Library of the Future

Yesterday's LRSN Forum, themed 'The Library of the Future' was well attended and had some very interesting speakers. Hopefully the outlines of the presentations will soon be posted. Katherine has already put hers here - she's so quick off the mark that lady!
I managed to avoid presenting this year by dobbing in someone else and was surprised that none of the presenters mentioned Second Life (my original proposed topic) or gaming which appear to be very big in the library blogs I read. There were, however, some great speakers and topics; in particular Shanta, Katherine and Connie. There were several concurrent sessions that I would have liked to attend too - but one can't be everywhere.
Facebook was discussed and this morning I came across a relevant article, Why Your Company Needs To Be on Facebook that adds food for thought.
I met and talked with many old friends while digging into the delicious refreshments supplied at lunch and teatimes. Thanks Sandy for organising another successful gathering of TAFEWA Librarians and others interested in the sector.

Facebook and Privacy

Last week I copied a recipe to my Epicurious recipe box and was surprised to see a popup advising me that the information had been added to my Facebook record. I had only recently opened a Facebook account and, like most users, didn't read all the fine print. I considered closing that account as I really don't want my web surfing habits to be made public - but then forgot about the incident - until today.
Reading a recent blog post on librarian.net I saw this comment:

I explain the word “default” to my sudents often. To people new with computers, the ideas of the comptuers default settings is a little perplexing. Fred Stutzman highlights part of David Weinberger’s post about Facebook where he discusses how Facebook’s default privacy settings are all wrong. Completely and totally wrong. Don’t miss one of Fred’s earlier posts where he discusses how to turn the Facebook Beacon off to stop it from telling marketers more about you than you may be aware of.

What a good idea. I promptly followed the instructions for turning off the beacon and hope that I can surf privately in future.

Second Life @ Central?

We have been thinking about using virtual worlds for teaching at Central TAFE for several months and several lecturers are excited at the prospect - but so far we haven't seemed to be getting anywhere. Now, however, things are beginning to move with the establishment of a wiki where we can share our thoughts and ideas.
I've been emailing interested people every relevant article I come across and really hope that Central can establish a presence in SL. I look forward to being able to do some training both in-world and on campus. It would be a shame if the virtual librarianship courses that I was lucky enough to attend were not put to good use.How my avatar has changed since those early days!

Library Planning

The wiki is up for Central TAFE's day of planning "To establish Library goals and projects to meet the College Strategic Plans for 2008". The list of what we want to achieve is growing ever longer and I am afraid that, as was the case last year, few of these objectives will be realised.

I do hope our planning meeting doesn't result in this:

Discussed on the blog Librarian in Black was Michael Stephens's keynote address Ten Technologies: Ideas to Improve Library Productivity. There are some wonderful ideas and comments here - not least being his closing statements of library philosophy: Learn to Learn. Adapt to Change. Scan the Horizon.

Other ideas for library planning come from Katherine’s blog, Librarian’s Matter; David Lewis’ A model for academic libraries 2005 to 2025 and Part one and Part two of staff responses to the McMaster University Library Strategic planning process.

iLibrarian also has links to presentations from the Hawaii Library Association Conference.

On Blogs, Wikis and RSS

Yesterday I presented 2 training sessions on blogs, wikis and RSS. The first was for staff at my college and I was pleased to see that our professional development sessions are being made available to staff at other colleges too - swelling attendance at this course by 3. However, had I known in advance, I might have planned for a generic login to be available instead of wasting time (mine and my students') running around finding out how to log them into our network. We had fun and I was gratified to read the comments on the evaluation sheets. I hope I gave them all something that they can use both for work and for personal communication. They were so eager to get stuck into the practical part of the workshop that they didn't even want to stop for tea and Tim-Tams.

That afternoon I repeated part of the session (blogs and RSS only) for a group of Library Studies students. This was at a different campus and I made the fatal mistake of leaving my nerdstick with all my presentations stuck in the pc where I did the first workshop. Fortunately I was able to download a copy from the shared drive and use a usb stick from lost property so the day was saved.

These students had a blogging assignment but I tried to give them more than just the basics. We discussed web 2.0 and library 2.0 which they claimed to have never heard about! I think I managed to get across the need for finding out for oneself about all the new tools and technology available and not just waiting to be told what is and is not important. To that end this blog post from LibraryCrunch and the accompanying comments make interesting reading.

Thanks for your support

Three people have commented on my decision to stop blogging, one a complete stranger (I think) so I'll keep it up for a little while longer. I wonder why previously posted comments have disappeared into the wild blue yonder?
I've also been asked to do a workshop on blogging for our Library Studies students next week and it would be setting a bad example if I were to give up - wouldn't it?
What's the good of having a mind if you can't change it - so here I go again.

