I’m co-chairing the ACRL Green Component Committee for the 2009 National Conference in Seattle–in other words, I’m working to help lighten the environmental impact of the conference.
And so this article in LJ’s Academic Newswire caught my eye: the Ames Public Library and Iowa State University in Ames Iowa are using bike couriers for their ILL service! It’s faster, cheaper, and more efficient than using USPS, and look Ma, no petroleum dependency!
Now the question is: how can this kind of idea scale for larger ILL operations? And how can this kind of creative thinking inform other library processes?
I’ve been talking to students and faculty recently about how well our library’s services and collections appear in our course management system, and one professor made a point of saying that she can see the day coming when all textbooks will be digital, and students will have e-reader devices like the Kindle. It’s not really such a far-fetched idea, and so I was very interested to see this article in the most recent issue of Campus Technology: The End of Textbooks?
One key point from this article: students (maybe even more than professors, librarians, or other campus types) are less than enthused about trading their books in for a Kindle.
Here’s a question for the tech-minded folks who read this blog: a colleague wants to be able to post a white paper online and allow colleagues to comment on it openly, so they can see each other’s comments and have an ongoing conversation about the document. However, he doesn’t want anyone to be able to edit the document itself.
I’m not familiar enough with all the wikis in the world to know what might be best to recommend, but I suspect there’s a wiki out there (Wetpaint? a PMwiki skin?) that would do this for him. If not a wiki, perhaps a blog with a single post for his document? (Or a sticky post, if he finds he needs to add more content over time?)
Any thoughts on the magic bullet tool for this situation?
After a long lull–sorry, things have been crazy busy around here–a new post to my reference question blog, Bibliophagus, where I keep track of questions asked at the UC Berkeley Moffitt and Environmental Design reference desks (as well as some questions from chat reference, too!)
I hope to be back to posting more regularly within the next few days. In the meantime, thanks for checking in and if you need immediate, mindless entertainment (as well as a fascinating illustration of how incentiveless crowdsourcing works) spend a few minutes with the Google Image Labeler.
It’s shaping up to be a great day-long session of discussion, brainstorming, hands-on practice, and general play with the 2.0 world. I hope to see some of you there!
Check out this great video made by DePauw University Libraries, about using library image databases rather than Google Image Search. Clever, well-produced, totally un-tedious!
Captivate users, help me out! We recently decided to change our default screen resolution for online tutorials from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768. However, the template we’ve been using all this time has a fixed screen capture size for 800 x 600. When we use it at the new resolution, it only grabs a small chunk of the screen.
Can screen capture sizes be edited after they’ve been used once? I seem to recall that they can’t, although I honestly don’t see why a template file shouldn’t be editable like this. Maybe I’m missing something?
And out of interest’s sake, has anyone else created a template from scratch? I.e., not saved a movie as a template, but created a graphic template in Flash or Fireworks or another tool, and saved or exported it as a .cptl?
When I was a literature librarian at the University of Oregon, I once had a long conversation with the Chair of the English department about the crisis in scholarly publishing. (Yes, this was prompted by a serials cut.) He suggested that there might be a role for libraries publishing scholarly monographs on demand.
I’ve always been of many minds about libraries taking on this responsibility, but according to this new report from ARL, most research libraries are already engaged in publishing scholarly content in one way or another. I’m still of many minds about it…but I’m interested to see how widespread it is. Only 36% of the responding libraries said they weren’t somehow engaged in publishing scholarly content. That suggests a major new mission for research libraries to me–one that’s (so far) going pretty unsung.
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.
