and innovative aspects of the program or service.

Send nominations to the Academic Division Awards Committee Chair, Catherine Lavallée-Welch, Director, University of South Florida Polytechnic Library, clw@poly.usf.edu.

Note: Electronic submissions are required.

Submission Deadline: April 1st, 2012

Thanks for nothing, big guys (UofT and UWO cave to Access Copyright)

This made a big splash up here in Canada last week, but then seemed to quickly quiet down, and I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong spots. Read many of the details on the Excess Copyright blog, but as Howard Knopf points out, "In an astonishing development that has caught all but a handful by surprise, U. of T. and Western have signed copyright deals with Access Copyright that appear to be an early and complete capitulation to an important battle over the costs and parameters of access to knowledge in Canadian post-secondary institutions."

Down in the comments someone writes, "I actually sit on the Access Copyright Working Group for Western. No one that I know on that committee knew anything about this agreement. It also comes hot on the heels of the entire student body (undergraduate and graduate students alike) voting to opt out of the Access Copyright Tariff. There are many, many questions about the deal and the entire process that need to be made public."

See also Sam Trosow's post on the subject.

Does anyone have words from the institutions about why they've caved like this? 

CFP: Fourth International M-Libraries Conference

Found onthe m-libraries blog, information about the call for papers for the 4th M-Libraries Conference, to be held at The Open University on 24th-26th September, 2012. The Open University is headquartered in Milton Keynes, UK.

Please submit your abstracts (up to 300 words) by 15^th of March 2012 to m-libraries-conference@open.ac.uk

CFP: Extend and Unify: Outreach and Education for Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy Programs

Call for Proposals: Book chapters on scholarly communication and information literacy
Title: Extend and Unify: Outreach and Education for Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy Programs
Book editors: Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University and Merinda Kaye Hensley, Instructional Services Librarian/Coordinator, Scholarly Commons at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Estimated publication date: ALA 2013 Midwinter Conference
Publisher: Association of College and Research Libraries.This book will be published in print, available for purchase in various e-book formats, and available as a free downloadable book.

Editors of the forthcoming ACRL publications book, Extend and Unify: Outreach and Education for Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy Programs, seek proposals for chapters from skilled librarians or

others involved in education around scholarly communication issues who have researched strategies and/or implemented programs on the intersections between scholarly communication (SC) issues and information literacy (IL). This book aims to create a roadmap for librarians to integrate scholarly communication and information literacy programs through instruction, outreach and other educative opportunities. Written for practicing librarians who wish to build a toolkit for integrating scholarly communication issues into information literacy and vice versa, this book will provide essays, case studies, best practices, lesson plans and outlines, and other material for building collaboration and promoting discussion on scholarly communication issues in libraries and in the academy.

Potential topics include:

• teaching strategies for addressing scholarly communication issues by population - undergraduates, graduate students, staff, administration, faculty as well as by academic discipline 
• examples of instruction and outreach through embedded librarianship and reference work 
• case studies detailing SC/IL program alignment, collaboration, partnerships between SC and IL librarians, student publishing, campus or discipline-specific research conferences 
• classroom-based, curricular integration for undergrads or graduate students which could include IL session outlines, lesson plans, outreach examples 
• essays focusing on educating students, faculty and/or staff, possibly by discipline, on specific issues e.g., author rights, copyright/Creative Commons, OA/public access or specific types of scholarly or creative work, e.g., data, images, performances, music, multimedia, etc. 
• addressing perspectives of faculty, staff, administration including buy-in, engagement, conversational openings, and educational programs 
• assessment of SC/IL programming and outreach efforts

Please note: We are looking for diverse perspectives on these issues across types of higher education institutions including community colleges, liberal arts colleges/universities, ARL institutions, etc.

Target audience: The target audience for this publication is both librarians who are responsible for instruction, information literacy, and/or scholarly communication; liaison librarians and/or bibliographers who are responsible for outreach and education of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff in any discipline, and program coordinators for both SC and IL.

Submission procedure and timeline: Authors are invited to submit proposal by March 2, 2012. Proposals should include author name(s), institutional affiliation, proposed chapter title, 2-page summary of proposed chapter and a current CV. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by April 2, 2012. Full chapters (4,000+ words) are expected to be submitted by June 30, 2012. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a blind review basis. Chapters should be unique to this publication - no previously published or simultaneously submitted material should be included. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

All inquiries and proposals should be emailed by March 2, 2012 to scil.book@gmail.com.

