The Distant Librarian

Trends in e-learning: What does it mean for libraries?

From Stephen's Lighthouse:

Upcoming free SirsiDynix Institute Event

Trends in e-learning: What does it mean for libraries?
Date : May 21, 2008
Start Time : 11 a.m. Eastern
Length : 1 hour

While in some sectors e-learning may seem "old hat", the world of e-learning continues to change at a rapid pace. With newer technologies such as mobile devices, technologies such as Second Life, litigation in the e-learning vendor arena, and evolving standards, e-learning remains a dynamic area that we have to keep our eye on. And while many libraries have fully developed e-learning environments, many are just getting beginning to explore the possibilities. This workshop will focus on issues related to how availability and interoperability are changing the way e-learning is being delivered as well how developments in open source and open access as well as social networking are changing the way e-learning occurs.

Frank Cervone —Professor of Education and Director of the Library, Information, and Media Studies program, Chicago State University

The author of numerous articles and four books on topics related to information technology, he writes a regular column for OCLC Systems and Services: International Digital Library Perspectives and has been an invited speaker at library conferences in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and Brazil. He was a member of the NISO working group on metasearch and is the past chair of the CARLI (Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois) Learning Objects Task Force. He has a MSEd with a specialization in online teaching and learning from the California State University, an MA in Information Technology Management from DePaul University and a Ph.D. in Management and Information Systems from Northcentral University.

Register here.

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.

Survey on the use of IM Widgets

Danielle Dennie at Concordia University asks for your assistance in a survey she's running on your use of Instant Messaging Widgets:

Dear all,

I will be conducting a study to learn about and compare usage of IM widgets on online subject/research guides from different North American academic libraries. I would like to see the types of users that use IM widgets on a librarians subject guide and the type of questions that are asked. The survey is short (it should take no longer than 5 minutes to complete). Here is the link to the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Lk5nkzDRP_2bUOh2NEdgU2YQ_3d_3d

If you (or someone you know) have an IM widget on your subject guide, I would appreciate it if you could take the time to fill out the short survey.

Thanking you in advance,
Danielle Dennie


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Danielle Dennie
Biology, Chemistry & Biochemistry and Physics Librarian
Concordia University
Vanier Library Building
7141 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montréal (QC) H4B 1R6
Office: VL-127-3
Tel: 514.848.2424 ext. 5237
Email: danielle.dennie at concordia.ca

Technorati Tags: IM, Reference, Widgets, Surveys

Survey of Library Services for Distance Learning Programs

Primary Research Group is about to release the results of their Survey of Library Services for Distance Learning Programs. I participated in this survey and am supposed to receive a free copy - will let you know if it's worth buying, but here's what it covers.

This 145 page report gives extensive data, broken out by size and type of college, for public and private colleges, and for U.S. and Non-U.S. libraries. Among the more than 500 tables of data presented is information about: use of real time chat and virtual reference services for distance learners; percentage of libraries that offer special classes for distance learners; future plans to offer information literacy courses to distance learners; policies on providing web pages, blogs or listservs that specifically serve the needs of distance learners; number of interactive online tutorials provided to distance learners; state of relations between the library and distance learning instructors; percentage of libraries with equivalent of library orientation program for distance learners; the role that libraries play in distance learning orientation; percentage of libraries that maintain agreements with other colleges to offer library services to their students; percentage of libraries with an official liason to the distance learning program; percentage of libraries with a full time position devoted to distance learning; staff size for library distance learning staffs; policies on line item in the library budget for distance learning; evaluation of distance learners use of the library; evaluation of distance learners information literacy skills; distance learner attitudes towards the library; assessment of the reference needs of distance learners; electronic reserve policies for distance learners; spending on shipping costs to serve distance learners; library’s primary means of shipping books and other materials to distance learners; library staff responsible for serving distance learners; provision of remote assistance by the library in how to use the courseware management system; level of access to library databases provided to distance learners; copyright issues; annual salary of librarians devoted to distance learning.

