October 24, 2008
Coffee Break: Open Access
The conversation at this term's first Forum coffee break focused on what the Library is doing to support faculty publishing in Open Access journals. Some of these journals require faculty to pay a publication fee of as much as $3,000. It was asked what the Library can do to help them. Societies behind the journals sometimes waive or reduce these fees if there is an institutional membership. Should the Library pay for this membership? Or should research grants pay for these publication fees? The talk then turned to University researchers interested in conducting natural language processing research with electronic resources the Library provides. It's not clear if the licenses for the resources we provide, including Open Access titles, prohibit the type of data mining they want to conduct or if they are allowed under Fair Use. We also talked about the role of publishers in academia and the difference (if any) between non-profit and for-profit publishers. I'm sure we'll cover these topics again at another talk.
Posted by amuro at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2008
Coffee Break Schedules
Due to popular demand, the monthly coffee breaks are back again this year! The first of these will be this week--Thursday, October 23 from 3:30-4:30pm and Friday, October 24 from 10:30-11:30am.
Like last year's breaks, these meetings will be held at Beanster's in the Michigan League. Paul Courant is expected to attend these sessions again, and he's picking up the tab - just tell the staff at the counter that you're with the Library. Conversations will be free-ranging, so come ready to discuss anything that's on your mind: librarianship, technology, politics, or whatever. As usual, all library staff are welcome to attend.
Other coffee break dates are listed below:
November 21 3:00 – 4:00
November 24 3:30 – 4:30
December 15 9:00 – 10:00
December 17 3:0 – 4:00
Posted by kfolger at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2008
Coffee Talk: Unexpected Things we Collect
The conversations at this month's coffee breaks covered a variety of topics, so it's hard to capture it exactly for those of you who weren't able to attend--the fact that I have a mind like a sieve doesn't help matters. One topic that stood out for me was that of things we collect that you might not expect, like King, "the illest men's magazine ever!" and books by authors such as Danielle Steel or Robert Ludlum. While very popular, these aren't exactly the sorts of things you expect to see in an academic setting. Our collecting of this material, to me, gets to the heart of what it means to be a research library. We don't buy this material for today's users, even though the books can and are frequently checked out. Rather, we're thinking about researchers 50 or 100 years from now who might want to learn more about American society in the late-20th/early 21st century by reading the books that were being read during this time or looking at the advertising in magazines. Publishers aren't always very good about keeping copies of books or magazines once they go out of print so, if we don't collect this material now, we don't know whether it will be available in the future to meet research needs.
By the way, speaking of unusual things we collect for research purposes, AAEL is in the process of building a computer and video game archive. Dave Carter is spearheading the project and is documenting their efforts on a blog called,
Eaten by a Grue. Check it out and, if you've got any old games or equipment in your basement, talk to Dave.
Posted by kfolger at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2008
Coffee Break: e-book readers
At today's Coffee Break we took a look at the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle owned by DSS and available for Library staff to borrow. We talked about interfaces, book formats, and the utility of e-books. Julie from DSS mentioned that the Kindle can only be purchased with a user account, which allows items to be purchased from the Kindle store. This makes it hard for a library to loan a Kindle to patrons since you can't easily prevent them from purchasing content.
Posted by kshawkin at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2008
Coffee Talk: Second Life
The main topic of conversation at Monday's coffee break was Second Life and how it's being used in libraries and in the corporate world. Most of the people at the coffee had at least visited Second Life and some had even managed to create avatars and do a little exploration. A couple of people had attended Patricia Anderson's Enriching Scholarship session on Second Life, so had lots of information to share about what they had learned. Her presentation is available on SlideShare.
I visited Second Life once a couple of years ago and found the experience less than compelling. There seems to be a fairly steep learning curve. But, people are using it. The latest issue of Time has an article on Second Life which says that 13 million people have visited it at least once and there are about 450,000 users per week. LindenLabs, the company behind Second Life, tracks a number of statistics and is very open about sharing them. The latest statistics, through March 2008, are available here.
Posted by kfolger at 09:56 PM | Comments (1)
April 07, 2008
Coffee Talk: Diversifying the Profession
An interesting topic that came up at last Friday's coffee break was the issue of diversity in the library profession. At the last Senior Managers' meeting there was a presentation from a UM committee called STRIDE, Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence, on faculty recruiting. Somebody asked about the presentation, which prompted a discussion about whether there were things we could do differently to improve diversity within the Library.
Are we doing all we can to recruit librarians of color?
Where do we advertise, do we send recruiters to relevant conferences, are we actively inviting candidates to apply for positions?
It was mentioned that one of the difficulties in hiring librarians of color is the relatively small number there are and, if we want a more diverse profession, library schools need to do a better job of recruiting diverse candidates.
Is librarianship as a profession appealing to people of color? Why or why not?
ALA has some statistics on credentialed librarians by race and ethnicity on its website.
88.3% of librarians are white, 4.8% are African-American, 3.3% are Asian/Pacific Islanders, 0.2% are Native American, 0.7% are two or more races, and 2.7% are Latino.
I don't remember what the percentages are at UM, I'll check with HR to get the numbers, but I do remember that Paul mentioned at the last Library Update that are numbers have been going down over the last few years.
What could we be doing differently to attract and retain more librarians of color, any suggestions?
Posted by kfolger at 11:23 PM | Comments (2)
Coffee Talk: POPLINE and Abortion
At the coffee break on Friday, the controversy over the POPLINE database blocking keyword searching of the term "abortion" was much on the minds of a couple of people in attendance. I was struck by a couple of things during the discussion: 1)those of us who were aware of the controversy had absolutely no idea what to do with our outrage, and 2) many of the posts on the subject on library blogs briefly expressed outrage but mainly focused on explaining how it was possible to work around the block. That was quite a contrast to Paul Courant's reaction. He wanted to immediately call the NY Times to shine light on the situation. I wonder if the contrasting reactions reflect some fundamental difference between how librarians and non-librarians think. There are some pretty crummy interfaces in the library world and, while we may complain or make suggestions for improvements, overall librarians tend to accept what we're offered and just figure out what we need to do to make it work. Some of us even take a perverse pride in our ability to create intricate search strategies. I still miss fashioning nested boolean searches in classic MIRLYN--search boxes are for lightweights ;-)
I've been following some of the discussion that David Fulmer and Shevon Desai have had as part of the SkillShare program. Seeing David's reactions to what are fairly typical reference interactions has been eye-opening. At the desk, we get so used to hitting roadblocks and figuring out ways around them, it's weird and kind of embarassing to see them described from a more novice perspective. When you're behind the desk, when an MGetIt link doesn't work, you try another one or figure out another way to determine whether we have an item or not. Maybe it's time we stopped being so accepting when our systems fail us.
Posted by kfolger at 10:10 PM | Comments (4)
March 28, 2008
Forum Coffee Breaks
It's time for a coffee break! This Friday, March 28, at 10am, join your colleagues at Beanster's in the Michigan League for coffee and conversation. There's no agenda, we'll just talk about whatever suits our fancy. Last time around, topics included ebooks, ebook readers, the tech services reorganization, and RDA (Resource Description & Access) aka the new AACR2. So, what's on your mind?
By the way, if you can't make this week's coffee, there will be another one next Friday, April 4, at 9am at Beanster's.
Posted by kfolger at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)