June 29, 2007
Michigan Library Branches Out
Am I the only one noticing how Michigan Library is permeating the web, with links in Wikipedia
and in Amazon?
See the little M after the word "(Paperback)"?
I have found these very helpful when looking for books, only to discover we have it at the library. I would imagine students and faculty will think the same thing!
Posted by swortman at 10:47 AM | Comments (3)
June 28, 2007
Revenge of the Blog People: Part 258
The generation gap of the library world, Michael Gorman vs. Bloggers has a recent twist. True to the ideas of mash-ups and not only being consumers of technology but also producers of technology the latest revenge from the blog people on Michael Gorman's 2005 article in Library Journal comes in the form of a song by David Lee King which features quotes from his article. Will this never die?
Okay, it IS pretty funny!
Posted by swortman at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
The "Summer of Love" 1967
Attention Baby Boomers and dare I say, Pre-Boomers: where you around for the Summer of Love? As a tribute to the 40th anniversary of that summer MSNBC offers a quiz to see how well you remember that year. Quizzes are always fun so I thought I'd add a link to it here so you could test your recall. We boomers are not getting any younger, you know and the memory may be the first thing to go so think young and take the quiz. Warning, I only got one wrong!
The Net Generation is welcome to take the quiz too. We'll see how well you were paying attention in your history classes!
Have fun and, oh yeah, peace and love.
Posted by swortman at 08:21 AM | Comments (2)
June 27, 2007
Twittering Astronauts?
Social networking, here, there and everywhere. I have been trying to make sense of my notes from ALA to offer some posts to this blog but haven't gotten anything organized well enough to make sense yet so I'll just comment on social networking in the news.
I can't listen to the radio at all these last few days without hearing about social networking. NPR's Talk of the Nation had a show on this afternoon Social Networking on the Web Grows Up
Host Neal Conen talked with several people about the various ways social networking is growing up and being used for innovative networking. There was talk of social networking as a way of mobilizing people as well as a way of finding people both globally and locally with like interests (http://cruisecritic.com or http://www.meetup.com/).
Someone else spoke of social networking related to business networking, finding contacts, checking references, recruiting people. Even using it to look up a dentist and checking out who else on the network you know, at least virtually who might be able to recommend the dentist. For business they mentioned sites like linkedin and I just found ryze
The third person, Tom Watson, publisher of onphilanthropy.com talked about social networking as a way of gathering both money and people to social causes. See an article he wrote about Kiva and how he used it to provide microloans for people starting businesses in underdeveloped countries.
I haven't even gotten to the twittering astronauts yet! There is an article in C/Net News about how NASA met this week with people from Twitter, CreativeCommens and other online groups in what they called an Exploration Summit to figure out ways that NASA could become more hip to the new net generation. One popular idea was astronauts twittering from outerspace. Cool!
Posted by swortman at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2007
ALA Annual Conference Photos
More photos available on Flickr.
Posted by swortman at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2007
Michigan Librarians as Bloggers
I was glad to see I had 54 unread posts from the Michigan Uberfeed when I checked Google Reader this morning. Wow, things are picking up. I few days ago it seemed like I was the only one blogging and I really didn't have anything to say.
I look forward to reading about many interesting ideas and observations from this group!
Posted by swortman at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
Saturday @ ALA - EBSS Day
Saturday was EBSS Day for me. EBSS is the Education and Behavioral Science Section in ACRL. The day started at 10:30 with committee meetings. Being relatively new to ALA I made the mistake of volunteering for too many things. Consequently I'm on two committees that met at the same time and were presenting programs Saturday afternoon, one after the other.
The Reference Committee talked of creating an EBSS wiki for information in research on education and behavioral science librarianship. The plus would be the collaboration. The minus side would be the collaboration. Too many wikis have been created which end up being just the work of one person. People, particularly graduate students, seem to be worried about being judged on what they submit to a wiki and feel it should be a finished article. Either that or they don't like the idea of someone else editing their ideas. In the work intensive environment of a graduate program there is not enough time to contribute to wikis and blogs if it's not going to get you extra points on your CV.