Sounds pretty interesting!

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

What's up with Amazon's Search Inside this Book?!?

Search Engine Showdown posts that Amazon appears to be dropping the Search Inside this Book feature!  And the end of the post they note the apparent partial reappearance of the links, but when I went in today, while I could find plenty of logos on the book covers, I couldn't search inside books that I had previously been able to.  Anyone hear any official scoop?  The publisher sign-up page is still there...  I'd sure hate for this to go :-/


Technorati Tags: Amazon

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

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.

Criteria for tenure and promotion: a review of practices among members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries

Just posted to our institutional repository is a brief report (13 pages plus an appendix) entitled Criteria for tenure and promotion: a review of practices among members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries.  The abstract reads as follows:

This study reviews current practice relating to tenure and promotion to the highest rank by examining those libraries closest to our situation, the members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. A search of the literature indicates that reviews of tenure and promotion criteria and practices for Canadian academic libraries are rare. In 1995 Gloria Leckie and Jim Brett undertook a review of the key terms and conditions for librarians found in collective agreements of libraries belonging to the Canadian Association of University Teachers. Their findings indicate that practices vary widely with no consistent approach across the board. A number of factors exerting upward pressure on criteria and promotion for University of Calgary librarians led me to investigate whether this upward pressure was a widespread phenomenon, and therefore whether criteria and processes for tenure and promotion had subsequently been affected. Results from this investigation are compared to the initial 1995 survey. For comparison purposes, a literature survey was conducted and findings are summarized.

Technorati Tags: Tenure, Libraries, Canada

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

Ovid responds to customer desires on tab naming

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how to use EZProxy to change the default wording on the tabs in the new OvidSP interface.  Seems we weren't alone in desiring a better name for the Ovid Syntax tab, and Ovid reports that on Friday, Feb 1 they're going to automagically switch the name of that tab to Advanced Ovid Search for everyone.  You can of course still use the EZProxy trick to rename it anything you want at all.  I'm looking forward to April 1 ;-)


Technorati Tags: OvidSP

Online Workshop: Building a Community that Values Academic Integrity

You might be interested in this online workshop from the Center for Intellectual Property at UMUC ($150)

Building a Community that Values Academic Integrity
Dates: February 25 - March 7, 2008 (early registration by February 8 )
Moderators: Gary Pavela, M.A., J.D., Director of Judicial Programs and Student Ethical Development, University of Maryland -- College Park & Kimberly Bonner, J.D., Executive Director, Center for Intellectual Property, University of Maryland University College

Studies show that establishing a community of shared academic values fosters academic integrity in the classroom. However, establishing that community may be more difficult when students adopt the values of a digital "remix" culture that challenges the traditional understanding of authorship. How do institutions foster academic integrity values in light of changing cultural norms? Are there special techniques and tools required? Are the best tools to use in preventing academic dishonesty "technical" like Turnitin.com? And are there additional legal and ethical issues involved when using technical measures to prevent academic dishonesty?

Goals for the course:

• Examine faculty and student attitudes about academic integrity
• Examine several strategies to foster academic integrity and discourage dishonesty in teaching and learning
• Evaluate the importance of building trust in academic environments and identify key factors in achieving and sustaining trust online and face-to-face
• Review some of the currently available online tools helpful in discouraging academic dishonesty
• Evaluate the legal issues involved in using those tools to foster academic integrity
• Consider the educational tools that can be used to remediate students after academic dishonesty occurs

Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online

A new book from ACRL: Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online.

Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online describes significant and innovative online instruction programs in a straightforward, narrative way, focusing on the development, implementation, and assessment of each institution’s online information literacy instruction effort. By pooling the experiences of a variety of institutions and programs, this book provides a bank of knowledge that serves as a resource to other institutions currently teaching IL online and a guide to those contemplating it.

