SLA Academic Division

Computers in Libraries 2011

If you're a member of SLA, then you probably saw the email from CEO Janice R. Lachance last week reminding you that members registering for Computers in Libraries 2011 will receive a discount on their registration. Register here before February 25th and pay only US$ 239; after that date, it's US$ 269. SLA is a learning partner to the conference, which runs from March 21-23 in Washington, DC.

There are plenty of folks from SLA, and the SLA Academic Division, who'll be presenting or offering workshops at CiL2011, not to mention plenty of talks on items of interest to those working in academic libraries. For example:

• Semantic Web Apps for Researchers: VIVO, from Margeaux Johnson, Christopher Case, Alex Rockwell, Paul Albert, and Ying Ding
• Integrating iPads Into Learning & Libraries, from Laine Gabel, Dan Jakubek, Graham McCarthy, Weina Wang, and Naomi Eichenlaub
• Digital Collections: Creative Development & User Experience, from Cathy Wolford, Elizabeth Botten, and Sara Snyder
• Libraries in the Semantic Web, from Lisa Goddard and Gillian Byrne

And that's just a sampling of what'll be going on down in DC this March. Check out the full program, go ahead and register, and we hope to see you there!

Call for nominations - NEW Springshare Innovation in Academic Libraries Award

 

 

The Academic Division of SLA is very proud to announce a new award for academic libraries, sponsored by Springshare, Inc., creator of LibGuides!

This annual award recognizes a new program or service that demonstrates an innovative approach to academic librarianship.

Award

A certificate and a $500 US award, donated by Springshare, are presented during the Academic Library Division Business Meeting at the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference. The winning library is also recognized through the Academic Division’s various public relations outlets.

Criteria

Projects nominated for the award should demonstrate recognized innovation, creativity and quality. Nominated programs or services can have been developed in any facet of the library’s activities, including but not limited to:

• reference and research assistance;
• information literacy and library instruction;
• collection development;
• cataloging and/or technical services;
• space planning; or
• marketing and public relations

Eligibility

Academic or research libraries in a higher education institution are eligible to receive the award. Recipients must have implemented their program or service in an academic or research library no more than two years prior to the nomination submission deadline. Nominated libraries do not have to have a SLA or an SLA-Academic Division member on staff.

Submissions

Nominations must include a 500-1000 words description of the innovative program or service and must demonstrate usage and/or success of implementation using accepted assessment methods. Include any other supporting print or electronic documentation that would assist the committee in evaluating the purpose, content, impact, and innovative aspects of the program or service. 

Send nominations to the Academic Division Awards Committee Chair, Catherine Lavallée-Welch, Director, University of South Florida Polytechnic Library, clw@poly.usf.edu.

Note: Electronic submissions are required.  

Submission Deadline: April 1^st, 2011

Library Day in the Life

My apologies, O Readers, for I was remiss. 

Yesterday started Round 6 of the excellent Library Day in the Life project. And while in a more righteous world there would've been a post about it here yesterday morning, we don't live in such a world and so better late than never.

Library Day in the Life was inspired by a blog post from Bobbi Newman in 2008, and has grown tremendously since. From the project's wiki:

Whether you are a librarian or library worker of any kind, help us share and learn about the joys and challenges of working in a library. Join us by sharing details of your day for a week on your blog. Not only is this a great way for us to see what our colleagues are doing and how they spend their days but it’s a great way for students who are interested in the library profession to see what we really do.

It's not to late to take part, and its certainly not too late to take in the blog posts, Tweets (#libday6), and Flickr photostreams being produced this week by over 200 participating librarians. Share your week with your peers, and see what your peers are sharing.

Transforming spaces

No, we don't mean phone booths.

Academic libraries are increasingly feeling pressure to provide spaces for things other than books within their walls. Group study space, quiet study space, carrels, information commons, and any place where patrons can settle and be comfortable -- and/or productive -- are being recognized as high-value commodities.

As such, it behooves us to check out articles like GOOD's "Placemaking 101: Ten Steps to Transform a Public Space", which provides ten tips from the Project for Public Spaces. While PPS is generally focused on outdoor areas, their tips resonate with the needs of academic librarians dealing with the conversion of stack areas to other uses (especially the one about the petunias).

