Monday, December 12, 2011

Library thoughts derived from the book, Where good Ideas Come From

A couple of years ago, I was able to go to a presentation by Steven Berlin Johnson. (I remember the Berlin part of his middle name, because there are A LOT of Steve Johnsons out there.)  Anyway, he was at DU talking about his 2006 book, Everything Bad is good for You. That was way back on March 31, 2009 for a Bridges to the Future (video) event.  (He was also selling his 2009 book, The Invention of Air.) Just this year, he wrote Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  This book also looked interesting, so I checked it out from Penrose.  In short, I was able to glean lots of great perspectives and insights that could be applicable to the library world.  Here are some:

Concerning open systems - "When one looks at innovation in nature and culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders." Page 22.

"Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts--mechanical or conceptual--and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those combinations--by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges--will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration." Page 41.

"The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table." Page 42.

Concerning the supposed wisdom of the crowd vs. herd mentality - "This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network." Page 58.

Concerning browsing and serendipity - "But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked." Page 108-109.

Bill Gates from Microsoft used to take annual reading vacations.  He (and his successor Ray Ozzie) would "cultivate a stack of reading material--much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft--and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled." Page 112-113.

More on browsing and serendipity - "But it [browsing on the web] is much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring the library stacks, pulling down books because you like the binding, ever was.  This is the irony of the serendipity debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to the mainstream of the culture." Page 118.  I am not sure that I agree with this.  There is a bit of research that shows that browsing and serendipity was important in the print world of the library, too.  Here is one good article, final version is behind a paywall...

Concerning the market of ideas and intellectual property - "All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters--liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise exaptation, emergent platforms--do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.  In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate." Page 232. Yes, yes, yes.  Let's get scholarly research out from behind paywalls.

"Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants rerefine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgement of their origin." Page 233.

Concerning walled information gardens - "Participants in the fourth-quadrant don't have those costs; they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones." Page 235.

"Whatever its politics, the fourth quadrant has been an extraordinary space of human creativity and insight.  Even without the economic rewards of artificial scarcity, fourth-quadrant environments have played an immensely important role in the nurturing and circulation of good ideas--now more than ever." Page 239.

Thomas Jefferson noted: "That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition...."  Johnson noted: "Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant.  The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection.  It is society that keeps them in chains." page 241.

Another good line concerning the Internet - "There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas." Page 243.

Overall, I liked the book.  I highly recommend it.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Went to the NCAR Library yesterday, and it was good

Some of the members of the DU Student Chapter of SLA went to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Library yesterday.  We had a good time meeting with two of the Archives staff, Matthew Ramey and Kate Legg. I learned about a bunch of things that they are doing, some of which are:
We had good discussions ranging from policies and procedures, to the art of negotiation and advocacy, to new systems such as Chronopolis and OpenSky, to copyright and other legal ramifications of digitization, to how to balance the needs of administration (looking for institutional metrics) with the needs of the average patron.  I wish I had time to go into more detail, but check out their websites and pages, and give them a call/email if you have any questions about their services and collections.

What should OA publishers work on next?

An OA publisher representative asked me. "What would you like to see ... publishers doing that they aren’t now to help promote growth of OA? Outside of supporting it more, obviously ;). Any specific steps you’d like to see us make?"

I responded with:

----------------------------------------------------------
Hi XXX,

Sorry it took me a while to respond… I’ve been thinking about how and what to write back.

1) I would like to see some more experiments in different peer-review systems. Other scientists have argued for reviews to take place after the article is published, similar to the Faculty of 1000. (But that system is extra review after the pre-publication peer reviewing is already done.) Why not make the post publication review the peer review? This way, the publications can make it out to the public faster.

Here are some good posts and reports concerning the convoluted peer review system we have now.

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-peer-review/
Michael Nielsen has a great new book out. (Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science) Have you read this yet? It should be required reading at [Publisher name redacted]. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691148902

http://jasonpriem.org/2011/01/has-journal-article-commenting-failed/
Jason Priem does good work on alt.metrics for journals. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/open-post-publication-peer-review-full-argument/
http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/open-post-publication-peer-review/
I am not sure who does this blog, but it seems very well thought out.

http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=379
PEER REVIEW IN ACADEMIC PROMOTION AND PUBLISHING: ITS MEANING, LOCUS, AND FUTURE.by Dr. Diane Harley and Sophia Krzys Acord. We had Diane Harley come to our campus last year, and here is her presentation. See the third video down, http://library.du.edu/penrosepen/videos-from-the-provost-conference

There are lots of other good writers and scientists who would like to see faster publication through different arrangements of peer review.