Stephanie Davis-Kahl
Illinois Wesleyan University

Merinda Kaye Hensley
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lifehacker's best screencasting and screen capture apps

Over the past several weeks, Lifehacker has listed what they believe to be the best screencasting and screen capture tools for both Windows and Mac. In each post they cover the tool's Features, Where it excels, Where it falls short, and The Competition. Here they are:

• Best Screen capture tool for Windows (I had never heard of the winner, PicPick)
• Best Screen capture tool for Mac OSX (I love Skitch, but wish it had just a few more presets and callouts) For some strange reason the Skitch website says the iOS version is "coming soon", but you can (and should) grab it for the iPad already.
• Best Screencast tool for Windows (No surprise there - remember your educational pricing!)
• Best Screencast tool for Mac OSX (also a solid win, though I was surprised Camtasia:Mac didn't even show up under the alternatives...)

Canadian Learning Commons Conference - registration now open

Looking for an excuse to come check out our awesome new library building? Why not register for the 6^th Canadian Learning Commons Conference, to be held here at the University of Calgary, May 7-9, 2012. The theme of the conference is New Media, New Fluencies and Life Skills Development: Preparing Learners for the 21st Century, and you'll find the list of sessions here. Oh, and just 'cause it says "Canadian" in the title doesn't mean you guys south of the border can't come - Calgary should be pretty nice in early May (but no promises).

The importance of sweater vests and screencasting

Over at Library Voice, Chad Boeninger pops out of hibernation with an excellent post titled How I make instructional library web videos and screencasts and how you can too. In this post Chad distills his six years of experience with screencasting by answering the following questions:

1. Why Web Video?
   
2. What type of content?
3. How much time does it take?
4. How much time is saved?
5. How long should my videos be?
6. Script or no script?
7. Which software for screencasting?
8. How do I record my voice?
9. Where do you record your videos?
10. Which resolution?
11. Why and How do you add the video of yourself in the videos?
12. To edit or not?
13. How do I know when my video is done?
14. Where should I upload?
15. But you don’t use just use YouTube, do you?
16. How do I promote my videos?
17. What else should I know?

Yes, it's a long post :-)

Tips for making mobile-friendly screencasts

Over at The Screening Room, the blog to support the Mac-only screencasting product, ScreenFlow, you'll find a recent post with some guidelines for creating screencasts optimized for the iPhone and iPad. Note though that down in the comments you'll find some corrected information, so you should probably go with those figures.

While this post talks about ScreenFlow and iOS devices, the information obviously can be applied to other tools and other devices.

ebrary launches an iOS app

Well I was gonna give a complete review, but got called away for the afternoon, but you should should go check out the new ebrary iOS app (links to the Cdn iTunes store, so YMMV). I can tell you that it works pretty well, though is a little light on the feature set. You'll need an Adobe Digital Editions account, and will need to have an existing ebrary account set up from the full platform website. Here's ebrary's brief introduction to the app.

I'll tell you what though, it's sure a lot easier than the initial download option :-)

Mentoring a New Distance Education Librarian

A newish book popped up for me on an ego alert, and I learned that Mentoring in Librarianship: Essays on Working with Adults and Students to Further the Profession contains a chapter specifically on Mentoring a New Distance Education Librarian (it's chapter 27, written by Annie Knight). It's also available on Amazon, where you can search inside the book to decide if it's right for you.

2011- my year in reading

I started the first couple of weeks of 2011 on vacation, and was reading books on my iPhone at the time. I thought it'd be interesting to track how many books I read in 2011, something I'd never done before. I switched to reading on an iPad 2 when I got one in April, and did all my ereading either in the Kobo app, or the Overdrive app when borrowing books from Calgary Public Library. As I mentioned, I don't have numbers from any earlier years, but my strong sense is that I read more books this past year than any other in my adult life, in large part because of the ease of grabbing another title to read RIGHT NOW from an ebookstore, or CPL. Hope you find something interesting in here too. I'm not going to give you the actual titles read, most of which were some variant on SciFi or fantasy :-)

2011 by the numbers

• Total number of books read: 33
• Average number of books read per month: 2.75
• Total number of pages: 17,738
• Average number of pages per month: 1,478

 http://db.tt/aBJl8agV

Incidentally, I'm composing this on the iPad with charts pasted in from the Numbers app. I'm not at all sure the images will actually go through, but we'll see in a moment...

Nope, they didn't, so here's take 2.

OverDrive Posts Public Comment Apparently in Response to Librarian in Black Post

A quick followup to my post earlier this month noting Sarah Houghton-Jan's (LiB) rant about Overdrive's different catalogues. TeleRead point out that OverDrive has in fact clarified their position, but without making any mention of Sarah's post, which is likely the cause of theirs. It'd be great to hear a debate between these two parties :-)

Introducing the Top Ten Most Influential Bloggers | E-Learning Council

via www.elearningcouncil.com

I actually don't follow any of these folks, but if you're looking to pick up some new feeds, this might be a good place to start! (none of them appear to be librarians)

Oh, and I'm trying to close browser tabs by the end of the year, so a few more posts to follow!