Learning 2.0 Outside of Libraries?

Michael Stephens posted part of a proposal to measure the effect of Learning 2.0 in Libraries and I wish him the best of luck.  Since the program began with Helene Blowers in 2006 it has been adopted by close to 1000 organizations worldwide proving that it is clearly a success in the library world. Why should we stop there?

Libraries are not the only groups that are struggling to understand the effect of Web 2.0.  The structure of Learning 2.0 provides the space for people to learn at their own pace and join a community of learners.  Why not open this opportunity to a larger community?  Librarians could lead the way in educating their communities about these tools.  For academic libraries, workshops centered around Learning 2.0 could be a valuable service for faculty or students.  Public libraries could extend this to the general public or specific communities like small businesses.

Has any library used Learning 2.0 as an outreach tool?  I would love to know.

Academic Shortcuts and Profitable Plagiarism

Your institution uses software services like Turnitin.com so you can rest assured that student cheating will be caught, right?

Not so, says Thomas Bartlett of the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on March 20, 2009. While many professors are aware of different services that help students write their papers for them, they may not be aware that it is a profitable and global industry they are up against.

These companies called essay mills write custom papers for students who pay per-page, and avoid software like Turnitin because the essays are original works; they just aren’t created by the student. The Chronicle tracked one of these companies, Best Essays, from Virginia to Ukraine to the Philippines, back to the US.
John Gordon of Future Tense interviewed Bartlett about the story on March 27 and it is well-worth the four minutes to listen.

What is a professor to do?  Solutions using technology can help but as Bartlett concludes, having a relationship with the student and their work is still the best deterrent.

Relevant User Guides in a Web 2.0 World

This post is a summary of a presentation given by two Information Literacy Librarians from Wartburg College, Kimberly Babcock Mashek and Kari Weaver,  at the Library Technology Conference on March 19, 2009.  They compare different user guide models and present best practices to make them more interactive and effective. 

The main points of the presentation are to:

1. Understand what your users want
2. Understand what resources you have available
3. Choose the most appropriate resources according to points 1 & 2.
4. Continue to evaluate and maintain your services.
5. Share their experience and successes at Wartburg College

Brief History of User Guides

Pathfinders or Static Web Pages

Problems

• Don’t know if people are using them
• No standardization
• Users don’t understand library jargon

Why user guides?

• Enhances Info Lit Instruction
• Virtual Access
• Model proper research behavior

What is expected?

• Be specific
  • by class or assignment
• Allow customization
  • what are primary databases in their field
• Need to be current
  • link checking (can pay or have student workers do it)
• Want sophisticated search but not have to struggle to use it
• Easy to find library Web page
• Familiarity/comfort with interface
  • use Wikipedia platform (MediaWiki)
• Explanation of resources and context
• Minimal clicks
• No library jargon
  • research help
• Anytime, anywhere convenient

Google Apps for Libraries

PRESENTER:
David Collins, Associate Director for Public Services in Library, and Barron Koralesky, Associate Director for Information Technology Services, Macalester College  

SESSION DESCRIPTION:
Using a mix of demonstration, hands-on experience and conversation, participants will dig deeper into Google and Google Apps.   You may want to bring your lab coat.  Macalester has been using Google Apps for nearly a year, and will share some experiences as well as ways we have been integrating / leveraging Google into the day-to-day life of our library and institution.  We want to know how others are using Google, and hope to develop a shared “best practices” project as one outcome of this session.

Important that Library and IT collaborate

3 sections – Presentation, Hands-on, Group Reports

Had year long exploration of email.

• Found and picked Google
• Soon after had massive power outage condensing transition to a couple of weeks.
• What happens if you go to Google?
  • seperated security and privacy
  • Google does security well (much larger resources)
  • Privacy
    • Assumption – everything sent by email is not private

Education account does not have Reader, Groups, and ?.

What it has changed in Campus

• more open environment – perpetual beta
• new things appear and don’t know about it until after the fact.
  • traditional IT prefers limited controlled support of applications.

Next Generation Library Catalogs

PRESENTER:
Eric Lease Morgan, Head of Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at the University Libraries of Notre Dame            

This is a link to an outline of his idea for next generation library catalogs on the ND library website originally composed in 2006 and updated in 2007. A more recent and shorter version is available on his website, Infomotions.