2) Could you get my faculty to understand all of the different models and systems of scholarly communication out there? Get the university’s administrators to modify the tenure and promotion system to encourage more openness? (Yeah, this is a tough one.)

Joe

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Does it pay to beat your head against the traditional publishing wall?

I just submitted this title to the Science Online 2012 conference.  What do you think of it?  If it gets approved, who would like to see speak at this session?

Does it pay to beat your head against the traditional publishing wall?

Most academic scientists are still concerned with publishing in "traditional" journals because they are rewarded the most for publishing articles in those outlets. However, many scientists are beginning to see the advantages of publishing in new venues and Open Access journals. Should one argue with traditional publishers and their backers concerning the unsustainable scholarly communications model we are currently in, or will that exercise be futile? John Wilbanks noted: "So don’t waste breath fighting with people on the internet. Keep driving train tracks into the ground, relentlessly. Never stop building infrastructure, never stop using existing standards, never stop creating new businesses and projects that recognize open as infrastructure. That’s how we win."

Suggested by Joe Kraus (@jokrausdu)

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

"We are people of the screen."


This is from "TOC 2011: Kevin Kelly, 'Better than Free: How Value Is Generated in a Free Copy World'".  Found this via Patricia Anderson and this blog post.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

This Internet thing is just a fad...

Maybe someday people will put music and their home movies on the net.  Nah.


Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the link.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

My library day

This should be a short little piece about #libday7.  I've taken part in #libday in the past, but only back to Libday4.

On Monday, July the 25th, I got into work a little late, since I needed to drop my 11 year old kid off at a summer camp.  It is just a week long camp at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center.  He is learning about comedy and improvisation.

Of course, email is the first thing that I slog through, and I had a lot of it to slog through.  I was off work last Thursday afternoon and Friday.  (We went out camping with the Boy Scout Troop at the Wilderness on Wheels camp about an hour SW of here.  One of the kids designed a bench [we helped him build it] and ran a fishing and camping workshop as an eagle scout project.)  Over the weekend, I read some of the more important messages, but I left the non-essential messages till Monday.

Soooooooo, here are some of the topics of emails that I responded to.
After lunch, I listened to some of this online workshop session concerning how our admissions office is using social media to interact with prospective and new students.  I often attend the WebEd workshops in person, but I didn't today.

During the rest of the afternoon, I worked as a peer reviewer for the journal, Practical Academic Librarianship.  This is a great new journal from the Academic Division of SLA.  I read most of the paper last week, but it took me a little while to write the reviewers report concerning the article that was assigned to me.  This is the first time that I have been a peer reviewer for a journal, so I wasn't sure how much feedback to provide, so it took me a while to write out my response and thoughts about the article.

That was pretty much my day.  Exciting, huh.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

My prelim schedule at SLA in Philadelphia

Prelim schedule for me at the SLA Conference in Philadelphia.

---- Saturday, June 11, 2011 -----

Frontier flight 448
Depart: 10:33am Denver, CO Denver International (DEN)
Arrive: 4:04pm Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia International (PHL)

Take the train to East Market Station
4:00 PM-6:00 PM
446 or 4348 train to East Market Station.
4:39pm or 5:09pm
http://www.septa.org/schedules/rail/s/AIR_1.html

PAM Early Bird Dinner
6:30 PM-8:30 PM (Lee How Fook, 219 North 11th Street)
Lee How Fook, about one block north of the Convention Center. This family owned eatery is located on 11th Street between Race St and Vine St at 219 North 11th Street.

----- Sunday, June 12, 2011 -----

SLA Leadership Development Institute
7:30 AM-12:00 PM (Convention Center 201ABC)
Continental networking breakfast at 7:30 a.m.; program starts at 8:00 a.m.

