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Web 2.0 in its highest form.  Egads.

 

more about “William Shatner Reads Levi Johnston’s…“, posted with vodpod

 

giving in to lazy library patrons

And the Dewey Decimal System falls victim.  From the Denver Post:

By the end of the year, all six Rangeview branches and the district’s outreach office will dump the iconic Dewey and its numeric organizing system for one that relies on word categories such as “history” and “science.”

…

“For years, we’ve had focus groups and people consistently tell us, ‘I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how this library works,’ ” Sandlian Smith said. “So we decided to turn things upside down, and so far it seems to work well.”

I got a lot of problems with this.  First, Dewey already contains the categories they’re using, they’re just categorized numerically. If patrons can’t “figure out how this library works” then a librarian can give a brief introduction to the Dewey system.  It’s kinda what we do here.  Second of all, the movement toward the barnes and noble/borders categorization is ridiculous because patrons will always become lazier and eventually want librarians to hand deliver all their materials to them without them ever doing any work.

And really, has anyone consistently found exactly what they’re looking for on the first try? At least Dewey will ensure some organization in that similarly topical books will be found within just a slight deviation of the call number.  Part of the fun of browsing through the stacks is finding not just the object of desire, but those pleasant surprises that hadn’t presented themselves earlier.  Dewey ensures more precision of similar subject matter than in the store.

Also stated in the article:

Ken Neely, a 17-year patron of the Perl Mack branch, said he’s happy with the new system.

“I think it’s a good idea, especially if you are new to the library and don’t know the system. You don’t have to go to one of the librarians and ask for help,” Neely said. “That means they can spend more time helping people and doing research for you.”

Arrgh. We’re here to help people learn how to sharpen their information literacy skills, thereby becoming better researchers; we exist not to do their research for them.  Not only that, but how can we spend more time helping people if they are being conditioned not to ask for help in the first place?

This here, is the caveat of Web.2.0…the more people are tagging, friending and stuff-and-such like that, the lazier and more apathetic they become to learning how to use an OPAC, where they can find what they’re looking for just as quickly, if not more so, by reading a brief tutorial or getting a two minute instructional session on how to move through the stacks and where to place their eyes.

I’m all for keeping up with people’s technological or taxonomic proclivities, but laziness doesn’t fall under the Web 2.0 schema. Even LibraryThing’s Open Shelves Classification project doesn’t completely dismiss Dewey,  as its emphasis is to collaboratively reclassify rather than assign quasi-arbitrary taxonomies. Dewey shouldn’t become a martyr because patrons refuse to acknowledge their own numerophobia.

Here’s an idea, why not just paste subject heading labels, taken from Dewey, throughout the stacks? Or would that not be upside down enough?

knowledge is good

The University of Nottingham is definitely on to something.  What with their wildly popular and scientastic Periodic Table of Videos, it looks as if they’ve unveiled a new venture that’s rampaging through the Interweaves.  It’s called Sixty Symbols, “a channel devoted to those funny letters and squiggles used by physicists and astronomers.”

As evidenced by the rejuvenated popularity of Star Trek, I think people’s minds are melding to the idea that the 21st century is more about learning than it is about greed. Huzzah.

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.

infomaniacs hang out @ FORA.tv

A colleague just passed along a link concerning FORA.tv, and I must admit it looks exceedingly captivating.  Like academia.edu, FORA.tv is another piece of the academic’s puzzle for marketing ideas by and for those in the academic world, or rather anyone who wants to learn for learning’s sake.   What is FORA.tv all about?

FORA.tv helps intelligent, engaged audiences get smart. Our users find, enjoy, and share videos about the people, issues, and ideas changing the world.

We gather the web’s largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world’s top universities, think tanks and conferences. We present this provocative, big-idea content for anyone to watch, interact with, and share –when, where, and how they want.

I’m not sure, but it looks as if FORA.tv gathers its content from institutional organizations themselves rather than indexing from sites like YouTube or Google video, etc.; still a little uncertain on this one. Uploading video also requires a submission process, obviously for weeding out the less educational content.  But if you wanted to find the latest high-profile speech on the economy or were even wondering what it would be like to die via black holes, FORA.tv is the place to be.

creatistic

I’m perpetually amazed at how I’m always late and a day behind regarding stuff like music and Web 2.0.  Case in point: I’ve just noticed the additions to the image editing site BeFunky.  As if the functionality wasn’t groovy enough,  they’ve compiled even more options for optimizing the gonzofication of your photos.  Use the cartoonizer, warholizer, scribbler, inkifier, charcola, etc to add varying degrees of wowza to your pics.  It’s a perfect tool to use for editing when using comic life.  Not to mention seamless integration into your networking sites has been taken care of.