He asked about what people want to learn and addressed whether he will be able to do that.

Initial Questions

• What is the Catalog?
• What does it Contain?
• What functionality do you expect from it
• What problem is it expected to solve?

What is the Catalog?

Concept of Index

• list of words as a pointer
• he advocates that catalog is type of index
• index is finding tool, database is organization of information
  • Google is index, URL’s are the pointers

1995 collecting eletronic journals

• created an 856 subfield u and people said you can’t do that.
• expanded from ownership to licensed material, and where to find other items.

• Catalog more of a finding aid.

Using CONTENTdm in a Consortium

PRESENTER:
Ann Kenne, Head of Special Collections, University of St. Thomas; Denise Tyburski, Media Services Librarian, and Chris Schommer, Digital and Special Projects, Macalester College    

SESSION DESCRIPTION:
In this session, staff from CLIC will discuss the decision process to purchase ContentDM for our digital collections and how the consortia agreed to divide costs and collections.  We will also discuss customization of the site and give examples of how workflow is set up at some institutions.
Project Timeline

• CLIC Consortium started the digital projects search in January 2005
• September 2005 – Created community of interest in Digitization
• Fall 2005 – spring 2007 – Study of various software options

Why Contentdm was chosen

• others already using it – St Kates, MN dl, U of M, Carleton, St Olaf
• flexible pricing structure
• good out of box but allows customizatoin
• training from MINITEX
• good documentation

Drawbacks

• Not good with Macs – interface
• Lack of presentation tools

Implementation

• June 2007 Level 1 license – 10000 digital objects
• Oct 2007 Upgraded license to Lvl 2 – 40000 objects  from Mac funds
• June 2008  Upgrade to unlimited license (with all of CLIC)

Minnesota Digital Library

PRESENTERS:
Marian Rengel, Outreach Coordinator, and Eric Celeste, Consultant, Minnesota Digital Library

 SESSION DESCRIPTION:
The Minnesota Digital Library continues to work with organizations to digitize their collections and is now working with organizations to research providing a state-wide search mechanism. We are continuing our social networking project and anticipating a year of research and development in 2009-10. Marian Rengel will provide an update on the developments in the Minnesota Digital Library. She will also seek ideas from participants for future work of this organization.

Asked what people know about MDL in the audience. Some contributors present.

Get funding from MINITEX and mostly run by volunteers. Has a new grant to develop Minnesota Learning Commons

Help institutions to digitize on condition that they allow access through MDL.

Actuall three sites

• Minnesota Reflections is main resource of compilations.
• Minnesota Digital Library
• Minnesota Finder

Technology Trends and Libraries – Eric Lease Morgan

Eric Lease Morgan is Head of the Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at the University Libraries of Notre Dame.  He was previously at North Carolina State University from 1991-2001 where he created the MyLibrary feature.

Gives handouts to help him process what is in his head and creates a structure for himself to see what is going on in libraries.

Can talk about trends but really wants to focus on opportunities. Focus on the How rather than the What.

Loves libraries. Makes his own books, archives his personal items.

Look at higher level trends

• Not iPhone – mobile computing

• Not Prius – green technology

Small bits of information are trend.  Not whole books, facts within them.

Web-enabled mobile devices – ubiquitous computing

Semantic Web

Information for computers to read because of  linked data

Computer finding various relationships that others have created from many different perspectives.

Graph these relationships

Walden example

Name, dates, people who have cited it.

Common relationships and rare relationships will show up.

Middle relationships will be true

Rare will be questionable

Examples of linked data (using RDF’s)

Infomotions – RDF File

About Walden – originally from Freebase.com – made by MIT

rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.walden

Shows URI that refers to thoreau.

Libraries have created some really cool technologies but are now superceded.

MARC record was created in the 60’s, predated SGML, HTML

first five characters tell how long the record is. There is an ASCII character that indicated the end.

Shared office with Frank Kilgour

Said MARC was really stupid!

MARC has been taken over by XML.

Z39.50 was good then, but OpenSearch is better now for the current information environment.