EBSS Program Saturday Afternoon
EBSS started the afternoon program by presending the Distinguished Education and Behavioral Sciences Librarian Award for 2007. Patricia O'Brian Libutti, recently retired social sciences/education librarian from Rutgers won the award. I don't know her but liked her immediately when she announce that she was going to take the $1000 award and go fly fishing with her husband. Now that's a woman who plans to enjoy her retirement!
After the award came the program, Empowering Data: Persuasion Through Presentation.
There were three panelists/speakers at the program
1. Bob Molyneux, statistician and librarian
2. Steve Hiller from University of Washington
3. Maribeth Manoff from University of Tennessee
None of them really spoke on the idea of persuasion through presentation, which was the theme. They each talked about their experiences which was okay and people seemed to be interested and had plenty of questions duing the Q & A time so hopefully it was something worthwhile.
The thing that really surprised me was the Research Committee's program after this, held right next door. This was the first time for this event which highlighted a few select people's early research attempts. There were five poster session/discussion events which overlapped. Thanks to the generosity of APA the event had a reception with a lovely food spread which always seems to attract people. People had the chance to casually walk around and review each poster session, talk with the researchers and pick up fliers while enjoying fabulous desserts, dips, fruit and coffee.
The five poster and discussion topics were:
1.Information Literacy Rubrics with the Disciplines
2. Innocense Lost: Communication Studies Publishers and the Modern Library
3.Information Seeking Behavior of Graduate Education Students
4. Book and Journal Use in Four Social Science Disciplines
5. Blogging to My Peeps: Communication with Psychology, Linguistics, and Sociology Departments
All were well done and interesting. I think the general feeling was that this format worked will and sessions were well attended, especially considering this was the first time it was held. APA is planning on sponsoring similar events at future annual conferences which is good news.
Posted by swortman at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
June 23, 2007
Libraries Build Communities at ALA - Friday
I joined a group of about 25 librarians from across the country to work at the Capital Area Food Bank as part of ALA’s Libraries Build Communities. This voluntary program started last year as a way to give back to the local area when ALA became one of the first major conferences to return and support New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of people attending the conference volunteered to help the New Orleans community rebuild and the event was such a success it's being repeated in DC. All big cities have their problems, not just NO. Wherever Annual is held there are plenty of opportunities available to say, “ALA was here� besides having its members spend their money.
Groups this year could sign up to work at local schools, public libraries, Habitat for Humanity or the Capital Area Food Bank. This food bank where I worked supplies one million pounds of food per month to area homeless shelters, day cares, and other agencies in the greater DC area. The food is donated by grocery stores like Giant and Safeway, along with smaller local groups. The food pantry also grows some of the food it gives away and offers programs to at risk people within the community, teaching them about nutrition. According to Oye, the woman who directed us and kept us on task there are over 600,000 people at risk of hunger in the DC area. Think of it – filling the University of Michigan stadium six times with people and they’re all hungry! It’s hard to imagine and even harder when you realize, like Pat, a librarian from Notre Dame said that this is just one city and the same problem exists wherever ALA holds their annual convention. On the plus side, we calculated that our group today sorted and packed 40,000 pounds of juice, juice boxes and condiments and 14,375 pounds of pasta and macaroni.
Linda TerHaar Michigan’s Undergraduate Library Director also volunteered at a local school library. I haven’t had the chance to talk to her much but it sounds like her group worked hard, sorting old books and organizing and updating a local school media center collection. I managed to get a picture of her before the camera batteries went dead. Hopefully there will be some pictures on Flckr soon from other people.
Posted by swortman at 09:21 AM | Comments (2)
On the Road to ALA - Thursday
Well, here I am in Washington, DC. Guess I won’t be on the Internet until tomorrow [it ended up being Saturday]. I tried it from my room and got a message that it will be $10.95/day! Yikes! I’ll just head over to the Convention Center and use theirs.
I borrowed my husband’s Business 2.0 magazine to read on the flight this evening. I don’t know why he keeps getting it. I think it’s a promotional thing since he’s never subscribed to it. There was a good article, Weaving the {Semantic} Web, by Michael V. Copeland. The article talked about Nova Spivack and his company Radar Networks. The company, and others like it are working on Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web. This new iteration of the web people are working on will be a smarter, machine-based web instead of the people based social networked web of today.