I almost feel badly that the site is free and I have little creatistic ability to begin with.

LibraryThing assimilated?

Like pixels across the interwebs:

Under the terms of agreement, CIG has purchased a minority stake in LibraryThing and has designated Bowker as the exclusive worldwide distributor for the library marketplace of LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL), LibraryThing’s flagship library product. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The addition of LTFL to Bowker and ProQuest’s growing suite of offerings, including AquaBrowser Library®, demonstrates CIG’s continued commitment to helping librarians and their patrons embrace Web 2.0 technologies to enhance and improve the efficacy of their book search and discovery efforts.

Tim Spalding, el jefe of all things LT, is confident this minority buy-in is a win-win situation:

Our shot. I have a simple internal label for this deal: We are going to get our shot. LibraryThing has done very well considering its humble origins and structure. If we had gone the venture capital route we’d have started with a lot more money, but we’d have to “flip it” about now–just when things were getting exciting. Instead, this deal means we get to keep our souls, and get our full shot at making LibraryThing.com and LibraryThing for Libraries everything we want them to be. That’s a wonderful opportunity.

For members, this is also great news. You’ve waited a long time for some features, and scaling has been a problem. Everything can’t happen right away, but it can happen. With your help and criticism we can continue to build the site you want, and support the community you created.

Not sure how this will play out.  Obviously, both sides get something out of this deal, though for posterity I will remain borderline skeptical.  Either way, now we play the waiting game.

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.

LibGuides

One of the fruitions of my library’s attendance at a recent conference was to become more fully introduced to the increasingly popular service called LibGuides. After attending a session on it, the first thing my director mentioned was something to the effect of “I don’t care if it’s coming out of the budget, but we’re getting this.”  We’ve got it, and it’s living up to the hype.

For those not in the know, LibGuides is an online service geared toward libraries that allows for innovative  design of information-centered pathfinders and subject guides.  In plainer English, it’s a way to better deliver helpful information resources and course specific guides to enable better information seeking behavior among library patrons. Reasons why to consider LibGuides:

• online interaction of users – submit polls, feedback boxes, enabling of comments for every section text is entered
• HTML/Javascript embedding allowed for display of more dynamic content
• uploading documents – word, pdf, ppt, etc.
• embedding media – easy embedding for youtube, though not so for vimeo
• linking to one’s OPAC, databases, proxy connections
• RSS embedding
• online tech support
• complete customization of page – tabular or dropdown guides (or both)

We are in the process of transitioning to LibGuides and for me, the amount of options for customization is the greatest obstacle of the system, which truly is no obstacle at all.  So many things to do, getting beyond the first steps of the planning stage will probably the hardest part of the whole process.  Our approach has been to create a basic set of guides for general disciplines by dividing subjects according to liaison assignment.  Next, we are contacting faculty to see who’re interested and how we can improve those guides and create more in-depth ones for courses or even particular assignments.

I’m curious about the future expansion of LibGuides.  It is a hosted service, meaning that people are coughing up the moolah for it, yet the amount of subscribing libraries seems to be increasing each week.  Could it eventually replace a library’s traditional Web page, even OPAC?

Take a tour.

encyclopedia of life

Great new resource for all you scientastically curious infomaniacs. The EOL looks to be a great new reference guide to help classify and understand life, the universe, and everything. Well, maybe just life.

In a nutshell:

Welcome to the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life portal. This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth.

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goals are to:

Create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.

Transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating virtually all known data about every living species.

Engage a wide audience of schoolchildren, educators, citizen scientists, academics and those who are just curious about Earth’s species.

Increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

Chock-a-block full of images, species overviews, a massive table of contents of each species, it’s taxonomic outline in multiple formats (text, graphical, source), and extensive references to all cited material, this online project, now in its beginning stages, is shaping to be an immensely useful and accessible resource for all future biologists and lovers of life.

One concern is that it may end up something similar to wikipedia, in which anyone can submit anything of questionable quality. I suppose submission won’t really be the problem but rather the means by which the material is reviewed and approved by the administrators for scientific acceptability. As one can see, the institutions involved in this undertaking are rather scientifically serious about what they do, so getting this right is fairly important. But as it already has established data partners to aid in verifying, safeguards are presumably in place.

Think of this as a renewable source of information and info-seeking behavior. We are only aware of approximately 1.8 million species on earth. How many more millions are still undiscovered and in desperate need of cataloging and classification?