Karen Munro, Learning Librarian

Slate has an interesting article on Why Yahoo! Answers is a librarian’s worst nightmare.

They make some good points about the kinds of questions that are best asked of other people, rather than of a search engine–it’s a distinction I haven’t seen librarians talk about much in our conversations about IM reference and Google.  They also point out how deeply unwise the crowd can be.

I’ve used both Yahoo! Answers and the Amazon.com-sponsored equivalent, Askville, to ask both “facty” and “opiniony” questions.  The quality of the answers ranged considerably–I got some good conversation about the Kindle, for instance.  I also got some pretty lame responses about how vaccines work. I also got an excellent, thorough response about vaccines from a medical librarian who answers a lot of questions in Askville.

Clearly there’s a range of expertise and knowledge in the crowd, and clearly companies like Yahoo! and Google are starting to pick up on that.  Again, it makes me think that libraries should be doing more in this department–leveraging the social participation and knowledge of our extremely smart, educated users, and providing some sort of vetting/endorsement/ratings tool to help people tell the good from the bad from the ugly.

Google recently announced a new venture to help people share knowledge and expertise online, leading with the announcement of their concept of the “knol.”  (A knol is a unit of knowledge.)  Interestingly, their approach here looks a lot more similar to how we might approach this kind of project in academic libraries than it usually does.  They’re concerned with allowing experts to share knowledge and retain their identity as the author of that knowledge, on the assumption that knowing authorship allows users to determine the relative validity and usefulness of information.

This reminds me of the Connexions project at Rice, which uses “endorsement lenses” to allow experts to highlight and endorse educational tools contributed to a common pool.  It’s a new take on the idea of user-created content and the wisdom of crowds:  rather than rely just on popularity as a gauge of quality, these tools acknowledge that some users are more skilled and knowledgeable than others.  It strikes me that this is a compromise approach to content sharing that academic libraries can probably get behind.

The Google “knol” project is still in its earliest stages, and currently by invitation only, but here’s an interesting snippet for academic librarians to consider:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.

Sounds a lot like something that undergraduate students will want to use, doesn’t it?  Sounds like free, authoritative, unlicensed, findable subject research guides.  On every topic under the sun.

I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who’s participated in the project so far.  To me, this looks like something we should be watching very closely.

The Sparta Public Library in NJ has started lending out Kindles to patrons.  Whether or not the Kindle is the e-book technology to watch, I love this library’s go-get-em attitude, and their creativity in overcoming the issues of accounts, downloading, expenses, and permissions.  A great example for every library that takes a “wait and see” or (worse) a “we could never do that!” attitude.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a neat video article about a project at Purdue University, bringing ancient Roman architecture to life in 3-D.  The project is neat, and so is the coverage–makes me wonder whether 2-minute videos covering library topics would be a good addition to our Library News blog in the future.

Friend, colleague, and erstwhile blog reader Annie Zeidman-Karpinski asked what ever happened to those library instruction tutorials I’ve been working on for so long.  Good point!  Here’s what’s new (all tutorials require the free Flash player):

Connecting from off campus (2 min, no audio):  Demonstrates how to set up the proxy server to use licensed databases from off campus.

Find full-text articles using Melvyl (5 min, audio):  Shows how to find online articles if you already have the full citation, by searching for the journal in Melvyl (the UC-wide online library catalog.)

Use Library of Congress subject headings in Melvyl (5 min, audio):  Gives tips on how to do a faster, more efficient search in Melvyl by using LC subject headings.

Search using Worldcat.org (3 min, audio):  Shows how to use Worldcat.org, the free online catalog to libraries around the world, to expand your search beyond the UC system.  (This one’s by Anne-Marie Basso, UCB reference librarian.)

Borrow items using the Interlibrary Borrowing Service (2 min, audio):  Demonstrates how to borrow items from other libraries once you’ve discovered where they are.   (This one’s by Anne-Marie Basso, UCB reference librarian.)

Evaluate scholarly content online (5 min, no audio):  Offers some tips on how to tell whether the article you’ve found online is scholarly or not.

All are created using Macromedia Captivate.  Please give them a test-drive, and send me comments about how they work for you.  If you use a screen reader or other assistive technology,  I’m particularly interested in knowing how they run for you.  All comments are welcome!