Spivack, grandson of Peter Drucker is getting ready to release his first attempt at a commercial use for Web 3.0 by offering a personal planner that will make the computer and network work for the user. Think of it as the computer knowing you well enough that it can seamlessly plan things without all the back and forth calling or emailing that’s usually required now. Ever see that video explanation of a wiki that’s out there? This planner sounds like a giant wiki, only the computer, not the people reads data from several sources and come up with what is the best option for you.
According to this article mashups are early versions of Web 3.0. So is tagging in Flickr. Things like this are what Tom Coates, who works for Yahoo calls, “dirty semantic Web.� I guess that means Web 3.0, phase one.
This sort of thing has been going on for a while if you look at Amazon as it suggests items for you based on past purchases. The CIA is collecting data from several resources on possible terrorist subjects, (hopefully not you and me) trying to find connections or relationships that might foil a terrorist plot in the early stages.
Peter Morville, who was in Ann Arbor for the opening of MLibrary 2.0 will be speaking at ALA on Monday as part of the ALCTS Presidents Program. Topic? Ambient Findability, of course.
Posted by swortman at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2007
MLibrary 2.0 Workshop - Social Tagging: What is it and what does it have to do with the library?
Workshop number 2 for Mlibrary 2.0 was today. This one was on social tagging and gave an overview of Flickr and Del.icio.us. There is so much information to get through for each of these workshops that it's very helpful the way the group has organized the web site for users to go back and look into things further.
Suzanne Chapman gave today's presentation. She explained things well, had answers to everyone's questions, kept us on task and gave great examples of how other libraries and groups are useing social tagging.
Suzanne and Bill Dueber came up with an interesting experiment for demonstrating social tagging to the group. They had us to to a picture online and enter our own tags. After everyone entered their tags we checked out what we all came up with, then compared that to the cataloging information. Since there are two workshop sessions the tags are separated into session one and session two. Tagging images, while not standardized has great potential because it allows you to get down into details that cataloging can't possibly include. With broad brush strokes people can enter as many words as they want with the hope that someone will have the same ideas for catagorizing the image.
Something I hadn't heard about before this workshop is Google Image Labeler. It's part game, part social tagging. Google flashes images up and you have up to 90 seconds to come up with as many tags as possible. You are paired with another random user who also enters tags for the same image. You both enter tags until there is a tag match. Supposedly this helps Google to come up with appropriate tags or indexing for their images. It's kind of fun but some images are definitely easier to tag that others. Sometimes there is a short list of words you can't use to tag the image. These are usually the most obvious choices for tags so you have to expend a few brain cells to come up with other, not so obvious tags.
Makes me think I should check out Eye To I: Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy at ALA Annual. The Informtion Section of ACRL is presenting this along with ACRL Arts Section. They created a virtual poster session using a blog. The presentation is Sunday, 1:30 - 3:30 at Renaissance Washington - Grand Ballroom South, if you're interested.
Social Bookmarking
Things I didn't know:
1. You can suggest links that you think other people in your network might like.
2. You can create delicious feeds very easily and put the code on an appropriate web page or in your blog. This would be so easy to use for so many things in the library!
3. You can customize your tagroll cloud easily in del.iou.us, too
4. You can add a del.icio.us button to Firefox (easier than IE)that lets you post an address on the fly.
Flickr
There's a MLibrary 2.0 group in Flickr with 111 pictures!
Flickr and copyrighting are an interesting phenomenon. I have to do some more reading about Creative Commons and licencing. It's so easy to post pictures on Flickr that no one seems to be concerned about having someone's permission to post their picture or taking pictures of book covers and slapping them up on a web page. Who controls the content, the image, the right to display? It's all getting looser and looser which is not necessarily bad thing.
There's a Michigan Libraries Flickr group along with a lot of other fun groups. I think KRS should join the Librarians on Motorcycles group, it only has two members.
