It’s Friday afternoon, and I’m heading out the door to do some hours at the Environmental Design reference desk. But before I do, a few links to projects designed to help close the global information gap. Because our main constituents may be the folks at the reference desk, but we have a broader responsibility as well, to the folks who can’t get there yet.
Better World Books: a national book drive to improve people’s lives through literacy
Librarians Without Borders: working to develop a library in Angola, while struggling to keep their name in place (Doctors Without Borders has taken exception.)
freerice.com: addictive little vocabulary-building game designed to promote literacy and language skills, while donating food to the hungry.
I’m going to be offline for a few days for the Thanksgiving holiday. In honor of which, please enjoy this cheerful Gilbert & Sullivan send-up by Stephen M Stahl, MD, PhD, of Neurosciences Education Institute. Professor Stahl, my hat’s off to you in the arena of promoting educational activities online.
Northern Virginia Community College has a computer lab devoted to gamers. This, of course, is causing all kinds of controversy and debate. Not among the students, obviously, but among the rest of us–faculty, librarians, administrators–who wonder whether a gaming lab is a genuine educational tool or a sign that we’re selling out our own teaching mission. Sample comment from a reader of the article: “Many [college students today] do not have any strong work ethic.” Wow.
An interesting point to consider is that made by John Min, director of the Northern Virginia gaming “pit,” who explains the motivation for the gaming lab in one word: “Desperation.” The college is trying to get students to enroll in its IT program, and it uses the lab as a way to create community and promote the courses in that program. At least one student said he was planning to take a course he saw advertised on a poster in the lab.
It’s fascinating to me that we’re seeing these declines in computer science and IT enrollments (the Chronicle recently carried another story about Cambridge’s shrinking computer science program), at the same time as we’re seeing creative, smart, tech-minded young people building terrific Facebook apps, creating awesome lip dubs as recruitment tools, and generally disregarding the traditional distinctions between work and play, with some really cool results. Maybe they’re trying to tell us something? (And maybe some schools, like the UO, NVCC, and Stanford are listening?)
I’m going to start doing occasional posts that provide a manageable reading list of current pieces about a given topic. I make no claim that these are the best pieces out there, or that the list is anywhere near comprehensive. They’re just some things that I’ve seen or read recently, or that I want to read soon, and don’t want to lose track of. (Also, I don’t vouch for my citation style.)
With no particular agenda in mind, I’m doing the first one on Facebook. So, here we have it:
Charnigo, L. & Barnett-Ellis, P. “Checking out Facebook.com: The impact of a digital trend on academic libraries.” Information Technology and Libraries. 26:2, March 2007, 23-34.
Link to UCB resource; requires log-in. Haven’t read this one yet. From the abstract: “This article reports on a survey of 126 academic librarians concerning their perspectives toward Facebook.com, an online network for students.”
The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2007 Check out the full study link, and do a quick search on “Facebook.” 80% of students use social networking tools daily, but most prefer not to use them for work or school. Student quote: “It would be crossing the line for my advisor or instructors to find me on Facebook. But it’s open to everyone!”
Kroski, E. Top ten Facebook apps for libraries, part 1.iLibrarian. August 1, 2007.
Includes apps for Slideshare, Libguides, MyFlickr, the UIUC Facebook app that lets users search the library catalog and databases from inside FB. Edit the URL to get parts two and three.
Lupsa, C. “Facebook: A campus fad becomes a campus fact.”The Christian Science Monitor. Dec 13, 2006.
Includes a sidebar history of Facebook and poll results on students’ opinions on FB privacy issues.
Stephens, M. “Social networking services.”Library Technology Reports. 43: 5, Sep/Oct 2007, 45-51.
Link to UCB resource; requires log-in. Gives an overview of MySpace, Facebook, Ning, and Hennepin County PL’s Bookspace. Gives practical suggestions for what a library can do to start offering services in FB or another social networking tool.
Here’s a neat way to find blogs that are interested in what you’re interested in: search by tags. I recently popped up the http://wordpress.com/tag/millennials/ list, because I tagged a post with “millenials.” The list shows the most recent post across all WP blogs that used this tag.
The latest reference questions from the UC Berkeley Doe/Moffitt and Environmental Design reference desks (as well as our pilot IM reference project) are here.
Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons’s report on undergraduate research behavior, has been getting lots of attention lately. Foster spoke here a few months ago, and I thought her work was intriguing and creative. The entire study is available here.
I’ve mainly given up Twitter except for the express, shameful purpose of checking up on the daily activities of David Hewlett, sci-fi actor extraordinaire. If you haven’t used Twitter before, the boiled-down version is that it allows you to post up to 140 characters of text about what you’re doing, thinking, watching, reading, eating, or whatever-ing to the Web. You can post via a Web interface (i.e. go to the website, log in, type 140 characters) or via SMS (i.e. text 140 characters in on your phone), IM, or email. An article in Wired called Twitter “social proprioception”–basically, it’s one more way to know where all your peeps are at all times, and to keep them informed about your doings, too. For a more comprehensive guide to Twitter, see the Wikipedia article about it. (Clash of the Web 2.0 technologies!)
The thing with Twitter is, it’s sort of neurotically addictive, and then it’s exhausting, and then, if you’re like me, you give it up because you don’t really want to be that connected all the time anyway. You may also have the sneaking suspicion that the whole world doesn’t really yearn to read about every detail of your day–every cup of coffee, every movie, every missed bus. (After all, we can’t all be David Hewlett.)
But I still find Twitter intriguing, and I’m interested to know whether libraries or other like organizations have come up with interesting ways to use it. As I see it, the main features are:
IM-like immediacy (good for flagging a librarian when you need help in the stacks?)
social networking (would librarians want to share a network? would we want to allow patrons to send us comments via Twitter?)
archiving of past tweets (you can look back and see all the things you did last week, as well as what all your friends did. again, good for patron feedback?)
flexibility of medium (you can tweet by IM, SMS, email,or web)
We keep talking about ways to work collaboratively with our users, and to get more feedback and information from them…I wonder if there’s a way that the underlying Twitter technology fits into this. Apart from celebrity-stalking, that is.
I spent last Friday at an all-day conference I helped to plan and present: “Academic Library 2.0,” sponsored by the Librarians Association of the University of California, Berkeley. Here are some of the things I learned in the process (tongue in cheek, yes):
People feel pretty comfortable canceling out of a free event at the last minute, even if they know it was popular and that others were turned away due to lack of space, and even if they know lunch was ordered for them.
Librarians (myself included) are not always expert at high-tech event presentation skills, such as figuring out where to plug in the projector.
You have to ask for tables and podiums. AV carts are not enough. (D’oh!)
More people will probably come to a session titled “Teaching with Mash-ups” than “Congressional Research 2.0.” (That one’s an educated guess.)
People don’t like to have to find their own parking.
Good weather is a jewel without price.
There are never enough plugs.
You can read a list of 200+ emails fifteen times, but it’ll still take an extra pair of eyes to find the three malformed addresses that are screwing up the email you’re trying to send out.
Event planning is a profession for a reason.
I’m slowly catching up on my feeds, my email, my many neglected projects. I’m on the desk many, many hours this week, so I should have some good updates to the reference question blog soon.
I'm the Head of the University of Oregon Portland Library and Learning Commons. I spend a lot of time thinking about learning spaces, videoconferencing, teaching, and design. I ride my bike to work.
