campuscast

Egads…it looks like the web 2.0 / social networking movement is really picking up steam in academia.  There seems to be a new online lecture-cast platform that’s unveiled every week.  Inevitably it’s an encouraging movement, as colleges and universities are realizing they have the ability to capture lightning in a bottle as it strikes on campus.  Librarians are cashing in as well, as increasingly we are the ones who are doing the recording, organizing and disseminating of such content.

The movement toward increased lecture-cast only makes perfect sense.  A special event happens on campus, and with the permission to record and eventually post said lecture, an institution not only contributes to the overall body of knowledge, but also promotes itself and faculty in the process.

Notable platforms

• YouTube – EDU – With brilliant examples like the periodic table of videos, more and more schools are uploading content, forcing YouTube to organize a separate space for the professional geeks.
• FORA.tv – Focuses more on the prestigious speakers than the institutions. Important indeed.
• Academic Earth – currently featuring lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.
• iTunes U – Virtual beheamoth that it is, iTunes U is a subset of the iTunes Store contaning massive amounts of lectures, supplementary course info, and stuff of a general academic nature.  Typically free, of course.

academics + web 2.0 = academia.edu

One functionality our faculty continually requests is the ability to have some sort of space of self-promotion aside from our Web presence; short of time spent training them on developing Wikis (they routinely don’t enough time to spare) or attending meetings centering on  how were going to find the time to attend additional meetings for proposing the creation of an institutional intranet, they still lack a veritable and virtual posterboard for themselves and their research.

Academia.edu is a an online directory of institutions and researchers who want to promote their work in hopes of finding contacts and collaboration.  A typical Web 2.0 app, functionality seems to be fairly complete: add content to your profile, upload papers, talks, adding folks as contacts, as well as research interests. It even boasts the addition of such illuminaries as Paul Krugman, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking.  Too good to be true?

Academia.edu appears to be in its initial launch and is growing exponentially.  Browse or scroll a list of participating institutions and researchers;  departments are displayed hierarchically.  Aside from the browsing capability, the only minus of the site is that it’s not very intuitive or well-explained in terms of directions, from the signup process to the display.  Working out the kinks, I’m sure.

It’s a good service though, one that prompts the question why it wasn’t done earlier.  But I suppose that’s the nature of academia; ironically, we surprisingly (ironically?) just haven’t got the hang of that self-promotion thing.

LibraryThing’s OSC

I’ve been meaning to write something about LibraryThing for awhile; it’s a very cool site that brings together people who share an interest in captivating stories. How to find them, those who read them, the ways we catalog and organize them, and simply appreciating them.

LT is self-described as “the world’s largest book club”. That may be so, as it is undeniably a social networking site connecting readers and librarians and publishers the world over. The vast amount of members connecting through the interesting libraries, friends, groups and comment options to which one can subscribe enable limitless interactivity with members and their representative collections. This would be LibraryThing’s strength.

LT is countering this strength by embracing a new challenge. It is seeking to replace, gradually, the Dewey Decimal System by developing a scheme called the Open Shelves Classification, a modern, collaborative, and free organization of published works. Certainly it is an ambitious, long-term project requiring great innovative thinking, though it’s not meant to be the end-all-be-all solution for classification but rather simply a newer, better method to be replaced by future classifiers.

I have no doubt that LT will summon the people power to think out and deliver such a lofty goal; indeed, I think it should be attempted in the old tried-and-true interest of simply seeing if it can be done. I do have, however, a slight pinch of skepticism which I admittedly cannot yet find the source. Maybe it’s because LT has got such a good thing going already. Is it trying to be everything for book fans too quickly? Has it developed a strong enough membership of librarians/organizers/catalogers/OCD-ers to lend sufficient and adequate input for achieving such a goal? Can being too collaborative actually prevent the OCS from taking flight?

Since this is an experiment, I suppose that my questions will be buried within the OCS pudding that will eventually manifest itself. All in all, I like the audacity LT promises with itself in simply being an experiment. I think that’s where where the success is seen…asking questions and seeking answers…not necessarily the answers you want to see, either. See, librarians can be scientists too…right?