BBC and BL together to build a digital archive.

This memorandum of understanding sounds like it could be pretty cool. There are lots of interesting digitization efforts underway in Europe.

New website

Since the very beginning of this blog I have written about the Olin library website. I am delighted to be able to say that we are very close to having a new website. The image here is the home page, notice there is no great verbiage to wade through. We think most people come tot he library online to search for and find information. So the first thing you get is access to our iteration of Summon, and subject and title access to databases. Clustered around that is the ability to navigate to more specific kinds of searches, and information about, or services of, the library.

Some of the links still don't work, some of the images are stock images, but you get the idea. I have to give a big thank you to Paul Gindlesperger for all his work in coding this site. At the beginning of the fall term we got access to the college CMS and began writing our new site. Over the fall we have had numerous meetings about what we want it to look like and how we want it function. We have tried to design it based on these principles.

1. Our top priority is enabling our users to find the information they seek.
2. We seek to help relative novice student users, while enabling more sophisticated users to get what they need in a familiar "native mode" or via quick shortcuts.
3. The website should include a significant education component, and not assume that users are in the building or can seek in person help.
4. It should be aesthetically gorgeous.
5. Information about us, our services, facilities, or resources, that are key to our users use of the (online and physical) library are of primary importance (e.g. hours, phone #, etc.). Other information about us is secondary (e.g. history, statistics, etc.)
6. Metadata should be consistent and not hide us from search engines (on and off campus)
7. If we disagree on architecture, nomenclature, etc. usability testing will be used to decide the outcome.
8. Pages should be coded so that we continuously collect data about usage etc.
9. We use that data and usability testing to make decisions about revisions of the site.
10. The site should be efficiently maintained, hopefully by a variety of people in the library.

We hope to launch it early in the spring, and then take the spring semester to do usability testing, and refine the site.

I would love to hear your reactions to it. What do you think we have got right? Wrong?

For all my northern friends

My brother just sent me a photo of snow on the hills outside Lancaster, so I sent him this to show him what he is missing.

More on the Google Book Search Settlement

The library associations are right on this one. As I wrote in an earlier post, the usefulness of Google Book Search will come down to the price of the institutional licenses for libraries. The original libraries that opened their collections to Google for scanning did so because they thought that the resulting digitized texts would be available to their users and everyone else. Librarians did not participate in this to create a huge new revenue stream for the heirs of death authors and for brain dead publishers. If that was the deal, those authors and publishers could have rummaged through their own libraries to find the copies to digitize.

Reading Books on Smartphones.

Flurry is a mobile computing research company based in San Fransisco. Their research supports my (and many others) claim that smartphone will be the ultimate book reader. "The sharp rise in eBook activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the Media & Entertainment space."

Read the full post here.

Matching teaching to learning styles

Interesting article in the Chronicle today, Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students.

"... teachers should worry about matching their instruction to the content they are teaching. Some concepts are best taught through hands-on work, some are best taught through lectures, and some are best taught through group discussions."

So what is the best "teaching style" for library instruction content? I suppose a further question is, does all library instruction all into one style of content? In general I would argue that most classic library instruction is about skills acquisition and development, which would suggest kinesthetic learning (learning through practical hands on experience.) Very often we reduce that to hands on computer work with library services and resources, sometimes supplemented with hands on work with printed materials.

But what is the "practice" is the verbalization of thought and decision making in the content of information retrieval and analysis? Can thinking be hands on?

Is the Great Recession the Tipping Point for the Book Industries?

Will we look back twenty years from now and see our current Great Recession as a tipping point for the book industries (writing books and about books, publishing, distribution (bookstores, libraries, online, etc.)?

This week we just learnt that Baker & Taylor, and their academic library book vendor subsidiary YBP, has bought Blackwell. This is a very significant move towards monopoly in the academic library book sales market. While there are still other players in the marketplace -- Ambassador, Midwest Library Services, Coutts -- YBP will dominate. But they will dominate a market that, in terms of the portion of library collection budgets spent on books, continues to shrink. Basically, it seems in this recession Blackwell could not compete in the US market.

Now today I read this story in the New York Times that Kirkus Review is closing down as well. It was always one of the major reviewing venues for librarians. As the ways in which professionals and readers alike find out about recently published books continue to change, Kirkus could survive and this recession struck the coup de grace.