Before reading the comments I had been giving my blog some thought (what else does one think about when lying in bed at night?) and decided that, if I were to start again, I would possibly talk more about some of the things I've been doing recently. I've bypassed the chance to say anything new about Podcamp Perth that I attended last weekend (why was I the only representative from Central TAFE when it was held on one of our campuses?) but can now add my bit about the discussion held in Second Life last night about the new TV series "The Librarians"
This is a picture of the discussion held at Laneways Library on ABC Island. Emerald Dumont was the moderator and I (Galia Beck) her faithful assistant am sitting on her right. Discussion was fast and furious. I was kept busy handing out notecards and IM-ing people who needed help of any kind.A link to the transcript and another snapshot can be found on Virtual librariesinteract.info. During the discussion we were asked to comment on weird things that had happened in our libraries and my report on the shoe fetishist found under a table sucking on some-one's shoe was voted the most gross. For that I won a prize of $30 to be spent at the ABC shop in RL. Thanks everyone.

Goodbye

It is months since anyone commented on a post in this blog. This is most disheartening and I have decided to stop spending any time on it. My colleagues will just have to put up with emails of interesting items that I find from time to time.

I have been blogging for over a year and at first it was stimulating and rewarding. Now I wonder why I bother - hence the decision to say Goodbye to any regular readers who may be out there. Please email me if you think there is any point in continuing.

Librarians in the 21st Century

I attended another session in the intermediate course on Virtual Librarianship in Second Life yesterday. It was not as stimulating as the previous three sessions, probably because it related to working with teens and I have have been turned off that age group by my experiences as a high school teacher. However, one thing that did come out of it was a reference to an article about Librarians in the 21st Century.in which the writer, Joyce Kasman Valenza, claims that ... librarians cannot expect to assume a leadership role in information technology and instruction, and we cannot claim any credibility with students, faculty, or administrators, if we do not recognize and thoughtfully exploit the paradigm shift of the past two years.
This is particularly relevant in light of my current efforts to run 23 Things at my library and my struggle to achieve acceptance of the role that Second Life or any other virtual world may play in the learning/teaching environment. I am empowered by the comment:
You do not take “no” for an answer when a network administrator or technology director refuses to support a pedagogically sound activity. You seek a way to get to “yes” if learners will benefit.
In yesterdays SL session I mentioned that I was trying to introduce my colleagues to new technology in spite of my director's reservations - and virtually behind her back, and received a resounding cheer from my classmates.
I wonder if the 23 Things participants realise just how much effort goes into running this exercise and how disappointing it is for me when they "cannot find the time" to complete each "Thing" as it is posted.

Latin anyone?

I didn't study Latin at school because my father didn't want me to suffer the way he had when studying the subject. However, my love of words and their origins has often made me regret that omission. One of my favourite daily emails is 'A word a day' by Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) and in AWADmail Issue 275 he points us to an article about a Latin version of Wikipedia, Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Latin Isn't Dead On 'Vicipaedia'. This is a wonderful use of modern technology to discuss items of current interest in an ancient tongue.
"Vicipaedia has 15,000 articles. Catullus, Horace and the Roman Senate all are there; so are musica rockica, Georgius Bush and cadavera animata, a k a zombies. You can read in Latin about hangman (homo suspensus), paper airplanes (aeroplanum chartaceum) and magic 8-balls (pila magica 8), as well as about famous Italians like Leonardo da Vinci and the Super Mario brothers."

Engineering Librarians Lunch

It is some time since I last attended an Engineering Librarians Group meeting so when Susanna sent me an invitation recently I jumped at the chance. I was able to combine work and pleasure as not only did I meet up with old friends but also Tamara from Nature Publishing Group was there to tell us about her company's new and enhanced online products - as well as paper based.

Coincidentally, on my return to my office I was working on a wiki for 23 Things @ Central when I came across this post:
Though del.icio.us is great, and I use it all the time, if the student happens to be science-oriented,(Connotea is a fantastic tool that was created by the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, etc.) specifically as a social bookmarking tool for scientists. And, unlike del.icio.us, it is set up to automatically retrieve bibliographic information from several recognized sites (PubMed, etc.).

Thanks for lunch Tamara. And without your presence I would probably never have become aware of this tool.

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 Blogs

From Library Journal is an article by Melissa L. Rethlefsen, Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us, I found this, and other useful information, on the iLibrarian blog which contains lots of news and resources on Library 2.0 and the information revolution. If you are "doing" 23 Things there is much material here that could be used.

The Library is alive and well

From ResourceShelf comes this article about the increase in numbers of people who visit libraries in Colorado. There is often talk about the demise of the library because of the rise of access to broadband and the ease by which search engines can be used to find information but this article should be compulsory reading for any of the powers-that-be who are thinking of cutting back on libraries in academic institutions, preferring to allocate them only virtual space.

Libraries attract record crowds by resourceshelf

Despite the rise of broadband Internet access in homes across the country and the ability to Google just about anything from anywhere, libraries are attracting record numbers of visitors.

Nationwide, visits to and items checked out of libraries are increasing steadily. According to the American Library Association, nearly 1.3 billion library patrons checked out more than 2 billion items in fiscal year 2005, the most recent figures available. That compares with 1.15 billion visitors checking out 1.7 billion items in fiscal year 2000.

