Useful tips from Library Stuff

Average Library Use Calculator

"Have you ever thought about the monetary value of your own library use? The Maine State Library offers an interesting take on this. Go to www.maine.gov/msl/services/calculator.htm and take a look at how your average library use is valued." (Holmen Courier - 10/12/06)

More about Web 2.0 (and of course Library 2.0) is discussed in this paper. An alternative term is Participatory Network - less confusing than Library 2.0

Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation

"This document describes the conversational model of libraries, provides an overview of current Web 2.0 technologies, and a brief discussion of Library 2.0. Specific challenges and opportunities of participatory networking are reviewed. Finally, the authors recommend the creation of a shared participatory network of libraries. This network would not only experiment with new collaborative web technologies, but work with library organizations and vendors to speed innovation in traditional library systems. Finally the network test bed would provide shared infrastructure to provide participatory technologies, such as Wikis, blogs and RSS feeds to libraries for inclusions in their day to day services." - "American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy Information Institute of Syracuse - Syracuse University’s school of Information Studies - Sept 2006) - via It's All Good

Library 2.0

I have done a lot of reading while preparing for my presentation on Blogs and Wikis at the LRSN forum next month. Nearly everything leads me to find out more about the catchphrase “Library 2.0”.

It was only recently that I first heard about this phenomenon so I brought it up at our monthly Librarians’ Forum at Perth this morning – only to find out that, although we had been discussing several ideas that are important to Library 2.0, my colleagues were not aware of the term.

I’ve cobbled together some links to further reading that I have found worthwhile. If we want to be seen as being on top of new ideas then constant awareness of what’s being posted on the web is important and we should all monitor our RSS feeds regularly.

Library 2.0 Links

http://mchabib.blogspot.com/2006/08/academic-library-20-concept-models.html

Academic Library 2.0 Concept Models (Basic v2 and Detailed)

posted by Michael C. Habib @ 4:27 PM

http://wiki.library2.net/index.php/Main_Page

Library 2.0 Wiki (not much in it)

Library 2.0 Sarah Houghton’s (LiB) definition of L2

“Library 2.0 simply means making your library’s space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs. Examples of where to start include blogs, gaming nights for teens, and collaborative photo sites. The basic drive is to get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives…to make the library a destination and not an afterthought.”

Key principles

• Browser + Web 2.0 Applications + Connectivity = Full-featured OPAC
• Harness the library user in both design and implementation of services
• Library users should be able to craft and modify library provided services
• Companies wanting to do business with public or academic libraries should not be creating proprietary software; Library 2.0 is not a closed concept.
• Constant change is replacing the older model of upgrade cycles
• Beta is forever
• Harvest and integrate ideas and products from peripheral fields into library service models
• Continue to examine and improve services and be willing to replace them at any time with newer and better services.
• Library 2.0 is a disruptive idea
• Rigidity breeds failure
Harness The Long Tail

http://del.icio.us/tag/library2.0

All items tagged Library 2.0 in del.icio.us

Better Library Services for More People

http://digbig.com/4ngdn

One thing, however, is crystal clear—our discussion of Library 2.0 and the debate that's followed has but one goal and that is: better library services for more people.

What we do want is to discuss and search for ways to reach that goal; to improve library services and reach more users—without leaving any existing users behind. This is not an easy goal, but one that should be discussed. It would be great if we can do this in a constructive and productive manner.

Eli at AADL sums it up very well in a blog post:

Because Web 2.0 is the product of increasingly smarter software development tools and progressively more robust open-source code libraries, inventing and implementing a new Library 2.0-style service requires more creativity than it does cash. Furthermore, the ideas of Web 2.0 are based around sharing code, access, and services; the stuff that the bigger libraries do over the next few years are likely to become available to smaller libraries much faster than the Internet achieved its current ubiquity.

11 Reasons Why Library 2.0 Exists and Matters

http://digbig.com/4ngdp

Online Community and Libraries, Parts I & II

http://digbig.com/4ngdr

Online Community and Libraries, Parts III & IV

http://digbig.com/4ngds

Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries

http://www.webology.ir/2006/v3n2/a25.html

Bringing Information Skills Training Up To Date

There are some great ideas here. I haven’t been able to download the audio files but the slides blew me away.