DST04SU Sci-Tech Newcomer's Lunch
11:30 AM-1:00 PM (Rangoon Burmese Restaurant, 112 North 9th Street)

Meeting with Caroline Rives 1:15-1:30pm
1:15 PM-1:30 PM (Marriott 401)

DST03SU Sci-Tech Division Board Meeting
1:30 PM-3:00 PM (Convention Center 204C)

EXHSNR INFO-EXPO "Historic Philadelphia" Networking Reception
3:00 PM-5:00 PM (INFO-EXPO )

OGSNEW SLA General Session and Awards Presentation
5:15 PM-6:15 PM (Convention Center Ballroom AB)

OGS1 Opening General Session Speaker: Thomas Friedman
6:15 PM-7:15 PM (Convention Center Ballroom AB)

SLAAwards SLA Salutes! Awards and Leadership Reception
7:30 PM-10:00 PM (National Constitution Center)

----- Monday, June 13, 2011 -----

DST01MO Sci-Tech Division Business Meeting
7:30 AM-9:30 AM (Convention Center 107B)

DST02MO Crime Scene Investigation Philadelphia: Forensic Science Explained
10:00 AM-11:30 AM (Marriott Salon J)

EXHMNL INFO-EXPO "Reading Terminal Market" Networking Lunch
11:30 AM-1:30 PM (INFO-EXPO )

DFAN04MO SPOTLIGHT SESSION - Collaborations Across Disciplines
2:00 PM-3:30 PM (Convention Center Ballroom AB)
 
DFAN05MO SPOTLIGHT SESSION - Visualizing Science
4:00 PM-5:30 PM (Convention Center Ballroom AB)

DST10MO Sci-Tech Division Open House
6:00 PM-8:00 PM (The Field House, 2nd Level, 1150 Filbert Street)

LSW meetup at the Field House
8-10pm

Elsevier Dessert reception, Marriott 1201 Market St.
7:30 PM-11:30 PM

----- Tuesday, June 14, 2011 -----

DPAM07TU PAM Vendor Update and Networking Breakfast
8:00 AM-9:30 AM (Convention Center 113C)

DCHE04TU Developments in Informatics
10:00 AM-11:30 AM (Convention Center 109B)

Lunch with 8 people at Lee How Fook Restaurant
12:00 PM-1:30 PM (219 North 11th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107)
Lee How Fook Restaurant
http://www.leehowfook.com/
219 North 11th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Has pretty good reviews, http://bit.ly/lNxUoj

Business Hours: Tues-Sun., 11:30am - 10:00pm
Phone Number: 215-925-7266

DST05TU The Science of Ice Cream
2:00 PM-3:30 PM (Convention Center 203B)

INFO-EXPO "Rittenhouse Square" Networking Reception
3:30 PM-5:30 PM

SLADCabinet SLA Division Cabinet Meeting
5:30 PM-7:00 PM (Marriott Salon I)

All-Sciences Poster Session and Reception
5:30 PM-7:30 PM (Marriott Salon AB)
Title: All-Sciences Poster Session and Reception Length: 90 Minutes Technical Level: Introductory Abstract: Learn about the interesting things your colleagues are doing as they seek to cultivate or enhance scientists' knowledge management skills and demonstrate the value of our services to our parent organizations or potential clients. The poster session provides an informal and lively venue for sharing innovative ideas about important topics.

SLAJoint SLA Joint Cabinet Meeting
7:00 PM-8:00 PM (Marriott Salon H)

IT Dance Party
9:00 PM-11:45 PM (Marriott Salon E)
Abstract: Get your groove on at the annual IT Dance Party!
Tuesday,14th June 2011 09:00 PM Marriott Salon E

----- Wednesday, June 15, 2011 -----

DST07WE Science 2.1: New Forms of Scholarly Communication in the Sciences
8:00 AM-9:30 AM (Convention Center 203A)

DST08WE Sci-Tech 101
10:00 AM-11:30 AM (Convention Center 203B)

DST06WE Data: The Next Generation—Sci-Tech Division Contributed Papers
12:00 PM-1:30 PM (Convention Center 112B)

CGSNEW SLA Closing General Session and Membership Meeting
2:00 PM-3:00 PM (Convention Center Ballroom AB)

CGS1 Closing General Session Speaker James Kane
3:00 PM-4:00 PM (Convention Center Ballroom AB)

Happy hour - McGillin’s Olde Ale House
1310 Drury Street, Philadelphia, PA
5-9pm

LSW Meetup Baseball game?
7-10pm Phillies stadium?