There are many other examples (the rise of the Kindle and Nook, and Google Book Search come to mind) but those two will do for this week.

Noise and Space in Club Olin

I couldn't have put it better myself, than TJ Fisher in the latest issue of the Sandspur

"As the time comes for spending hours upon hours in the library, the most important thing to remember is to be considerate and respectful of those around you. Do not make noise or hold group discussions where there are quiet study signs, and try not to take up all the high demand real estate in the library for catching a couple Zs between study sessions."

How good is Summon?

So I am in my Faculty Evaluation Committee meeting today, at which the committee decides on my tenure, serious business. Half way through the meeting a professor says, "By the way, that R-Search is great. My students love it. I love it!"

This doesn't often happen with other library services ....

More on the Revised Google Book Deal

Couple of more comments on the Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA for the cognoscenti.)

http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/11252009/library-groups-release-guide-revised-google-books-settlement

Revised Google Book deal disappoints many

Wayne Wiegand at Rollins

Wayne is the F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University and currently a resident scholar in the Winter Park Institute.

More importantly he is the dean of American library history and we are really lucky to have him with us here at Rollins. This semester he has been teaching a class on censorship and part of a book discussion group that has been discussing the issues raised by Sven Birkerts' Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age. At the moment a couple of our librarians are working with him to organize a seminar/workshop/discussion group next semester for librarians and others on a topic of interest -- more on that later. What I want to let everyone know now is that he will be giving a public lecture on Wednesday November 18th on “Main Street Public Library; Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Heartland, 1865-1965” at 7pm in the Suntrust Auditorium in the Crummer School on Rollins campus.

If you are at all interested in libraries, community spaces, reading and are anywhere near central Florida on the 18th I hope you will consider coming. It is free and open to the public.

Open Access Week

Did you know this week is Open Access Week? We are not making a particularly big deal about it here at Rollins because it comes just a bit too early in an effort on campus to pass an Open Access Policy concerning A&S faculty publications.

If you are not even sure what open access is, take a look at this great little video.

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

Why does college tuition continue to rise?

This is a big question and lots of people have weighed in on it. Many agree that one contributing factor is that the costs of higher education rise more quickly than the CPI. One small part of those costs are library collection costs -- particularly continued journal price inflation. Recently we saw a particularly egregious example of this when the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) raised institutional subscription prices on their new acquisition, Scientific American from $39.95 per year, to an amazing $299 per year. Three hundred bucks is not such a big figure in comparison with the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spend each year on library materials but a single order of magnitude increase does get my attention.

So this time we did not just roll over and take it.

I organized my Oberlin Group colleagues to sign a joint letter to NPG and publicized the letter with the media. Our ultimate hope is that NPG will reconsider this decision and revoke this price increase. If the letter doesn't achieve this, then I expect the marketplace will. Rollins, along with a number of other college libraries, have already cancelled their subscriptions.

20th Anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall

Professor Nancy Decker's German students are organizing a party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. They have erected a huge polystyrene version of a section of the wall and placed it outside the library in the atrium. As you can see from the pictures it is certainly dramatic. The top photo is the east side (plain except for the names of people who died trying to cross the wall.) The bottom on is decorated with graffiti, like the west side of the original. On October 3, they will move it to Mills Lawn, the symbolic heart of campus and destroy it during a party.

The opening of the wall, the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was one of the most significant periods of my life. They were events that I had grown up never expecting to see. Most of our incoming class were not even born when the wall came down.

I Think You Are Really Going To Like R-Search

The holy grail of academic libraries for the last few years has been a search engine that rivals Google in attracting our students. Even pre-Google we knew we had to find some way of making searching, and more importantly finding, the good stuff in libraries easier.

Originally we thought dumping everything into our catalog or into our Integrated Library System (in our case, Sirsi) might be the answer, but those systems were designed to retrieve records of books and harked back to the old card catalog.

Then we thought we might be able to develop a "scholar's workstation" in some form, but that never really panned out.

Recently we thought federated searching might do the job, but lowest common denominator searching and the need to connect to multiple databases in real time led to slow and inappropriately displayed results that frustrated users and (even more) reference librarians.

I am over holy grails, but R-search, our name for Serial Solutions Summon service, is really cool. No more choosing databases, clean single search box, fulltext just one click away, intuitive limits and refining of search results, and nice previews. I think students are going to love this.

Let me know what you think.