"Delivering Top-Notch Technology Training for Your Patrons" presented on August 18, 2006 by Brenda Hough, Technology Coordinator at the Northeast Kansas Library System and Michael Porter (aka Library Man), Training and Support Coordinator at OCLC Western. Sponsored by the Johnson County Library.

Archive of Previous OPAL Events about
Library and Information Science Topics and Trends

• Streaming audio, text chat, and presentation slides about Tech Training (playback time of 56 minutes)
• Original WMA audio recording about Tech Training (8.4 MB file; playback time of 56 minutes)
• Converted MP3 audio recording about Tech Training (22.4 MB file; playback time of 56 minutes)
• Presentation slides about Tech Training.

Text Chat log of the session about Tech Training.

The Internet - Past and Future

1. New from Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Future of the Internet II

http://digbig.com/4nbfa

2. People around the world are coming together on Friday to celebrate the world wide web.

Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay, said she wanted people to reflect on how the web had changed their lives.

http://digbig.com/4nbfb

Citation Data

Scholar for Firefox is now ZOTERO, currently in beta. It works with most library catalogues, some popular dot-coms such as Amazon, and many gated databases.

http://www.zotero.org/

It captures citation information you want from a web page automatically, without typing or cutting and pasting on your part, and saves this information directly into the correct fields (e.g., author, title, etc.) of your Zotero library

This looks interesting but I haven’t been able to test it yet. It could become a very useful tool.

To Google or not to Google

When teaching web search skills I try to impress on my students the need to use more than one search engine for the best results. That's why I was impressed to see this entry from a blog by the Librarian in Black:

Ten Reasons Librarians Should Use Ask.com Instead of Google
http://digbig.com/4nbfm

I find myself using Ask.com more and more of late. It’s so easy to use a variety of search tools using the drop-down list in the Firefox toolbar.

ClickO6

Last week the ALIA Conference, ClickO6, was held in Perth. I have long thought that ALIA is more relevant to public and school libraries than to special and academic libraries and this conference did nothing to dispel my opinion. Central TAFE purchased three subscriptions and library staff were given the opportunity to attend the sessions that interested them most. I chose presentations on blogs, wikis and web design; the first two were repeats of presentations I had seen several weeks ago and the third offered very little that was new. In the exhibition hall various library-related vendors were well represented and I gathered some literature about those that interested me. (There weren't many freebies left as this was the third day of the conference. I did, however, gather enough pens to keep me writing for a year or more) Then I did a very stupid thing and left my "showbag" in one of the seminar rooms, not becoming aware of my loss until I was waiting for a taxi to take me back to work so there was no time to go back and look for it. All in all it was a wasted morning for me. I know a lot of time and effort had gone into it (one of my colleagues was on the organising committee) but I won't put my hand up to attend another similar conference. Several years ago the Health, Special and Law Librarians Group held a conference in Perth and that was streets ahead of this one in interest and variety.

ResourceShelf

Designing Usable, Self-Paced e-Learning Courses: A Practical Guide
By Michael Feldstein, SUNY Learning Network, and Lisa Neal, eLearn Magazine

This guide was primarily designed to help teams of instructional designers and content experts create effective, self-paced e-learning. It teaches best practices for improving usability that can be applied by any instructional designers or content experts and was created so that no prior knowledge of usability is required to use the techniques. (Great article, precisely summarises key approaches and useable processes!)

Source: eLearn Magazine

In July, The World eBook Fair took place offering more than 330,000 FREE full text books, all in PDF format, all ready for downloading, bookmarking, sharing. We’ve learned that another World ebook Fair will take place in October. It’s sponsored by The World eBook Library Consortia that offers these materials year round for a small fee.

From a news release:

5,000 new eBooks for cellphones are being added this week and this is only 1% of the hoped for 500,000 eBooks being targeted for release on the first day of October in honor of International Book Fair Month. Up from the 1/3 million eBook files offered for download, all free of charge, on July 4, in response to requests of eBook readers around the world, more eBooks were added to include more modern selections via commercial sources and a wider variety of formats, which could total 1/2 million eBooks in October. If all goes perfectly well there will be 1/2 million free eBooks, AND over 100,000 from various commercial eBook sources.