----- Thursday, June 16, 2011 -----

DMIL05TH Tastykake Factory Tour at Old Naval Shipyard
8:00 AM-12:00 PM (Tastykake Factory)

EPA Library Tour
10:00 AM-12:00 PM (1650 Arch Street (entrance to EPA offices is on 17th St.) 2nd floor)
http://epatour2011.pbworks.com

Frontier Airlines 449 back home. Leaves at 4:50pm
2:00 PM-7:15 PM
Depart: 4:50pm Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia International (PHL)
Arrive: 7:15pm Denver, CO Denver International (DEN)

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Some videos of the e-G8 conference in France

What is the e-G8? This was a major conference looking at international policies concerning the control of the Internet and Intellectual Property.

Here are some good videos of some of my favorite speakers talking about the need to keep innovation on the Internet open to new advances and new types of publishers.




Keynote - e-G8 from lessig on Vimeo.

Video of John Perry Barlow—EFF co-founder. He starts around minute 29:30.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Another great video of Heather Joseph - "Setting the Default to Open"

"Setting the Default to Open: Using Research to Advance the Public Good"
www.bigideasfest.org
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

UCLA talk by John Wilbanks - "The Fragmentation and Re-Integration of Scholarly Communication"

I've had the pleasure of seeing John Wilbanks speak once before. Here he is at UCLA talking about changes in scholarly communication.  Recorded May 11th, 2011.

Thanks Bora for the notice.

Here is the blurb from UCLA:
The UCLA Library is proud to share this presentation by John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons, entitled "The Fragmentation and Re-Integration of Scholarly Communication."  The scientific paper has been the primary container and distribution vessel for scientific knowledge for centuries. It's a creative work subject to the same sorts of legal and technical pressures as other creative works: it's part of an industrial-creative complex built on artificial scarcity, distribution, and top-down decisions about what is going to be high impact. And it is subject to the same disruption by the internet as other industries with that attitude, like music. But unlike music, there was a set of intermediaries creating a lot of inertia that kept the network from being disruptive, including funding agencies, tenure and review systems, and general lack of incentives. But the revolution that broke apart the music industry is well under way in scholarly communication. The journal is fragmenting already into the article, but it's not going to stop there - the advent of assertion-enhanced publishing, nano-publication, data publication, and more are going to drive a rapid disintegration of traditional "container cultures" and business models for scholarly communication.  This talk examines the progress made to date by the internet in etching away at the traditional means of scientific knowledge transfer, the importance of the digital commons in a world where content is fragmented, and some future avenues for "re-integrating" fragmented scientific communication that build on open systems. The talk was recorded at the Charles E. Young Research Library on May 11th, 2011.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Academic Libraries can have it both ways

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the future of academic libraries and libraries in general.  These posts do a good job responding to the well-known marketer's post, Seth Godin.

He doesn't really address academic or special libraries in the post. These libraries provide access to content that is scholarly or business information or things that are not mostly mass-market material (or kids books or $20 DVDs, etc.) This morning, I got a request for us to purchase a book on urban transport in the developing world by Edward Elgar [Regular Price $280.00 Web Price $252.00]. Good luck finding that for $10 on your kindle. (It is available online through different sources and for well over $200, but I don't see it for sale at Google Books like they say it is.) This is why we spend millions of dollars to get about 25,000 books a year. They average well over $40/book. They are not going down in price.

What do I mean by having it both ways?

The library can have print books and transition to electronic resources at the same time.  It shouldn't be an either/or discussion.  We have been doing that for years, and we have been doing a great job building a fantastic electronic collection of resources. (And, we have been providing great services with a small faculty and staff.)  There should be no reason to keep most of our print materials in off-site storage about 10 miles away.  My university administration wants to put most of the collection into storage to make more room for seating.  We were going to do that with the compact storage so we could open up most of the third level.  I feel this is defeating some of our core purposes. (Particularly "save the time of the user" when they have to wait 3-4 hours for a delivery and "every book its reader" and the need for open shelving for browsing.)

Without a good-sized collection on the campus, the library may not be as much of a draw, and the need for seating may become mute.  Seth notes that we are "defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario."  Just because we are arguing to keep print books on campus does not mean that we can't fight for the future--as the producer, connector and teacher of information.  Seth's logic is simply flawed.