Note:  I had to leave this one early to catch my plane…

Steve Lonn, Margaret Wagner, UM

UM has large Sakai implementation: 18,000 users per day; 3,700 course sites so far

Help documentation is heavily customized at UM; combination of original and modified Sakai documentation, with lots of custom pages for the Ctools implementation. Why collect data on help documentation? It helps to identify tools that have problems, to improve training & support, as well as direct development & improvement efforts, and finally to improve Help docs themselves.

Using Google Analytics to get data on help docs. Started with simple hit counter, but moved to GA to get more information & accuracy.

Screenshots on interpreting GA reports, demonstrating the kinds of information available from the tool

Mara Hancock & Judy Stern, UC Berkeley

Q:  How many institutions have systems in place that automatically capture webcasts/podcasts of lectures? A:  Of those present, only UCB, Michigan, U of Amsterdam.

@UCB, webcasting started in 1995, at the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (faculty genesis)

2001 ETS formed, and merged with BMRC and media services

2002-2004 ETS updates webcast.berkeley.edu, adds events and admin application

2004-2006 Experiments with captioning and search. Adds podcasting. Delivery partnership wtih Apple and Google. Webcast is next-generation vision.

2007 Strategy, design 7 specs for Webcast next-generation. Development & outreach.

2008+ Open source requirements. Complete Phase 1 development. Planning for Phase 3 and WC learning tools.

Current state of affairs: 6 webcast- and 14 podcast-enabled General Assignment Classrooms. Recharge for special events & courses. Departments share cost of webcasting with campus. All output freely available online to anyone in world. 83 full courses in 2007. 10,000 hours of content since 2001.

Local & world audience: 2 million visits to webcast.berkeley.edu (RealPlayer.) 2.3 million downloads from iTunes U. Youtube 1.6 million views, 8,700 current subscribers. Wanted to put the content up in locations where users could find it (iTunes, YouTube.)

Current questions:  How to make access easier, content more discoverable, share with other schools, make content and context more meaningful (i.e. surrounded by more learning activities in Sakai etc.), leverage innovation from other universities and community source projects?

Needs and barriers: students want more (incoming freshmen consider podcasting essential service), students & public want more portability, quality, quantity. Growing to 70 tech-enabled rooms in 5 years. Approx 1000 courses eligible, 1/3 of undergrad catalog. Problems: patchwork quilt programming, scalable vendor solutions expensive, proprietary code & limited integration, need solid foundation with flexible toolset, other systems not built to play.

UCB is interested in finding partners to join efforts and contribute to or implement OpenCast on their campus. OC Community: a community centered around open, scalable, and sustainable podcast/webcast solutions and best practices for higher education. List: podcast@lists.berkeley.edu. Wiki: confluence.media.berkeley.edu/confluence/x/AoEl Would like to leverage the Sakai community (governance, licensing, etc.) as much as possible.

Susan Hollar, U Michigan

New features in Sakai release 2.5.

The tool enables users to search & retrieve citations and make stable URLs to content within Sakai. Uses library metasearch, Google Scholar, and/or manual adding and importing of citations. Embedded within Resources tool.

Demo: http://sakaibrary.umdl.umich.edu/7777/portal (Michigan Ctools instance)

To use:  Within resources, go to Add –> Citation List. Search Library Resources, Google Scholar, etc.  Create new citation, import citation from Refworks or Endnote.

Metasearch categories: by discipline, with databases within them listed below. Database has drop-down (JS toggle?) description of database. User can select or deselect included databases as preferred.  MetaLib limits to 8 databases in a category.

Add citations by clicking “Add” button beside them. Can also see additional metadata below the citation using JS toggle. When you have your citation list, go to “Edit Citation List.” Can add more, for instance from Google Scholar or personal collection.

Opening Google Scholar through Sakai:  can work with link resolver and can display “Import into bSpace” button below the citation.

Clicking a title in the citation list takes you to link resolver (I.e. SFX, UC e-links @ UCB) to try to get the article from a library source. In release 2.5, can also add redundant link to UC e-links below, and make the title link go elsewhere.

Can edit individual citations to add notes, make changes, add more information. Can add a new URL as title link at the bottom of this form. Can export citation list to Refworks or Endnote. In 2.5, can sort by author/title/published year. Give title to citation list, publish it.

Students get read-only view. Don’t support collaborative creation of reading lists with students, but considering this.

New in 2.5: integration of the Editor into other tools. In WYSIWIG editor (i.e., for announcements, etc.) book icon appears, leading to the Citation Helper metasearch. Adds citations to published item in bSpace.