Price: $48.00
ALA Member Price: $43.20
278 pages
Softcover
ISBN-13: 978-0-8389-8444-4
ISBN-10: 0-8389-8444-4
© 2007

TOC is here (I co-wrote a chapter on WISPR with my colleagues Shauna Rutherford and Alix Hayden).

EZProxy Find and Replace: when the vendor says they can't...

Earlier this week we switched to the new interface for OvidSP (an attempt, I believe, at integrating the Silver Platter (SP) platform into Ovid).  It's nice, but the default configuration includes a Basic Search table, an Ovid Syntax tab, and a SilverPlatter Syntax tab.  Ovid Syntax and SilverPlatter Syntax don't mean anything to our users, and in fact we didn't even include the latter in our configuration.  But we wanted Ovid to change the text so the Ovid Syntax tab instead read Advanced Search.  We were told that it was a popular request, but that they couldn't do it right now.

Meh.  That's no good at all for our users.  I remembered that EZProxy has a Find and Replace feature, but hadn't really explored it yet.  Found this page on the Unofficial EZProxy Support Wiki and was off to the races.  Making the tab say what we wanted it to say took all of two lines of code to be added to the EZProxy configuration file for Ovid:

T Ovid (or whatever we're calling it)
U http://www.ovid.com (whatever)
DJ ovid.com  (whatever)
Find Ovid Syntax
Replace Advanced Search

So if you can find the T, U, and DJ lines in your Ovid (now or soon to be OvidSP for you too) you can stick in the two lines of red code and find that all is magically well.  Of course this means you can rename the tab whatever you want, and can rename other parts of the page as well.  Could be fun come April Fool's Day!  The other neat thing about this fix is that should Ovid change the tab themselves, our display will simply revert to their true and native display because EZProxy simply won't find the text string "Ovid Syntax" to replace!

So here are the before and after shots:

Have fun!

Survey of Library Services for Distance Learning Students

Posted to the Web4Lib mailing group:

Primary Research Group (http://www.primaryreserch.com/) is planning to publish a survey of college libraries that provide library services to distance learning students. This survey is open to accredited colleges from all countries. Participants receive a free PDF copy of the estimated 100-page report. Data is broken out by type and size of institution for easier benchmarking. Participants are listed but responses are confidential. To take the 40-question survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=yX6WslbR6pWYfSaTsDC0Qg_3d_3d

James Moses, Research Analyst
Primary Research Group Inc.

Took me about 10 minutes to complete...

Followup on Facebook Advertising

A month ago I offered my initial thoughts on the University of Calgary's experiment with placing social ads within Facebook.  Here are the results of our second round of advertising, where we switched the content of the ads to see if students seemed to be responding more to the type of ad or the content of the ad.

As a quick refresher, we were trying to generate interest in our subscriptions to ebrary and Refworks.  Check the first post for all the background on the two types of ads and the bidding process.

Based on my experience with the first round, I set my initial bids at $1.00 per CPM and CPC and left them there the entire run (Dec 1-12).  We ended up spending a little more money this time, $40.61 vs $30.66 last time.

Once again, we paid about 3 times more for the ads on the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ad type than we did on the CPC (cost per click) ad type.  This time we got more clicks on the CPC ad than we did on the CPM ad, which is opposite what happened the first time around.  This suggests to me that students may have been responding more to the message of the ad, which is a good thing.  They seemed to like the ebrary message more than the Refworks message.

Average cost per click was significantly higher on the CPM campaign - it cost us $3.51 for each click, vs $0.60 for each click we got while displaying the CPC ad.  In both our campaigns, the CPC ad type was more cost effective.  However, we got in front of more eyeballs with the CPM ad type - 80,000 vs 55,000.  Interesting to note that these numbers are almost identical to the numbers we got when running the first ad campaign, even though with that one I had started out much lower on the bid amounts.