1. The community is the expert
2. Create a place, not a design
3. You can't do it alone
4. Observe how spaces are currently used
5. Have a vision
6. Start with the petunias
7. Triangulate
8. Form supports function
9. Money is not the issue
10. You are never finished

Click through for a fuller discussion of those points, and have a great weekend!

Some good news about Delicious

It's nice to get the occasional good bit of news when it comes to leaked information.

Yesterday, the wired world was rocked by the news of a leaked slide from an internal Yahoo! webcast indicating that the company was planning to eliminate the social bookmarking service Delicious. Considering the number of academic libraries that use Delicious as the basis for resources like course and subject guides, it seemed like the sort of news that we should help get around.

As it turns out, we get to share some good news instead: according to the Delicious blog, Yahoo! plans to sell the service rather than shut it down. While this bodes well -- or at least, better -- for the service, those of you utilizing Delicious on a personal or professional basis may want to take advantage of its helpful export option. And those of you who'd prefer to see the service go open source, there's a Twitter petition just for you.

Have a good weekend!

A note on Wikileaks

On Saturday, The Lede -- a blog at The New York Times -- posted some confirmation of news that had started spreading the day before: Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs had sent an email to its students "warning them to avoid posting comments online about the leaked diplomatic cables, if they ever hope to work for the State Department." The Lede linked to a copy of the email, as posted on The Arabist:

Hi students,

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department.  He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

Regards,
Office of Career Services

While I have yet to hear of such notices being sent to students at similar programs, this is the sort of thing academic librarians working with said programs in the US should be aware of, regardless of their own opinions of how various organizations are addressing the Wikileaks cables.

Three items worth checking out on a Monday morning

It's Monday morning, you're settling in, and for many of you it's a short week. While you're checking your schedule, sipping your beverage of choice, and preparing to deal with the next few days, see if you can't set aside some time to check out the following:

• A chat about transliteracy
  To be fair, this one's not starting up until this evening, but it seemed best to give folks a heads-up in advance. It's an hour long chat on Twitter to discuss and explore the concept of transliteracy, and how it affects libraries and librarians.
• The presentations from Internet Librarian 2010 
  If you weren't able to head out to Monterey and partake of IL2010, many of the presentations are being made available for free at the linked page. Even if you were there, this is a good way to catch up on anything you may have missed.
• Failbrary.org 
  As librarians, we try things. As humans, we occasionally fail. This site is for sharing stories of the projects that didn't come together, and what can be learned from those experiences. More than mere catharsis, it's an opportunity to make your future efforts better by tapping into the experiences of your peers.

To reiterate, the first item on the list is happening this evening, while the others can be examined at your leisure. Enjoy!

CloudMagic: As-you-type searching for Gmail

Many of you have probably already seen and used Google Instant search. (If you haven't, just go to google.com and start typing. Then bask in the glow.) But now Webyog, creators of the MySQL manager and admin tool SQLyog, have put together an extension for Firefox and Chrome to allow as-you-type searching within your Gmail account. It's called CloudMagic.

 

Having installed it myself, I'm generally pleased with the results. The searching is much, much faster, and if all I'm trying to do is find a single message or thread, it's definitely the way to go. But if I'm looking for a group of emails to batch-label or -archive, CloudMagic can't help me; it doesn't seem to have that functionality.* Plus there's the fact that, almost a day after I installed it, it still seems to be indexing my emails. (Though I noticed the example account page in the video says the same thing for both accounts, so maybe I'm mistaking their meaning. Unfortunately, their diagnostic tool is somewhat cryptic.) 

But with those caveats, it seems like an application with serious potential. As the video notes, they're also planning expanding the application's functionality to include Google Docs and other webmail providers. So if you're using Gmail, take a moment to check out CloudMagic.

* Something I'm sure Google will correct if and when they decide to just purchase the app. Or the company. Or the city of Bengaluru, India.

