Is your library mobile ready?

Think about implementing low-cost or even no-cost solutions to support users of smart mobile devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and others. Possible applications include text or instant messaging, alternative web sites that can be easily read by smart mobile devices, a mobile friendly OPAC or online catalog. and mobile-friendly Web sites as reference resources.

Articles:

• Mobile technologies, mobile users: Implications for academic libraries (PDF)
• Libraries on the move: Library Mobile Applications (PDF)

NJ Multimedia Firm Releases New Metasearch Tool

NJ Multimedia Firm Releases New Metasearch Tool [http://www.gnosisarts.com/m0rpheme.html]: m0rpheme is a metasearch tool conceived by the developers of Gnosis Arts Multimedia Communications LLC. The tool enables you to compare searches across four different search engines [Gnostix Navigator, hakia, Gnostikon, Dogpile] for more comprehensive search results.

The Gnostikon finds .edu and .gov domains, based on keyword. A superb research tool when you want information from only the most reliable sources.

Search hakia, the semantic search engine. One of the first of its kind, hakia has many features of comprehensive, relevant semantic search, including images, a "who else has searched for this term" feature. and a "recommended most relevant site" feature.

Try Dogpile, a metasearch engine created by the developers at InfoSpace.Com. Dogile delivers results from several of the major search engines for more comprehensive search results.

The Gnostix Navigator delivers search results from the nation's top academic libraries. It is a custom-built mini search engine - called a search roll. College and university databases frequently contain more reliable and contain more thorough, rigorous information.

[Source: m0rpheme: opiate of the masterminds]

Serials Solutions to Offer ebrary Titles Through KnowledgeWorks

Today, ebrary(R), a leading provider of e-content services and technology, has announced that it has become the first e-book provider to become Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks Certified. As a KnowledgeWorks Certified content provider, ebrary will provide more flexible ways for customers to find and access titles in their subscription e-book databases through Serials Solutions e-resource access and management services. Serials Solutions and ebrary's mutual customers may now access their subscription content directly through Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks, the most comprehensive and authoritative knowledgebase of content for the library market. Read more here...

College P2P: A Hard Lesson

A new bill threatens to crack down on P2P downloading at colleges, but administrators say that Congress is misguided. Read more...

College Opportunity and Affordability Act

VALENJ: From Open Stacks to Open Source

VALENJ: From Open Stacks to Open Source - Discussion of the Virtual Academic Library Environment (VALE) Open Source ILS initiative.

State tech Web site in danger of closure

State tech Web site in danger of closure: Librarian asks $1 million from Legislature

A free, state-funded Web site popular with fledgling biotechno logy companies, small business entrepreneurs, scholars, students and medical professionals will go off-line Feb. 29 unless the Legislature and Gov. Jon Corzine come up with $1 million to keep it going.

That was the warning from State Librarian Norma Blake, who described the New Jersey Knowledge Initiative as the only state- fund site of its kind in the nation. It is provided free for use by anyone at 50 New Jersey college libraries.

To read the entire article, click here!

State tech Web site in danger of closure: Librarian asks $1 million from Legislature
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
BY TOM HESTERStar-Ledger Staff
[http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-9/1201671443279680.xml&coll=1]

Library to receive grant for software upgrade

The College of New Jersey was awarded a grant to possibly begin updating the library's system software. On Sept. 25 the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent agency of the federal government, announced the College would receive a $24,417 grant in order to investigate the development of an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Read the entire article here.

The Signal. Student Newspaper of The College of New Jersey. Issue date: 10/31/07 Section: News

Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium

Carnegie Mellon University is well-known for their excellent School of Information Sciences and since 2001 they have sponsored the Digital Library Colloquium lecture series. This site allows users to view the various lectures in their entirety and learn more about the participants through short biographical sketches. The subjects covered run the gamut from digital library initiatives to the intriguing subject of creative commons and machine-readable law. Visitors can browse through the lectures by year, and they will most likely find something that piques their own interest in the field of information science. It's an ambitious effort, and one that will be enjoyed by persons in the field and those who might be thinking about joining the field in the future. >From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2007. http://scout.wisc.edu/

Symposium on the Future of the Integrated Library System

Symposium on the Future of the Integrated Library System - was a very successful event and broke expected attendance numbers undoubtedly due to the timeliness of the content. Those who were unable to attend now have a second chance to hear the presentations due to Lincoln Trail Libraries System having recorded the sessions and having now placed the podcasts on a website for access by all: http://lincolntrail.typepad.com/ilssymposium/ Included are presentations by: Carl Grant, President of CARE Affiliateson the ILSmarketplace, from a vendor perspective and a second presentation on OpenSource Software as well as presentations by Karen Schneider, author of Free Range Librarian, Rob McGee, President of RMG Consultants, Chip Nilges, OCLC and several others. "I thoroughly enjoyed this Symposium and believe there was valuable content for all librarians." said Carl Grant, President of CARE Affiliates, "I know I've talked to many people who said they wished they could have attended and I think it is to be commended that they now have the chance to virtually attend those presentations through the excellent work of the Lincoln Trail Libraries System."

Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

Social bookmarking and tagging boost participation
By Melissa L. Rethlefsen -- Library Journal, 9/15/2007

Traditional library web products, whether online public access catalogs, library databases, or even library web sites, have long been rigidly controlled and difficult to use. Patrons regularly prefer Google's simple interface. Now social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative, well-organized information and their patrons' web experience.

A very interesting and thought provoking article. Read the entire article here: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

Teaching Portfolios for Librarians

This Friday, October 19, is the deadline to register for the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) online seminar, "Teaching Portfolios for Librarians," to be offered October 29-November 16, 2007.

Teaching Portfolios for Librarians will introduce the concept and structure of teaching portfolios, which are dynamic works of selected documentation and commentary that demonstrate teaching performance. This course will lead participants in activities designed to help them compose a teaching philosophy, write a portfolio narrative, and outline a plan for supporting documentation. Participants will have the opportunity to examine the mentoring process and identify strategies for successful mentoring and explore the value and use of the teaching portfolio in academic librarianship for self-improvement and tenure/promotion.

More info (including registration) is available here: http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlproftools/portfolios.cfm

Storage: From Highway Robbery to Runaway Bargain

Interesting item from PC Magazine (2 October 2007 pg. 21) - "Back in 1956, Don Larson pitched the only World Series perfect game, Elvis broke into the music charts with "heart-break Hotel", and a 5MB IBM hard drive cost $50,000. The price of digital storage has plummeted: Now you can have a terabyte for less than $200. If car prices had followed the same curve, you could buy an SUV with pocket change."

Implications of this have been obvious to the library world - Google Book Search is possible (along with Flickr, etc.) because storage costs are a small fraction of what they once were.

Article here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2184654,00.asp

Watch Out for Online Ads That Watch You

Online ads are not only booming--and scrolling, spinning, shaking, shouting, and singing--they are also watching you even as you are viewing them, capturing your click patterns to create more detailed profiles than traditional browser cookies do.

Behavioral marketing networks such as BlueLithium, Revenue Science, and Tacoda display ads based on your browsing habits. Spending on these behavioral ads will grow from $1.5 billion in 2007 to more than $2 billion next year, according to eMarketer, a market research firm. And the company expects video ads to account for more than a third of that total.

This could be a topic for an information literacy session...

[Information in this post has been taken driectly from an article in PC World, Watch Out for Online Ads That Watch You: New Web ads respond to your activities--and this has privacy advocates worried, written by Dan Tynan, March 2007, p. 26 - Available online: Watch Out for Online Ads That Watch You

MILEY CYRUS is pregnant!

It is not as if we librarians need another reason to illustrate to students the pitfalls of the Internet, but what the heck, here is another one anyway!

It seems that someone altered an article from J14 magazine, changing the text to read that "Hannah Montana" star Miley Cyrus is pregnant. Needless to say, publicist and J14 deny the rumor. Before the denial however, the damage was done and the rumor was all over the Internet and Blogosphere. As I always point out to students, don't believe anything you see on the Web unless it is from a verifiable, reliable source.

Before passing on something contained in an email, http://www.snopes.com/snopes.asp is a great place to check to dispel the urban legend hoax.

Google Books: Collect, share, and discover books

By this time and I am sure than most, if not all, of you are familiar with Google Book Search (GBS). Putting aside temporarily the intellectual property issues that have been raised by many, I would like to bring you up to date on a new feature of GBS. As of 6 September 2007, some new features have been that go beyond search so you can collect, share, and discover new books.

In effect, GBS now allows you to create your own online library of books, and then share your collection with others. For example, an academic library or professor might create a library of nursing books available online. For example, I have created a short list or library of books related to the history of nursing. Click this link to see my example. Keep in mind that many of the full view digitized book available in GBS are non-copyrighted because they have aged out. That means they are no longer covered by copyright law. Even though this may be the case, the books may still be valuable for research purposes.

Google has also launched a way to let users select copy and embed segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web page.
The addition of these features makes GBS a more robust and useful product. The information contained in this post is taken from Collect, share, and discover books Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager 9/06/2007 06:33:00 AM http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/collect-share-and-discover-books.html

A few other helpful links:

Create and search your own library on Google Book Search

About Google Book Search

Steal this book? Don't bother

When it comes to outsmarting the content establishment, your library may be your best accomplice.

