NITLE Summit

Assessing the Impact of Information literacy and Technologies on Learning (David Baird, Colgate and Sondra Smith, St. Lawrence), the last session before Pat and I get on the plane. Some interesting sites:

Media Scholarship Website at Hamilton.
The "freshman" (hate that word!) survey of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute.

NITLE Summit

The ERIAL Project is a really interesting anthropological study of research in academic libraries in Illinois. Akin to the Rochester Study. I am really interested in working with our Anthropology department on something similar -- maybe a student faculty collaborate research project?

NITLE Summit

Olin is conducting the LibQual survey of library service quality again this year. Here at the Summit, Pat and I are in a session about the MISO survey, which measures both IT and the library services. Since our IT and Library share the same building students and faculty often conflate their perceptions about the two. Using MISO might overcome this.

NITLE Summit

Bryan Alexander gave his usual bravura performance about two particular emerging technologies on Thursday night. Here is an interesting alternative to PowerPoint. A report worth taking a look at as the Reed College report on e-books.

25th Anniversary

2010 is the Olin library building's 25th anniversary. This weekend we have Reunion on campus and so we sprucing ourselves up and celebrating the anniversary. As I wrote here a while ago, we have hung some posters and banners. I think Strategic Marketing did a great job.

Digital Preservation and Access

An interesting juxtaposition of articles in the Arts section of the Times this morning. Emory has made some of Salmen Rushdie's papers available, including the original Mac machines on which he wrote, and there is an interesting discussion of the difficulties of preserving "born digital" materials. Like most archives, our own Archives & Special Collections has not begun to tackle this yet, too expensive, not enough standards, etc.

The second article concerns C-Span placing their video archive on the web. You can find the archive here. This is not about preservation, but all about access, and what incredible access. This is going straight on my politics libguide. But C-Span is actually archived at the Research Park at Purdue.

OCLC Records etc.

Barbara Fister, of Gustavus Adolphus, has written her usual thoughtful comments about the latest controversy concerning how we can use and sustain large shared bibliographic databases. My major concern here is how we can enable the maximum sharing and reuse of data while enabling such organizations as OCLC just enough control so that they have an incentive to continue to do the great work that we have seen over the last forty years.

Google Bikes

I love this!

Unfortunately, when I look for my daily commute, it takes me through a gated reserve that would be lovely, but illegal. The real route slightly shorter and goes along Mizell, and east, not west of Lake Mizell. But Google Maps won't let me change it, because I take a pathway, not a road for a 20 feet of the route and I bike aacross campus, not around it.

C'est la vie!

Urban Think to Close at the end of March.

Well this is sad news. The best local independent bookstore is closing. I suppose this is a sign of the times, but is a bad sign all the same. I enjoyed riding my bike down the Cady Way Trail, around the mall, and through Thorton Park to the bookstore. I guess I just didn't do it often enough. Last time I went, in February, I bought Fernando Baez's A Universal History of the Destruction of the Book: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq. But since then I have bought at least two books (new and used) on Amazon. Pogo was right, "we have met the enemy and they is us."