Colleges using aggregators to track social-media involvement

In a recent post to The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" blog, Travis Kaya describes how institutions like North Carolina State University and Bates College are creating hubs to track and provide easy access to their impact on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Bates' site also incorporates links to blogs, Wikipedia, and Google Maps, while NCSU has made the software for their Twitter aggregator open source, and thus free to any institution that wants to set up a similar system. From that post:

Bryan Alexander, senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, said the Bates site is a simple way for colleges and universities to corral information from social media. "So many great technology ideas seem totally obvious when you see them in action," Mr. Alexander said. "It's a very basic, simple idea, but those are often the ones that change the world."

It's an interesting piece, especially as academic librarians debate the merits of their libraries getting more involved in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Could these sorts of aggregators increase the viability of that kind of involvement, by linking it to increasingly common library blogs and other library resources? If colleges and universities find value in this sort of technology, how can librarians leverage their tech and information savvy to help make those projects better?

(Oh, and once again I came across a great link via Ellyssa Kroski. If you don't subscribe to her blog, iLibrarian, you really should.)

CLXO: Chief Library eXperience Officer

OK, I will admit that the title is a bit of a stretch. See if you can follow this train of thought.

I was intrigued by the article Campus Tours Go Disney by Eric Hoover. It is posted on Washington Monthly, though Hoover is also a senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article discusses the influence Jeff Kallay has had on the evolution of campus tours and how this came about because of his near obsession with the Magic Kingdom. 

Inspired by Disney's attempt to create a total "experience", he has consulted with hundreds of campuses on making their tours more authentic and to include as many of the five senses as possible to give the prospective students and their parents a day that they will truly remember. You can read the article to get an idea of some of the specifics, but what first got me to finish reading to the end was this:

     In presentations, he has even suggested that tours should deemphasize their facilities,      even if it means skipping the library. “Everyone’s got one,” he says.

Of course this got me frustrated. Especially in light of the recent discussion (see my previous post) on the value of libraries. One part of Dr. Oakleaf's recent report suggests that academic libraries need to research how libraries contribute to recruitment of students, but if the library is left out of the most important recruitment tool, then that would tend to belittle any contribution the library has.

So this then made me think if there is anything we can do to make a lasting impression and add to the "total experience" of the tour. A few ideas that I have had, in no means necessarily even feasible:

• Include a coupon in their tour packet for a free coffee or pastry compliments of the library, especially if you have a cafe in-house
• Create a video, a link to which would be included in the tour packet, of student experiences with the library
• Invite all of the tour guides in to a special gathering (you would probably need to include pizza) where they and/or other invited students would talk about the best things they have experienced at the library

Because of Jeff Kallay and the "total experience" movement in campus tours, the tour guides are usually encouraged to share personal experiences as they move around campus and seeding the minds of the guides with some particularly beneficial testimonials couldn't hurt.

Anyway, as I was thinking about this, I admitted to myself that there is probably not a lot I could do to influence the campus tour. I am in a smaller unit library on a large campus. So this made me focus on what could be done in my own library. We rarely get prospective students to take on tours, but we do get a wonderfully semi-mandatory group of new students (first years and transfers) to tour around the library every semester. It is often their first "experience" with the library. So, then, how do you make it memorable?

Well, for me it remains important to make sure that when anyone comes for the tour, we do incorporate as much or more in anecdotes as we do in straight "and here is where the books are" kind of information. For instance "Yes, it is generally acknowledged that we have the most comfortable chairs on campus." or  "We have actually had complaints from people about others typing too loud in the quiet study room, so if you like it quiet this is the place for you." Another lesson learned might be to think about training current student assistants to be library tour guides, and have them relate the 'inside information' so it is more believable than it is now since it is coming from an old guy like me. Maybe have an external person act as "CLXO" that can audit the tour and report on the general "experience" that new students or really anyone, well, experiences when visiting your library. Do library employees smile and acknowledge visitors and tours? Are there particular areas of the library that just look uninviting, dirty or in need of maintenance? Was the tour guide memorable or did they just seem to recite facts and figures from a (probably) outdated script?

So, what do you do to make your library "experience" memorable?