Earth Science Sites of the week

I was pleased to receive Mark Francek's weekly newsletter again this week after a long break for the USA summer holidays. I regularly forward this to the lecturers in Mining & Geoscience, Environmental Science and Surveying at Central TAFE and many of them have remarked on its usefulness. The website is http://webs.cmich.edu/resgi. Mark is Professor of Geography at Central Michigan University.

Why not recreate this as a blog with an RSS feed Mark?

Feeding the OPAC

Some time this summer, the TOCRoSS project will release open source software that will be capable of delivering an RSS service to push publisher and e-journal table of contents data directly into library catalogs, allowing users to find journal articles just like they find books. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK is developing the service with publisher Emerald and library supplier Talis.
From LibraryJournal.com Journals in the Time of Google
By Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born — April 15, 2006

What is Pandora?

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It's powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell it one of your favorite songs or artists and it will launch a streaming station of music in a similar vein.

You can vote for songs that you like or dislike, bookmark songs to hear again any time or buy them from iTunes or Amazon.com with just a few clicks. Great to use as background music any time or create playlists (from your bookmarked songs) for parties.

Honey, honey

Our dear friend, David, visited us at home last Sunday bearing gifts of pure Jarrah honey and honey and sandalwood. He's a firm believer in alternative medicines and had read a newspaper article proclaiming the benefits of honey as an antibiotic - particularly against Staphylococcus aureus. It sounded ludicrous but he advised Tim to rub it on his feet and let it soak in to let the benefits permeate his whote system. Feeling a bit of a nana Tim followed his instructions that evening and covered his feet with plastic supermarket bags to keep the stickiness off the furniture while he watched TV.

Next day he was on his feet all day presenting an OH&S training course. This usually leaves him with very sore ankles (arthritis has affected them, he has collapsed arches and doctors have recommended surgery to correct the problem) and he is almost unable to walk. He walked in the door that night without a stick and proclaimed that he was pain-free! His knee wound was also less angry-looking and puffy. Each evening this week he's followed the same procedure, except for last night. Today he is using his stick again so plans to use the honey treatment every night and see whether he can maintain the improvement to his mobility. He will be in Melbourne training all next week and the following week will be on an oil rig in the Timor Sea.

Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in their database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. Good directories are hard to find and require a lot of maintenance by their creators. This one shows promise.

Does anyone out there use Moodle? Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. Sandy Dailakis was enquiring about it recently and I’d like to know if anyone has experience with it.

The Library 2.0 Reading List from Squidoo has dozens of links to thoughts and ideas for using Web 2.0 in the Library. Web 2.0 is about finding new ways to interact and collaborate on the internet. An example is 5 Suggestions for Upgrading to Library 2.0 (or Some Easy Steps to Get Started...Really) from an article in Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology A Weblog by Michael Stephens

Mary Ellen Bates Search Tip of the Month doesn't necessarily come out every month. The latest edition is for July and August 2006. She always provides insightful comments and it's worth signing up for her newsletter or adding her site to your RSS feeds.

Surprising Search Patterns
A new study questions the common assumption that search engines control the hierarchy of the Internet.
By Kate Greene in Technology Review

Writely is a web-based service that allows for the creation and sharing of documents in a sophisticated word-processor-like interface. I love the idea of being able to access documents at home that I have started at work (or vice versa). Sign-up is free and once you have logged in you can start a new document or upload one from your computer.

Internet Resources Newsletter has many, many links of interest on a wide variety of subjects. There are far too many to list here but I recommend that you subscribe to it and pick the topics that interest you most.

After another week off I'm back at work again. This time it was all pleasure. Tom (my son) and his wife, Nessie were on a visit to Perth from Melbourne. This is the first time I've seen them since his accident last year. He has made an amazing recovery through sheer guts and determination but still needs to have half his pelvis replaced. I hate seeing him limping and in obvious pain but it doesn't seem to get him down and his presence in our house was like a breath of fresh air.

My iP0d continues to give me pleasure and I read all I can find about its uses. I can't imagine wanting to watch videos on the tiny screen so I'll probably stick with my 2G Nano - until eye attachments are available enabling large screen viewing. I've come across several mentions of the use of iPods as educational tools but can't imagine that they'd be of much value in a library. See iPod has new role as educational tool from Engadget.