I don't seem to be able to access the fancy graphs now that the campaign has been over for a few weeks, which is too bad.  I see no way to back up the timeline for that type of report.  I made my own in Excel, but they're not quite as pretty.  This is the number of clicks received on the Refworks CPM campaign:

And here's the number of clicks received on the CPC campaign:

You may recall the reason for that big spike on Dec 5th is that I actually forgot to set the initial bid amount to $1.00 until that day, so we received a big jump in the number of times the ad displayed (we'd gotten 1,600 displays on the first 4 days of the campaign, when I inadvertently left the CPC bid at $0.10 and then 20,000 displays on the 5th, when I set it at $1.00, where I'd originally intended.)

You can see that the clicks do tend to tail off over time when the bid amount remains constant.  It seems that in order to ensure your ad continues to display often over the entire course of your campaign (and thus generate the clickthroughs) you may need to up your bid every 4 days or so. There's a definite correlation between how often the ad is displayed and how many clicks were generated, as one might generally expect.

Here are all the numbers in one place: (click through for bigger size)

So would we do it again?  Sure, why not?  Grand total spending on about a month's worth of advertising for our roughly 10,000 students on Facebook was just over $71.  For that money we displayed the two ads over 270,000 times, and generated a total of 55 clickthroughs. Certainly not a huge success ratio, and more than $1.00 per click, but we got our message in front of the online students we wanted to reach. I haven't yet compared stats on the two products to see if general usage went up during the campaign periods.

What do you think, was it worth the money?

LITA Distance Learning Interest Group at ALA Midwinter

From the DLIG Blog:

You are invited to the LITA Distance Learning Interest Group discussion!

Saturday, January 12, 10:30-12:00pm, Courtyard Downtown, Salon III #3 on the map (PDF).

The LITA Distance Learning Interest Group will meet at the 2008 ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia to discuss current issues in distance learning and some of the exciting things the interest group has planned. Here are a few of the things we’d like to discuss:

• Our program, If we don’t call it distance learning, does it exist?, for Annual 2008.
• A possible LITA webinar on distance learning issues.
• A possible online course.
• Uses for our blog at http://dlig.wordpress.com/ .
• General issues in distance learning such as integrating library resources with course management systems.

Are there other topics you’d like to discuss?  Please feel free to email Karen Wetzel or Lauren Pressley and we’ll add them to our list.

All are invited! Please bring your experiences and ideas to share in an informal setting. We hope that you will join us for a lively and useful discussion.

Technorati Tags: ALA, DLIG, LITA

Canadian universities’ resource sharing agreement extends from coast to coast

There are definitely advantages to working in a country with a smallish number of universities...

Toronto, Ontario: Effective January 2, 2008, Canadian university faculty, students and staff will now be supported by one Resource Sharing Agreement amongst institutions. The new agreement will extend standardized reciprocal interlibrary loan / document delivery privileges across Canada.

Read the full press release here:http://coppul.blogspot.com/2007/12/canadian-universities-resource-sharing.html

Technorati Tags: COPPUL

InfoLit with a sense of humour

The University of Alberta Augustana Library has made their award-winning DVD, It Changed the Way I Do Research - Period: Augustana Talks Information Literacy, available for free online.  Here's a promo teaser from YouTube:

This isn't something to show to your students; it's much more a multimedia explanation of how the InfoLit program runs at Augustana, but it's done in a really fun style - kudos to student narrator and co-writer Kyle Harland!

This 30 minute video (DVD) documents and promotes the vision of Information Literacy at Augustana and the various components of Augustana's Information Literacy Program. These components include 21 for-credit discipline-specific Information Literacy courses embedded into the curriculum, a variety of assessment practices, an annual Information Literacy workshop for faculty and librarians, and Information Literacy Awards for students and faculty.

If you do download the entire 30-minute program, be sure to catch the Information Literacy song 24-minutes in.

Technorati Tags: InfoLit, Augustana

You think you've got it rough?