Q: Can a single list be shared across multiple sections of a group, and kept live & updated easily? Or would you have to publish & import it into each section? A:  The latter. Although SRG project will approach this.

Q: Can pass through to asset without authentication stop? A:  Depends on vendors–they allow to drill to different levels of the data. Lots of work for libraries to hook up to complicated landscape of multiple vendors with different standards compliance.

Q: Is main purpose to create storage for citations, or one-stop shopping, or…? How does this compare to RefWorks? Why would I want to implement this rather than existing library resouces? A:  Some folks don’t have RW. Also trying to get content as close to the course as possible. Want to draw resources into LMS, not drive users out to third-party resource, then pull them back in.

Q: Can we control what format the citation comes back in? I.e., not the full citation but just the URL or the linked title, for pasting into text we’re currently typing. A:  Haven’t supported this–debated what should be pasted in. Went with most complete citation, and users can delete all the rest of the citation if they just want the hyperlinked title.

Q: How long can the citations persist? A:  They’re resources that can be moved, arranged, republished, etc. like any other resource in Sakai.

Q: What about grey literature/unpublished/ad hoc readings? A:  Touches on e-reserves topic. Can create citation with URL for local web-accessible documents, or for resources already within Sakai.

Bob Sutor, VP of Open Source & Standards for IBM

Predicted shortfall of science, technology, and engineering professionals in U.S. Shift in Internet environment and public behaviors since 1995 (adoption rates, online activities.) Coming years will show just as much innovation & change.

World of Warcraft, Club Penguin etc. are predictors for user behavior in 10-15 years (multi-user social networking, high-level graphics, problem-solving, narratives, rewards etc.) Educational software can’t compare to these experiences (i.e., typing class in school vs. WoW at home.)

Overview of Web 0.0, 1.0, 2.0. Potential of virtual 3D worlds to be the next big thing? Hard to know, but must be informed about the possibilities. Issues around privacy, professionalism, currency exchange, other implications of virtual world technologies.

“Everything is getting connected.” Legal, legislative, financial implications. Monopolies around applications will become rare. May see monopolies around information. No single software provider will provide all the pieces. Beware of organizations that set up “interoperability” on their own, without collaboration.

Interfaces to common services will become more standardized, as best practices are developed and experience grows. Quality of service will be the key differentiator. Importance of open standards: level playing field, drive interoperability and interchangeability, inpinge on trade secrets & proprietary methods, etc. Open is inevitable–best idea wins. Meritocracy and talent will be valued over hierarchy.

Younger people born on the web won’t accept older paradigms. Change will be driven by their behaviors and expectations. Facebook tracking & advertising project a cautionary tale. (Beacon partner program, Computer Associates article.)

Jezmynne Wezcott, The Claremont Colleges

Meebo widget in home page for her “Welcome to the Science Library” site.

Web Content Tool: Tip:  Set new windows such as Refworks, etc. to open in a new window so that users won’t lose their work in that window as they navigate between Sakai and the other. Limit # of links in Web Content, because too many creates scrolling–just put the most important ones in here, and use Resources for the rest of the stuff. JW has created a dynamic list of all journals in a subject collection using the Web Content (note to self: ask to see this?)

Resources Tool: Tip:  It’s useful to duplicate relevant items across multiple folders, i.e. guide/handout for Google Scholar, because these are used by many different disciplines. Use text or HTML for users who may not have Adobe or MS Office. Make items or entire folders publicly viewable in the item’s details so that they can be linked to from other pages/sites.

Assignments Tool: Good for a “How To” step-by-step research guide. Suggested library assignments beyond research papers. Work with faculty to share ideas, encourage faculty to point students to the library site.

Wiki Tool: Use text, links, images, video/audio files. Store items in a folder in resources. Place items marked publicly viewable in other sites (i.e. My Workspace) and link to them. Easy to use.

JW’s setup:  students and faculty can voluntarily join the site via the public directory (publicized via in-class sessions.) Surprisingly popular.  Sakai administrator on campus can say which are most highly-visited sites in the system, for assessment purposes.  Faculty subsequently add librarians to course sites. Site stats indicate logins, events, and resources accessed.

Next steps: more librarian involvement, course-integrated instruction (work with faculty to integrate the library site and content into their research assignments), electronic reserves migration to Sakai. Create admin login to enable library staff to upload content to course sites. (?)