Libraries are offering more free search services, database access, articles, photos, eBooks, audiobooks, music and museum passes than ever. Chances are you are buying, subscribing to, or stealing something you can get for free with a library card.

While general search engines may seem more convenient, pointed search tools can provide more reliable information more quickly than repeated searches in which the user tries out different terms. According to Gary Price, founder and editor of the ResourceShelf blog and director of online resources at Ask.com, casting that wide Web net can pick up spam and unreliable information presenting itself as an authority. It may also be burying or missing good information.

For example, do you call it soda or pop? The soft drink industry or the beverage industry? Databases have a structure to take care of that problem. Many have a controlled vocabulary of terms that a human indexer assigns to each article, said Price.

While indexes of articles from both general publications and academic journals can be found on the Internet, users are often brought to an abstract summary of the article including publication info, but not the full text. The majority of library databases offer full texts of articles, so when you do find what you are looking for, you can immediately have access to all of it.

Searching in an academic realm has also become more user friendly. You no longer have to bother with Boolean search terms or complicated retrieval options. Database search methods have been replaced with easy point and click filtering in addition to the usual time frame option. Results offer links.

All of the information in this post is taken directly from an article written by Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com dated 23 July 2007. The entire article is available by clicking on this link.

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

I just want to take a minute to share this electronic resource with you. As a librarian, I am always on the look out for excellent quality resources to share with students and faculty. This is indeed a superlative effort:

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/] - In 1953, the Abraham Lincoln Association published The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, a multi-volume set of Lincoln's correspondence, speeches, and other writings. Roy P. Basler and his editorial staff, with the continued support of the association, spent five years transcribing and annotating Lincoln's papers. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln represented the first major scholarly effort to collect and publish the complete writings of Abraham Lincoln, and the edition has remained an invaluable resource to Lincoln scholars. Through the efforts of the Abraham Lincoln Association, the edition is now available in electronic form.

The Collection may be searched by simple words or phrases, Boolean searches, proximity searches, and word index to find the occurence of unique words.

The information in this post is provided by the hosting website of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.

Consensus: Podcasting Has No 'Inherent' Pedagogic Value

Consensus: Podcasting Has No 'Inherent' Pedagogic Value - A bevy of recent studies on students' experience listening to recorded lectures via podcasts confirms what many lecturers already know: that the pedagogical value of podcasts depends almost entirely on student motivation and the learning "context" of the application.

In a comprehensive survey of the latest academic studies on the impact of podcasting on learning and teaching, Ashley Deal, a researcher in the Office of Technology for Education & the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University, found that podcasting follows the pattern of many campus technology innovations."As with any educational technology, whether and how podcasting impacts the quality of the learning experience and/or educational outcomes depends largely upon how the technology is put to use," Deal wrote.

So, does podcasting enhance education? "The answer to that question depends entirely on the educational context, including goals and appropriate learning activities, and on how the tool is implemented," said Deal."Podcasting does not contain any inherent value. It is only valuable inasmuch as it helps the instructor and students reach their educational goals, by facilitating thoughtful, engaging learning activities that are designed to work in support of those goals."

Citation: Paul McCloskey, "Consensus: Podcasting Has No 'Inherent' Pedagogic Value," Campus Technology, 7/9/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=49018

A Provost and Librarian Walk Into a Meeting...

Dear Chief Academic Officer (who isn’t my own):

I’m the head college librarian. I’ve been here for years, even outlasted several provosts. Just got in good with the last one — then she left. Now, a new person is on his way and I don’t want to lose any ground. Should I meet with him right away, and what should I say? Please help.

Speaker after speaker in the audience posed variations on that scenario Monday at a session of the American Library Association’s annual conference that was part roundtable, part “Ask Amy.” During “The Art of Persuasion: Strategies for Effective Communication with Chief Academic Officers,” organized by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the provosts and vice presidents for academic affairs on the panel shared a list of their do’s and don’ts when approaching new college officials in their positions.

To read the entire article, and the do's and don'ts, click here.

The information in this post was taken directly from an article written by Elia Powers in inside highered.com dated 26 June 2007.

When ‘Digital Natives’ Go to the Library

College and university librarians got some unconventional advice Saturday: Play more video games.

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today’s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them.

George M. Needham, vice president for member services of the Online Computer Library Center, stressed that he was not suggesting that college libraries “tear up the stacks to put in arcades,” but that they rethink many assumptions.

“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said.

Fortunately, Needham offered thoughtful suggestions on how librarians can meet digital natives on their turf. You can read these, and the entire article (from which all of the information in this post was taken) by clicking...here (Inside Higher Ed, 25 June 2007, written by Scott Jaschik