Going the Extra Mile: Supporting Distance Education at University of Alaska Fairbanks, Suzan Hahn, Lisa Lehman, Rheba Dupras

Abstract:
The Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has a long history of supporting distance education through state-of-the-art, remote access services. Harsh climate conditions (heavy snowfall and icing, high winds, and extreme temperatures), rugged terrain, limited road and telephone systems, and permafrost that prevents the installation of communications networks, all contribute to the challenge of delivering distance education. This article describes and explains the library's services while discussing the challenges of providing information access to a diverse student population living in an area covering over 500,000 square miles.

Journal of Access Services : Service Innovations for 21st Century Libraries Volume: 4 Issue: 1/2 Page Range: 1 - 28 ISSN: 1536-7967 Pub Date: 10/31/2007 doi:10.1300/J204v04n01_01

Wetpaint Education Wikis Are Now Ad-free!

I really like the interface and options at wetpaint, one of the free wiki-hosting companies.  Like most free services, they embed ads on pages that you create.  Except now, if you create an education-based wiki with them, you can email them and they'll remove the ads!  Visit http://www.wetpaint.com/category/Education--Ad-Free for more details.  They say:

Who qualifies for an ad-free wiki?
The following uses of education wikis qualify for ad-free status:

• Middle/High School, University, and Grad School Classrooms (ages 13+)
• Group projects and assignments given by a teacher as part of a class curriculum
• Dissertations, portfolios, and other displays of students’ work in school
• Wikis created by educators to connect with parents

But I've received two separate confirmations that they'll likely consider library use as an educational use, so get out there, create your wetpaint wiki, and then email them to turn off the ads!


Technorati Tags: wetpaint, ads, wikis, education, libraries

2008 Off-Campus Library Services Conference Scholarship

The Thirteenth Off-Campus Library Services Conference will be held in Salt Lake City on April 23-25.  The conference is offering a comprehensive scholarship to a librarian or prospective librarian who meets the following requirements:

• has never attended an Off-Campus Library Services Conference
• must either be a library science student interested in distance education or a librarian who has worked less than two years with off-campus students.
• must prepare a presentation and paper about a current off-campus/ distance learning topic. The       presentation will be a fifty-five minute session including 10 minutes for questions.  Written           papers must have text (exclusive of graphs, charts, or references) over five pages in length and be formatted according to the APA Style Manual.  They should contain a reference list that shows you have researched your topic.  The paper will be included in the published proceedings.

The scholarship includes:

• Free conference registration
• Five meals
• A $600 check for travel and room expenses

To qualify, recreate and complete the form below in Word and email it as an attachment to connie.hildebrand@cmich.edu by January 15, 2008.  Winners will be selected by the Program Advisory Board of the Off-Campus Library Services Conference based on the quality of the proposed presentation and benefit to the individual.  The winners will be notified on February 1, 2008

For more information about the conference visit the conference web site at http://ocls.cmich.edu/conference

Name:__________________________________________________Institution:_______________________________________________

Address:___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Phone:_______________________________                  

Email:______________________________________________________

            _____Student                     _____Librarian with less than 2 years experience

What year did or will you graduate from a Library Science program? __________
How do you feel attending this conference will benefit you?
Title of your proposed presentation:
Objective of your proposed presentation:
Abstract (500 words or less):


Technorati Tags: OCLSC2008

Meredith on Online learning and its impact on public libraries

Meredith Farkas has a lengthy post discussing the problems of distance education programs not supporting their students adequately, or possibly just not informing them of the resources available to them, and the burden those students sometimes place on their local public libraries.  Some good comments starting to pile up already.

Improving the SFX menu

David Walker at Cal State has a really compelling presentation on why they've modified their SFX menu to look the way it does.  It's a 20-minute Captivate presentation.  If you look after SFX at your school, you really should give this a look.

(thanks for the tip, Jennifer)