Colorado 's 114 public libraries saw just shy of 28 million visitors in 2006, up slightly from 27.8 million visitors in 2005.

Source: Denver Post

Video tools

Central TAFE's "23 Things" team has had a lot of fun playing around with various online video tools, mostly visible on YouTube. In particular there have been some hilarious mashups using JibJab. It's fortunate that our colleagues (and bosses) have a sense of humour.

To find videos why not try the Google Video Search Engine? This article from Research Buzz tells us more about it:

** Fun With Google Video
<http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2007/09/17/fun-with-google-video/>

As you probably know, the Google Video Search Engine (http://video.google.com/) now encompasses other video sites, like YouTube. But if you don't want to search anything but Google Video, you can go to the advanced search page and specify that you want video only from Google.com, or you can use site:google.com from the home page.

That's how I discovered that site:google.com works as a standalone search. That's also how I discovered that Google Video has something over 4.8 million videos (just over 4.9 million if you turn off filtering). But if you start sorting the results by anything but relevance, the result count drops to about 333. So I couldn't get a handle on what the highest-rated video was or how many videos have been rated lately.

If you use inurl:video.google.com at Google, you'll see that the main search engine gives a result count of about 1.5 million pages.

Hooray for Perth

Perth has been successful in scoring the venue for the first Australian Podcamp, billed as the new media community UnConference that helps connect people interested in blogging, podcasting, social networks, video on the net, and new media together to learn, share, and grow their new media skills.
Podcamp Perth will take place on October 27 & 28 at Central TAFE (140 Royal St, East Perth WA 6004).
(Oh dear, that's where my new offices are. Does that mean I'll have to camp there over the weekend?)

The last two unconferences (Perth BarCamp and Perth UnConference) were very successful affairs and we are lucky to have another, with organisers who are leaders in their fields. To find out more visit the wiki or the blog.

New Library Building

This may look like something surreal out of Second Life but it is a winning design in real life.
Future System's winning Prague library I want it! In one of the shots it reminds me of a giant Teletubby looking over the treetops at Prague. Whatever it looks like it is a truly innovative design. I hope librarians also had some input as to how the interior works - something often overlooked in current practice.

Research Buzz newsletter

The Research Buzz newsletter always has so much of interest that I find it difficult to keep up. This week's contribution includes:

• New Wiki for Installing Software
• BlogTalkRadio
• New features in Google Spreadsheet

Collaboration

I'm so glad that Kathryn Greenhill (Librarians Matter) is "doing" 23 Things with her workmates at the same time as I am experimenting with it at Central. She writes such fascinating posts and I don't need to think - just send my participants to read her blog. Her recent post What’s new about Library 2.0? Shift in power had me thinking about the problems that I'm having trying to persuade colleagues - and management - of the value of immersing oneself in new things. Thanks Kate. I know I am not alone.

Second Life demo

I did a demo of Second Life for Adult Education Week recently. There was a disappointing turnout - I don't think it was promoted very well - but the 1 lecturer, 2 psychologists and a smattering of Library staff who attended were entertained and, I think, persuaded to try it for themselves. I was lucky to come across a couple of avatars in a library in SL and one of them entertained us by turning himself into a multi-coloured dragon and several other incarnations. I get a lot of pleasure out of this programme and am doing another virtual librarianship course starting in next week. There is so much to learn about the world and how to do things in it. My new home PC is in for repairs (it went into a regular reboot cycle and couldn't get started) so I am currently unable to visit SL from home. It's very frustrating. Can't play Oblivion either and am having to spend more time on housework!!

23 Things @ Central

We're in week 3 of this programme and the 9 participants have put up a variety of blogs reflecting their tastes and interests. I'm finding out a lot about them as they explore their 23 things and make new discoveries. Marsha advised us to take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid. This turned out to be quite an eye-opener for me

You're Pale Fire!

by Vladimir Nabokov

You're really into poetry and the interpretation thereof. Along the road of life, you have had several identity crises which make it very unclear who you are, let alone how to interpret poetry.

You probably came from a foreign country, but then again you seem foreign to everyone in ways unrelated to immigration.

Most people think you're quite funny, but maybe you're just sick. Talking to you ends up being much like playing a round of the popular board game Clue.

How little I know myself!

Kathryn Greenhill's latest post has some great pointers about how to find time to do the 23 Things:10 ways to find time for 23 Things

Change of Job

I've been persuaded to accept a secondment to a Systems Librarian position with the LRSN for 2 days a week. Not sure if I'm doing the right thing as I'm very happy and perhaps too comfortable in my current job. There will be a bit more money on my payslip (it's level 5) and I've said that I'll try it until the end of the year so both sides can see if I am the right person for the job. I'll continue to work for TAFE the remaining 3 days and it makes sense that I'll be transferring to the eCentral campus. I will miss my current colleagues at Leederville. I've worked with them for 5 years and we've built up a cohesive team that is not afraid of challenges and whose members all have a lovely sense of humour.