Facebook ‘r us? [not dead yet]

November 13, 2009 – 4:52 pm

Sherrill noted in this week’s A&R a link to the College’s Facebook page with a story about favorite student jobs, many of them in the Libraries. And Sherrill had posted this shoutout to a former student worker: “Hey, Noella! Thanks for that vote of confidence. We remember you fondly, too. Go to the Sophia Smith Collection FB page and give us an update.”

Now that’s product placement and outreach in one package!

So what about Neilson and the branches?

Today’s NYTimes has this article about using Facebook to brand your business and reach your “customers:”
How to Market Your Business With Facebook

“Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.”

By Jim Montgomery | Posted in 1 | Comments (0)

..”the library, as a place, is dead. Kaput. Finito. …move on

November 10, 2009 – 3:20 pm

From Inside Higher Ed…something from Educause last week.

“Let’s face it: the library, as a place, is dead,” said Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University. “Kaput. Finito. And we need to move on to a new concept of what the academic library is.”

I think Thorin is just trying to be provocative, myself.  But the fundamental question is before us:  What is the library as place going to be?  What does it need to be for the students? for the faculty?  What role will Smith libraries play in educating “women of promise for lives of distinction”?

Read on and comment!

Bookless Libraries? – Inside Higher Ed.

By Chris Loring | Posted in 1 | Comments (1)

Napster’s younger dweeby brother

November 2, 2009 – 11:02 am

Illicit file sharing isn’t just for kids these days. Once mainly used for downloading pirated music, sites have sprung up on the Internet that allow free swapping of academic journals

See The Latest File-Sharing Piracy: Academic Journals

By Eric | Posted in 1 | Comments (0)

Topical query: What did you call tonight when you were a kid?

October 30, 2009 – 10:48 am

Wikipedia says:
“Mischief night or mischievous night is a tradition in Canada and the United States; a night when the custom is for preteens and teenagers to take a degree of license to play pranks and do mischief to their neighbors. The most common date for mischief night is October 30, the day before Halloween.”

Other names:
Cabbage Night
Goosey Night
Devil’s Night

So ‘fess up to your past (?) mischief and let us know what you called tonight!

By Jim Montgomery | Posted in 1 | Comments (5)

The Netflix of Academic Journals Opens Shop

October 29, 2009 – 5:29 pm

From the Chronicle’s Wired Campus:

“By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.” http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Netflix-of-Academic/8648/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

By Eric | Posted in 1 | Comments (0)

Geo-Everything

October 9, 2009 – 11:12 am

The 2009 Horizon Report lists “Geo-Everything” among recent trends in the category “Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years.”

In a recent brainstorming session based on some of the Horizons technology trends, the Digital Services Team considered how the libraries might provide geolocation services using mashups, web pages, or software, for instance GPS directions/location or stacks map for mobiles. These ideas did not rise to the level of highest priority for DST this year, and they would require some investigation. Known possibilities include a “here’s where I am” message to friends, a tool for locating the libraries and special collections, or finding call numbers and directions for those with location-aware devices such as the iPhone.

These snippets give some details on Geo-Everything as it relates to higher education, from the Horizon report’s website http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/chapters/geo-everything/:

…..Google Maps (http://maps.google.com), for example, offers a one-button way to overlay public, geotagged media onto the relevant section of a map as you view it; photos or videos tagged with the location in question simply fall into place on the map.

….Mobile learners can receive context-aware information about nearby resources, points of interest, historical sites, and peers seamlessly, connecting all this with online information for just-in-time learning. Social networking tools for handheld and mobile devices or laptop computers can already suggest people or places that are nearby, or show media related to one’s location. Virtual geocaching — the practice of placing media (images, video, audio, text, or any kind of digital files) in an online “drop box” and tagging it with a specific geographic location — is emerging as a way to “annotate” real-world places for travelers.

***

Imagine connections between campus events and our digital collections, maps from our FYI entries for exhibitions, poetry readings and conferences, or the ability to take a picture of a movie poster and connect with online resources for reviews. These applications may require more time and expertise than our current resources would allow, but there are simple applications in use at some libraries to supplement written directions:

Here’s a map of library locations from Georgia Tech: http://maps.google.com/

Perhaps the Five Colleges could use an interactive map with images of libraries and other locations, plus links to directions and library web pages, like this one from the Free Library of Philadelphia: http://libwww.freelibrary.org/branches/branchmap.cfm

Here are two examples of dynamic directions to find items listed in the Wichita State University Libraries catalog: http://libcat.wichita.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=878401
 — look for Map Direction:Find Where It Is and Text It:to your phone options at the bottom of the record display. Location of a branch library: http://libcat.wichita.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1064995

Sika

WSU geo-locator

By Sika | Posted in 1 | Comments (1)

A Library to Last Forever

October 9, 2009 – 10:52 am

Sergey Brin puts his spin on GoogleBooks in an op-ed in today’s New York Times:

“But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting”

By Jim Montgomery | Posted in 1 | Comments (0)

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

October 9, 2009 – 9:38 am

List is here from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies

This list has been compiled from the Top 10 Tool Contributions of 202 Learning Professionals.

By David | Posted in 1 | Comments (2)

The Library-Catalog Wars: ‘Chronicle’ Readers Weigh In

October 1, 2009 – 5:06 pm

Catalogs are the problem!
Librarians are the problem!
Students are the problem!

A Chronicle article on trends in library catalog software has touched off an online reader debate about who’s to blame for patrons’ search frustrations and how to fix the situation.

Here’s the second Chronicle article with the debate…

By Eric | Posted in 1 | Comments (0)

The Public Option

October 1, 2009 – 11:39 am

Of all the current assaults on our noble republic, perhaps none is more dangerous than the public option – specifically, the public library option.

Read more!

By Janet Spongberg | Posted in 1 | Comments (0)