“The Wave of Technological Changes”

Amazon Kindle by Håvar og Solveig from Flickr

NPR.org played a report last night on All Things Considered about a private prep school that eliminated the entire print collection in the library in favor of an all digital collection.  They circulate 68 Kindles with the digital collection pre-loaded and the content is accessible on school provided laptops.  The report (and ALA President Camilla Alire) focused on some of the immediate concerns with the change: supporting student learning styles, cost, and study environment.  There was no discussion of the larger concern related to scholarly communication.  Maybe because the library in question is a school library and not a university library the scholarly communication issue was not considered relevant.  However, I think this is a great opportunity to bring up the problem of online content disappearing and changing as subscription packages are altered, prices go up and back file access shifts.  Many of our patrons don’t understand that an online purchase is not forever.  In the past a print journal, purchased by the library, stayed in the library’s collection until its usefulness passed.  Today the library may purchase a journal and its accompanying back files to 1990, for instance, and in two years when the contract renews discover the back file access now only extends back to 2000.  Books are no different.  Subscriptions with firms like NetLibrary can change from year to year and prices can go up.  Does going all digital really off set the cost in time and effort spent managing a print collection?  Until we demand more consistency and transparency from publishers librarians will continue to contend with moving targets and shifting user expectations.

2010 LITA National Forum

The theme for LITA’s 2010 conference is “The Cloud and the Crowd.”  From the description on the webpage the committee is hoping to receive proposals related to cloud computing.  They are also interested in “social technologies” like tagging and commenting.  The list of proposal ideas includes “crowdsourcing,” collaborative software, security, and globalization.  LITA will also be repeating the “un-conference” concept that they hosted at ALA Annual in 2009.  Presenters can also opt for the “half-session” slot that shortens the typical 75 minute to approximately 30 minutes.  Visit http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lita2010 for more details.  Proposals are due February 19, 2010.

HootSuite

I’ll be honest, I haven’t really jumped on the Twitter bandwagon.  That being said, I learned about an application that I think could make Twitter usable.  HootSuite is a web service that aggregates my twitter accounts and allows me to tweet the same message to more than one account and do it selectively.  It also track statistics for my feeds which is very handy.  Since I have personal, work and association twitter accounts this makes keeping everything updated much easier.  If you are new to Twitter you might check it out.

EndNote X3

EndNote X3 is out and it looks pretty good.  The changes seem pretty minor, but there are a couple of really nice things users may want to try.  The biggest thing for some of our graduate students will be the ability to have multiple bibliographies in one Word document.  This means you can have all of your dissertation chapters in a single document.  There is no need to merge multiple chapters after removing EndNote field codes.

EndNote now supports Cite While You Write in OpenOffice.org.  While this won’t necessarily impact our students and faculty at Oklahoma State I’m sure others will be able to take advantage of this option.

The Mac version of EndNote X3 is expected sometime later this Fall.  Check out this video to see all the new features.

My Info Quest

Librarian in Black just posted a great site called My Info Quest.  From their press release:

The service, named My Info Quest is the first collaborative text messaging reference service of its kind. Alliance Library System (http://www.alliancelibrarysystem.com) in East Peoria, Illinois has partnered with participating libraries, Altarama (http://www.altarama.com) and Web Clarity Software Inc. (http://www.webclarity.info) developers of Peoplewhere (http://www.peoplewhere.com) to build this exciting new reference service. The pilot program will extend until December 31, 2009.

What a great idea!  Check out the list of participation libraries.  They are still accepting member libraries to join this August.  I can’t wait to see this in action.

ALA Conference

ALA is now in full swing.  I’m currently attending the ACRL 101 meeting.  Happily the conference meetings understand and welcome people who arrive late and leave early.  I arrived very late, but hopefully I will be on time for future meetings.

I will be blogging for LITA later today at the Science Fiction and Fantasy workshop.  The LITA blog will be following many conference programs.  Check them out at litablog.org.

The first session I attended actually met on Thursday.  The Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT) held a deliberative discussion on Privacy.  ALA will be partnering with the Kettering Foundation to offer these discussions in communities all over the country.  I was lucky enough to sit next to Mary Minow an expert in library law.  She had some facinating insights regarding privacy including how libraries don’t protect patron privacy and that librarians don’t even realize their patrons’ information is extremely vulnerable.  I am hoping to moderate these discussions when I get back home.

I’ll update as time and my netbook battery allow.  Cheers!

New OLA Website in the Works

Last week I attended the Oklahoma Library Association Leadership Retreat.  This is where the leadership of OLA meets to plan and train for the upcoming year.  One of Thursday’s sessions was on OLA’s new content management system, ModX.  Roy Degler, a Digital Services Librarian here at OSU, and Tiffany Benson, from University of Tulsa and OLA Webmaster, have put together a beautiful website using ModX as its backbone.  I heard one of the attendees say that the new system will be very empowering.  The OLA leadership will now be able to control the content of their Division, Roundtable or Committee websites.  ModX is a PHP open source content management framework with support and documentation on their website.

I love that some of the attendees see this as empowering, although I think some were also intimidated.  The leadership of OLA seems very dedicated and ready to learn.  The new website is slated to go up September 1st, but the date is flexible.  Watch here for more updates on the new site.

Photo from Flickr–Vein by WASABIdesign

23 Things

Here at OSU our Currculum Materials Library is hosting a 23 Things Project this Summer.  The librarian in charge has laid out some, but not all of the services and software she wants us to try.  She is hoping that as we progress we will offer feedback about what we would like to see and do in the later stages.  She just assigned Thing #5, Flickr Creative Commons.  So far we have learned about blogs, avatars, and of course, 23 Things.  Check out the CML Learning 2.0 blog for more details on the project.

Flash-Mob Cataloging?

Okay, I confess, I have never heard of flash-mob cataloging.  I guess Library Thing-ers descend on a library and catalog their uncataloged books.  In fact there is even an LT group dedicated to Flash-Mob Cataloging.  Of course I thought flash mobs were spontaneous gatherings, but I’m learning that some of them are well planned and organized in advance.  So far LT-ers (according to the LT Blog) have tackled Rhode Island Audubon Society, St. John’s Church in Beverly MA, North Carolina State University’s Joel Lane Museum House in Raleigh, The Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago and have plans to mob the Clemson Montessori School in South Carolina this weekend.  This seems like a great way to help small libraries develop an inexpensive online catalog.  For more about Library Thing check out their website and take the tour:  http://www.librarything.com/

Library Websites

I have spent an awful lot of time over the last few weeks looking at other library websites.  Over the years my favorite has always been the Ann Arbor District Library, www.aadl.org.  The catalog fits seamlessly into their webpage, allows users to tag items, lets users create rss feeds from  searches and above all it’s easy to use.  My favorite part of the site has always been the blogs.  The New Items blog is so much more interesting to read than the New York Times Book Review (sacrilege to say that, I know).  The even have Audio and Video Blogs.  They have a Community Blog and Services Blog.  Obviously I love blogs, but not just any blogs.  I like the good ones.  The ones that are updated regularly and have posts that are easily digested quickly and provide me with the timely information I want.  There is so much more right with this site than I can get into in this post–after all, I want it to be easily digested.  Take a look at aadl.org and see what you think.  I know you’ll be impressed.