Posted by swortman at 01:20 PM | Comments (1)
June 18, 2007
Ten Major Types of Technology Users
I actually read my American Libraries magazine for June/July this weekend and found some interesting information. The latest issue isn't available online at the library yet. There's a fourteen day wait period so everyone has to read the paper version for now.
One of the Tech Briefs in AL mentioned The Pew Internet and American Life Project came up with ten different types of technology users in a report released in May . The project released the results of a survey on internet usage and categorized technology users into ten types. You can take a quiz on the project site to find out where you fit in the technology continuum. Depending on how high you score, you may be classified as an omnivore, a connector, a lackluster veteran, a productivity enhancer, a mobile centric user, a connected but hassled user, an inexperienced experimenter, light but satisfied, indifferent, or off the network. It's all for fun and not very reliable because I scored as a connector. I would think I'm more lie an inexperience experimenter, instead.
Here are some other brief tidbits from American Libraries
April 18 issue of PC Magazine has an article 11 Ways to Search Without Google, including Ms. Dewey. Check her out if you haven't seen her yet.
By the Numbers feature offers two interesting statistics for Academic Libraries.
1. 29% of U.S. homes are "without internet access [and] do not plan to get online in the next year, according to a Park Associates study." I think this is the study.
2. 1.1 million is the "number of pages of historical government documents, some more than a century old, removed from public view since the September 2001 attacks under the National Archives and Records Administration's 'records of concern' program." Here's a link to the original story.
3. Also a tip from Meredith Farkas to keep in mind as we pursue Library 2.0, "Avoid technolust." Basically, make sure you're not so excited about new technology that you use it just to use it. Make sure it's helping your library users and improving your library.
Posted by swortman at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2007
Blog/Rss Workshop from MLibrary 2.0
Thursday, June 14 was the first workshop presented by MLibrary 2.0, Blogs & RSS. We talked about the definition of a blog, how you can subscribe to a blog, viewing blogs using Google Reader and created our own blogs (well, it was an experiment!).
Since I had already created or posted to a couple of Mblog blogs last year I knew how to create a blog. The tough part is not creating a blog, it's keeping the postings current and actually having something interesting to say so that people will listen to you. Unfortunately, the two that I had been working on last year sort of faded out. I still would like to create a diversity committee blog or a blog on topics related to academic diversity but haven't created it yet. Maybe I'll try to use Wordpress or Blogger instead of Mblog. I'm sick of the generic light blue/gray Mblog template and it's not very easy to change as far as I can tell.
The most helpful thing for me in the Blog/RSS workshop yesterday was getting more familiar with Google Reader. I have tried Bloglines but I filled it with too many feeds in my excitement and can't possibly read them all. I went to a Sage extension in Firefox which is very cool but is machine specific. Now I'm on to Google Reader and,so far so good.
I liked being able to slap up a quick page from Google Reader of feeds you started or shared but now I'm working on figuring out how to do it. I can't remember and it's not on the resources page. Could this be added to the resources for the Blogs session?
Posted by swortman at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
ALA in DC
Here are a few sessions dealing with Social Software in Libraries or Library 2.0 coming up at the American Library Association Annual Meeting. If you see others that might be of interest please let me know.
• Saturday 11:00 pm - Facebook After Hours party
• Sunday 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - RUSA -MARS Chair’s Program - Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks and Libraries
• Monday 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - PLA -LD Wiking the Blog and Walking the Dog–Social Software, Virtual Reality, and Authority Everywhere
• Monday 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm - LAMA -BES Is the Learning Commons Enough? — Asking the Better Questions
ACRL also has a webcast on podcasting (!) coming up on July 10. It costs $, unfortunately but looks interesting "The Classroom Will Now Be Podcast: Podcasting in Higher Education and Implications for Academic Libraries"
(Could we get a group of people who went to ALA to share any innovative things they saw and learned about, whether 2.0 or not present something or blog about it?)
Posted by swortman at 09:00 AM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2007
Women's Studies and Blogging
Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources, had a recent issue on Women's Studies and blogging (Winter/Spring 2006, 27:2/3). Whoo boy, there are tons of feminist blogs, gender blogs, etc. I even found BlogHer , whose mission is to "evangelizes blogging by, for and to women." See their blogroll on Feminism and Gender. Who are all these people and what are they all blathering on about? How to you sort the intelligent blogs from the Paris Hilton "look at me" blogs? Hmmm.