WorldCat Local quick start

Here at Rollins we have been playing with OCLC's Quick Start for WorldCat Local. Playing being the operative word. It is really easy to set this up and it has some interesting potential.

Could this replace our OPAC? With the interesting reframing of our collection within the larger WorldCat collection (once again de-centering our catalog.)

The interface is clean, and includes the nice link to electronic content, and to ILL. I also like the limiting features that are all the rage in library databases these days.

But what is the relationship between this and WorldCat.org? When I search Google I come across WorldCat records. When I click on a record I go to the generic WorldCat record, not the WorldCat Local record. What would OCLC have to do to change that? Because that is true web scale discovery: web search and local retrieval.

Teaching RCC

I have been kinda quiet this summer, working on my garden and preparing to teach RCC this Fall. The latter has given me a new understanding of teaching faculty. This is a lot of work! particularly since this is new prep for me and I haven't been able to find a good textbook for the course (there are reasonable ones on the invention of writing and the proliferation of media since the nineteenth century, but not one that does both) an introduction to the history of recorded information. Here is the course description:

"Why do almost all humans learn to speak and understand language as infants, but we don't all learn to read and write, and if we do it is difficult and we do it much later? The answer is that writing is a technology rather than an innate part of being human. This course will be an introduction to the history of recorded information focusing on the moments of technological change: from orality to literacy, from scroll to codex, from manuscript to print, and the one we are currently living through, i.e., from print to digital. We will see examples of some of these technologies in the Library's Special Collections. We will participate in weekly field trips to an Elementary School in Orlando to help students there learn to read. We will also visit the Orlando Sentinel office as the employees of that newspaper go through this digital revolution. This course will help you better understand what we can and cannot learn from history, what is happening around you as some daily newspapers go out of business and books can be read on your iPhone, and your role as agents of change."

Here is a list of all the books (there are a bunch of articles and blog entries as well, but these are the books) from which I selected readings for this course and how to locate them at Rollins and beyond.

Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1983. (see also her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change."

Hessler, Peter. Oracle Bones: A Journey between China's Past and Present. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Houston, Stephen D. The First Writing: Script Invention As History and Process. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

McNeely, Ian F., and Lisa Wolverton. Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

O'Donnell, James Joseph. Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

Plato and William S. Cobb. The Symposium: and, The Phaedrus ; Plato's Erotic Dialogues. SUNY Series in Ancient Greek philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Roberts, Colin H., and T. C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: Published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1983.

Stephens, Mitchell. A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Trithemius, Johannes. In Praise of Scribes. De Laude Scriptorum. Lawrence, Kan: Coronado Press, 1974.

There are a huge number of readings I could have chosen from, if you have any suggestions, let me know.

Good News In interlibrary loan.

When a user asks how long it takes to get a book or article via ILL, or we mention it during an instruction session, we usually say, "plan on two weeks."

Well Melanie just gave me the report for the last academic year and she has shaved a considerable amount of time off those two weeks. On average, for articles, it takes less than 10 days from the user placing the request to them being notified that the item is available for them to view or print, and less than seven days for books. Overall, on average it takes nine days. That includes weekends and holidays.

Even better, she managed to do this while ILL borrowing increased from 1731 in 2007-08 to 3150 in 2008-09. Even better, she has a couple of things in the works (ILL Direct for books and RapidILL for articles) that should shave even more time off those numbers.

Congratulations Melanie, you get a pickle!

What are people saying about your library?

There has been this really interesting discussion in the ALA group at LinkedIn recently about how to monitor the reputation of your library in "cyberspace." People use the following tools:

Technorati
Delicious
Dogpile -- which captures the ones above and MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter
Yelp
SocialMention
LinkedIn application called Company Buzz.

Emily InLow-Hood mentioned that Beth Kanter had some good ideas about this as well. can you think of any others?

Recycling the Shelflist

Part of the R2 project means the shelflist is redundant. We should have probably done this many years ago, but better late than never. We decided to make quite a big deal out of retiring the beast as a way of making our community more aware of our move from print to digital.
At the end of May we offered individual cards to faculty and staff and a lot of people took us up on the offer to get a card for the books they wrote, or favorite titles. Last week the cabinets were offered to the highest bidder (the big ones went for $200 and the small ones for $120. Amazing.)
On Friday the staff recycled the remaining cards. It took 125 years to build the list and just 35 minutes to recycle it.