We often use physical print books to help our students learn, in addition to teaching our students how to use and find all of the ebooks and databases and ejournals and websites and such.  We do know that more and more people are using electronic resources, and we also know that people still use traditional books and printed media.  This is a collection that I have been building for the last 13 years, and that librarians here have been building for the last 147 years.  Yes, much academic content is not popular, and the books are not checked out very often, but it is important and useful for scholarly research.  To send much of it off campus because some of the material has not been checked out more than X times is painful for me to watch.  (I can understand sending off material that has not been checked out at all since 1997.)

What am I going to do?  I am still going to do my best to provide the best service for our students and faculty, that is for sure, but it will be more challenging in the new environment.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

The Internet and higher ed.

A couple of days ago, I listed to this February "On the Media" Podcast concerning the Internet.  It was good.

On another note... Philo A. Hutcheson, associate professor of educational-policy studies at Georgia State University, said
“As the breadth and volume of search engines’ results increase, providing a source of certainty for those building an argument,” he writes, “… the validity of academics’ knowledge, the fundamental assumption of academic freedom, becomes problematic.”
I don't buy it.  Professors and faculty can help their students learn how to filter out and synthesize the good stuff from the Internet.  There is a lot of crap out there.  Some people may think that all of knowledge is on the Internet, but it isn't.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

More on the book, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

Here are some interesting passages...

Chris Anderson, "The Rediscovery of Fire."
"Before Gutenberg, we had a different technology for communicating ideas and information. It was called talking."  And then, "Read a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and you may nod in agreement.  But then track down a video of the man in action, delivering those same words in from of an energized crowd.  It's a wholly different experience."  I think this is part of the reason that YouTube is so popular.  Seeing a presentation or a demonstration is much more powerful than just trying to read about how to do something.

Eric Drexler, "The Web Helps Us See What Isn't There."
This deals with absence detection.  This "could help societies blunder toward somewhat better decisions about those questions."  Identifying what is absent by observation is much more difficult than identifying what is there.  Reference librarians get these kinds of questions every once in a while.  A student wants to see if anyone has done research on a niche topic.  One could search and search and search and search and not find anything.  This is what the person wants, because he or she wants to identify a unique area where the person can perform novel research.

Martin Rees, "A Level Playing Field."
He discusses the arXiv.org as the preferred mechanism for reading research in physics.  He notes that "far fewer people today read traditional journals.  These have so far survived as guarantors of quality."  He sees that other less formal methods of publication will survive, such as blogs, and that quality control will be controlled by mechanisms of restaurant-like grading or Amazon style reviews.

Seth Lloyd, "Move Aside, Sex."
Why trek over to the library, when Wikipedia is 99.44% correct?  The 0.56% can burn you.  In mathematics, "an approximate theorem is typically an untrue theorem."  What is the sex part?  He goes on to explain that sex is a good way to share DNA information with others, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

John Tooby, "RIvaling Gutenberg."
He talks about the huge impact that Gutenberg had on the transmission of information and knowledge.  Not really new news here.  But, I like his note about William Tyndale who dared to translate the Bible into English, because that is what, you know, everybody read in England. He wanted lowly farmers to be able to read the scriptures and the supposed word of God. He was executed for doing such a foolish thing.

More to come.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Thoughts on Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

I am a very slow reader.  I got this book (HarperCollins, Ha) several weeks ago, but I haven't read much of it.  In the past, I would do whole book reviews on here, but in this case, I think I will chunk it out, and do reviews of sections of the book.  It is derived from an edge.org project.  They have about 150 2-4 page essays from prominent scientists and artists.  The book is an edited version of the essays on the edge.org site.  For example, Clay Shirky talks about the invisible college. 

Concerning the old publishing and mass media system:
The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity--academics, politicians, reporters, doctors--will compain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past.  The real action is elsewhere. [Preprint of the essay is here.]
I hear some things like this from my faculty.  I need them to wake up and see that the old publishing system is dying, and that they need to support new methods of publishing and peer-review. The Administrators need to figure out new ways to award tenure based on the different publishing systems. The architecture of access to scientific knowledge is just plain messed up We can't go back to the good ol' days.