A Wiki symposium - what next? I know that wikis are hot news and I look forward to reading the papers available from WikiSym 2006: Papers and Presentations. Some are already online and others, I hope, will be available after the end of August. I'd love to attend but Denmark (in Europe, not Australia) is rather far away.

Free web-based tools can be very useful - particularly if you don't want to be tied to Microsoft products. ResourceShelf has posted a link to a growing list of Zoho tools including word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools. The full list is awesome.

A report in one of my favourite RSS fees, BBC News, relates that Time magazine list the 50 coolest websites. "Many of the websites chosen for 2006 are examples of so-called web 2.0 sites, which give users tools to create and share content online." I've never heard of most and will enjoy investigating them.

My husband Tim now takes his antibiotics orally and his infection site shows marked improvement. Sue Benson, his microbiologist, must be a miracle worker. Not many years ago he wouldn't have survived golden staph. Thank goodness all that is behind us and we can get back to a normal life again.

Two weeks leave is never enough. I spent the first week running around for my mother to doctors and immigration interviews and the second trying to recharge my batteries.

Tim (my husband) is home though for 2 weeks he had daily intravenous doses of antibiotics administered by a series of charming nurses. The drugs would have cost us over $250 per day - thank goodness for private health insurance. His knee is looking much better. The swelling has gone down and the redness receded and he manages to get around quite well - sometimes even without crutches.

Because of the treatment we couldn't go away on a much needed holiday but were able to take a break of one night at a lovely B&B in the Perth Hills, Falls Retreat, run by our friends Jenette and Peter. We spent the night in a delightful self-contained suite that was snug and warm despite the winter temperatures and rain outside. Peter cooked dinner - a simply delicious curry made with fresh, authentic ingredients, not just the bottled curry sauces that we usually use - and they treated us to a slap-up breakfast served in the suite next morning, as they do with all their paying guests. Thanks guys, we had a great time.

On my return to the library I found an email from Ralph Mattner, librarian at Swan TAFE, advising me about Swan's Community Services Blog http://swantafecs.blogspot.com/. He also pointed me to these two sites http://jokay.wikispaces.com and http://jstuffed.blogspot.com , great for anyone interested in the Learning Community.

ResourceShelf this week contains links to searchable databases from some of the major art museums around the world at http://digbig.com/4mfck.

The ResourceShelf newsletter out today provides a link to an article UK’s Resource Discovery Network Now Known as Intute – it is well worth a read. The same article also posts links to news about “Internet Detective” which Central TAFE hopes to utilise in its new online Information Skills tutorials on WebCT and the launch of a second ESL Virtual Training Suite tutorial.

Tomorrow I will be on leave for 2 weeks. Tim is coming home this weekend and we have a lot of catching up to do. He contracted a golden staph. infection after undergoing knee replacement surgery and it's been an uphill battle for 6 weeks while he's been in hospital fighting the infection. He's not out of the woods yet and will probably have to continue on antibiotics for 2-3 years. Currently he receives them intravenously but eventually he hopes to be able to take them orally.

Mum will also be home next week. She has had a pacemaker installed and has taken some time to recover. She has spent the past 2 weeks in a beautiful nursing home where she's had a room flooded with sunlight and nurses ready to run round catering to her every whim. It will be hard for her to come back to reality!

Virus Attack

In spite of all I've read about the dangers of downloading files from unknown sites I stupidly downloaded a file earlier this week that infected my laptop with a Trojan virus. Fortunately I have an antivirus installed (why didn't that stop it?) and was able to clean up my files without having to reinstall the operating system.

Read the article Understanding Hidden Threats: Corrupted Software Files http://www.uscert.gov/cas/tips/ST06-006.html and make sure it doesn't happen to you!

Beatles Music

Still looking for Beatles music for my iPod I came across a suggestion to use these search terms “index of” + “mp3″ + “beatles” -html -htm -php. This was in an essay about advanced Google searching at http://www.cwire.org/data-mining-using-google/ so I was actually working at the time. There were several sites from where I was able to download free MP3 files and also some where they could be purchased ridiculously cheaply.

http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jul06/Mattison.shtml has an article about finding classical music but there are many ideas for finding music in all types of genres using a variety of search engines.