Posted by swortman at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
June 11, 2007
Mom on Facebook
I feel a little like an intruder by joining Facebook. My daughter's friends are adding me to their list of friends but I'm not seeing anyone my age. I read a funny article from the NY Times about a mother joining Facebook, totally embarrassing her and making her feeling , “wayyy creepy.�
Luckily my daughters are no longer high schoolers, thinking that everything I DO is "wayyy creepy." Those days are gone, luckily. What might really creep them out is to have a bunch of librarians ask to be their friends so if your interested (I am so mean!) here they are K & J.
The Kept-Up Academic Librarian mentioned an interesting article from MSNBC about MySpace losing the high school student population to Facebook. I am not even going to attempt MySpace right now. Facebook is foreign enough for me!
Posted by swortman at 08:49 AM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2007
MLibrary 2.0 First Session
Okay, I just spent 15 minute writing something that just got deleted so I guess I'll start again. So much for the preview function!
I went to the first session of University of Michigan Library's MLibrary 2.0 events and it was fun. It's exciting to be able to see people I've read or heard about and get new ideas. Today was the kick-off event and we listened to Peter Morville, Mr. Ambient Findability, Kristin Antelman, Associate Director for the Digital Library of North Carolina State and Jessamyn West, of www.librarian.net fame.
Each one had good things to say and my reading list has now tripled, after all their references.
Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger
UFOs (Ubiquitous Findable Objects) - by Peter Morville
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Allen Cooper
A Manifesto for Networked Objects by Julian Bleecker
The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
The Transparent Society by David Brin
Here are some random thoughts from my notes.
The word "usability" is overused. You need to include credibility, a belief in the information, usefulness, accessibilty, desireability and findability. These form a honeycomb, see the Semantic Studio blog for the description and diagram Peter Morville used.
Findability and credability are increasingly linked.
Ambient finability is the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time.
From Dilbert, "Information is gushing toward your barain like a firehose aimed at a teacup."
ambientdevices.com (there coming!)
You can track your children with a chip - the technology is available but how comfortable are we using it?
We need to create bigger needles for those bigger information haystacks.
Sites to check out:
Buzzillion.com
podzinger.com - a speech to text searching using speech recognition
delicious library (rat's it's Mac!)
findability.org
semanticsstudios.com/lemur.pdf (Morville's presentation)
vivisimo.com
Kristin Antelman talked about the library at NC State's experience with their new catalog along with other interesting catalogs and library sites, Plymouth State University Library, Seattle Public, Phoenix Public Library, UVa Library, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, which uses WorldCat Local.
She mentioned the Calhoun report, which lead me to an interesting article my Michigan's Karen Markey,The Online Catalog; Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?, in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of D-Lib Magazine
She mentioned the discussion group NGC4Lib - Next Generation Cataloging for Libraries
"Catalogers are feeling embattled," she says.
(What the heck is OWL, FOAF, SKOS, in my notes?)
Researchers want to see the lineage of publications, authors, clusters of knowledge. NCState's catalog doesn't do. Metasearching and Endeca is a big problem.
Jesssmyn West's presentation and handouts are available at http://www.librarian.net/talks/mlibrary/
She talked about Web 2.0/Library 2.0 as a service model which lets people drive. My concern is it lets SOME people drive but it's leaving other people farther and farther behind.
Random notes from JW talk,
"thingology"
digital natives vs digital immigrants - those born with this technology vs. us older folk who learned it later in life
Happy error messages on Flickr
Hard to get data from 2.0 apps
Everything is beta and will always be beta, since it's continually changing and never a finished product
Get rid of the fear of failure - experimenting is good w/ 2.0
Rutger's E-Z Borrow - ILL with a happy, user-friendly name.
10 no brainers for public libraries
Her talk was energetic and fun, if not in depth but I liked her attitude and spirit. The best thing I took away from it was her comment to jump in to technology or change with an Okay-who's-with-me attitude!
Posted by swortman at 09:38 PM | Comments (0)