Hopefully, I will be able to blog about many more sections of this book.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Some thoughts on #TEDxMileHigh

I was able to go to TEDxMileHigh last week, and I had a great time.  I tweeted some of the sessions and I had one with a typo for the hashtag.  I really liked the presentations by Bernard Amadei (talked about http://www.ewbdenver.org/), Gov. Hickenlooper, Dr. Paul Polak and Allen Lim.

I was able to volunteer for the event, so I was able to get some videos of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House before the event began.  And, here they are:



Thursday, February 24, 2011

My tweets from the Provost Lunch #provostlunch

Here are my tweets from the Provost Lunch by Susan Schulten on "The Meaning of Maps in American History." They are in reverse chronological order.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Open Attribute, what it does...

It took me a while to figure out what adding the Open Attribute browser add-on actually did. I thought it would add a popup or something like that to pages that were CC licensed. It adds a little CC license image to the browser bar, and it is clickable. See the image below.

When you click on the CC in the circle, it will tell you more about the license for that content.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Renovation Plan Demonstration at #scio11

Here is what I presented at the Science Online Unconference, Sunday at 11:30am-12:30pm.

Some of the feedback that I received was:
  • Students still need to have lots of physical books available to them on-site.
  • The library should scan as many books as possible to make ebooks.
  • Need to advertise just how many ebooks we already have available.
  • Advertise all of our electronic resources, not just ebooks.
  • Loan out Kindles (or other ebook devices).
  • Let people know that our document delivery services are free to them.
  • Spread the librarians throughout campus to create a more decentralized library. This will force faculty to think more outside the box.
  • Create more embedded librarian positions.
  • Better advertise that the library (and hence the university) pays for access to all of these journals, databases and ebooks, and that the information is not free.
  • Let the patrons know that we keep track of download data. Let them know some of that usage data. [That may or may not be allowable by the vendors.]
  • Should consider doing a before and after survey, so that we can see how much electronic use increases after the renovation has begun. This would be a good article opportunity.
  • Brand the golf cart as the "Library on the Go" cart.
  • Display the blue prints. Need to let them know what the place is going to look like and get them excited about the new facility.
  • This is an opportunity for the library to foster stronger connections to the students and faculty who already use the library, and an opportunity to create new connections with people who don't use the library as much now.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Some of my videos at the #scio11 Conference

Here are some videos.

We got to see some of the internal sections of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.



There are about 11 other videos of "Behind the scenes" at:

http://friendfeed.com/jokrausdu/583d84e8/made-videos-of-behinds-scenes-at-north-carolina

Friday, January 14, 2011

Prezi session at #scio11

Here are my quick notes of Prezi... I'm giving it a try right now. If you are an educator, make sure you sign up for the educational account.
  • Overlap elements when you give a prezi
  • Don’t spin too much – don’t make your audience sea sick.
  • No way to embed a prezi within another prezi.
  • They have a good “learn” system and tips.
  • Prezi meeting can hold up to 10 people who can work on the same presentation.
  • For a good prezi, one should think in frames with multiple objects, not linear slides.
  • Instead of having to go forwards or go backwards to a specific slide, you just pull back, and then you can go wherever you want.
  • Think of prezi more like a concept map or a mind map – not just linear thinking.
  • Make the details small.
  • It has circle, square, and rectangle frames. Frames within frames, use as many frames as you need.
  • Take a look at some of her examples. Here is a group made one.
  • Make your CV as a prezi. Huh, that sounds like a good idea
  • Easier to get small than to get bigger. Start big, then scale down when you need to.
  • Use PDFs.
  • Use higher image quality in the upload. Zooming in will be granulated otherwise.
  • OverLAP, Shift DRAG, SURPRISE your audience.
  • It doesn't seem like prezis can be embedded into a blog, though.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Top 10 reasons why...

I don't like top 10 lists.
  1. They are usually meaningless
  2. They often have items that could have been left out to make a top 7 list.
  3. They remind me of gender specific magazines that list the top this or that.
  4. Some of them leave out a couple of items, so it should actually be a top 12 or a top 16 list.
  5. They always show up at the end of the year or the beginning of the year, why not March or October?
  6. They remind me of David Letterman, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
  7. They remind me of my dear departed next-door neighbor's dog -- don't ask.