MARC8 was good then, but now Unicode is a better fit.  Especially for international, and even has Klingon!

People don’t want to browse, they want to search

There is too much to look at now.

Point of browse is to find “more like this”

Search is not meant to retrieve comprehensive results, just want a couple good ones.

Relevancy Ranking

Wisdom of Crowds

Internet was designed to withstand Nuclear attack (from DARPA – military)

distributed, no central authority

If a lot of people agree than it is probably true.

How to deal with this environment

See the big picture

We are straddling two worlds which is a challenges

Build collections for historical records

organize it into more manageable chuncks

Preserve them

very challenging becaues they must foresee changes

Provide access

Competitors in this environment – fashionable to be into information

enables democracy – now many places to get information

not able to assume that we are exclusviely ”public good”

What can we do?

Save the user time

Play and innovate

Items are free for the taking

Find ways to harness items on the Web to help your community.

Cannot be exclusively about books

Collect and organize

doesn’t recommend we use MARC, use what everyone else does XML

Controlled Vocabularies

not as important as they used to be

can use wisdom of crowds, full text computer data mining also

Use Indexers

Databases are good at creating and maintaining

but user must know structure of each – search commands

Index is about finding

Search words

Use them together for best result.

Go beyond just giving them the “thing” they want

Add value, everyone else can find and give

Provide people with tools to use the content

Once I get the book help them:

Read it, cite it, compare, summarize, trace idea through it

Not just books, other items

datasets – create graphs, tables, charts

 Other services

steer and recommend items to people

http://infomotions.com/musings/xml-in-library/user

Dirctory of Open Access Journals

He created a program to harness information from the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

While Google Books is good for UMich, not for everyone because Michigan gets a scanned copy everyone else is at the mercy of Google

Internet Archive is truly free. 

Has been working with Univeristy of Toronto

His own library of books – Alex

21000 public domain and open access documents from American/English Literature as well as Western Philosophy.

Can provide services against the Index – limit by subject, author, type of item (article, book), repositories (Internet Archive, DOAJ)

Demo of collection of various files of the same text from Internet Archive.

Can search within PDF’s in Internet Archive (because of dirty OCR’s), not Google Books.

He uses Perl. Files ending in .pl

Concordance in a general sense, counts words and gives context.  Perl command make-concordance.pl – Creates an index.

All these examples, what do you envision all librarians doing with this?

He envisions people who go and do this for specific topics.

 Raw text that he harvested can provide services against it.

Look up word in Dictionary, Look up in Catalog, Translate

Concordance of title, can see top 10, 50, 100 terms. then locate those terms where they appear.

Core skills necessary to do this.

Library collection, organization, dissemination,

Computer Skills

Relational Databases,

XML

Indexing

Programming

 

 

 

 

Meeting them Halfway: You Tube for Information Literacy

PRESENTERS:
Beth Hillemann and Aaron Albertson, Reference and Instruction Librarians, Macalester College

SESSION DESCRIPTION:
First year college students are used to gathering information through resources such as YouTube and Google. They need to learn about the approach scholars take to disciplinary inquiry. We designed a standardized session that asked students to critically evaluate a message conveyed through a YouTube video. In the session, they used library and network resources to produce a short bibliography of academic articles and books on the topic.

library ITs First Year Sessions

All different courses – econ., chem,

Challenges

Hard to put in context

Not every course had library research, not always at time of assignment

Involving more IT skills

Baseline assessment

Mission

Give students a common  experience, engage them (use YouTube for familiarity) , mimic scholarly work

Session components

• Intro – goals
• Lib – network intro
• Student Scholars: Be critical
  • Blue Man Group video (mimics airline announcement – addresses global warming)
  • Who is having these conversations? – discuss places – Google
  • Find evidence (Where to go?)
    • Google, Wikipedia – students also mentioned JStor, ASP
    • Intro resources -Lib website, catalog, database
  • Worksheet
    • Group them by twos
    • Very structured
      • Section 1 – Cover Catalog, how to search, how to request items, subject terms
      • Section 2 – Had to think of themselves as scholars in specific discipline
        • upload bibliography of what they found
        • Activity: assume a discipline and brainstorm in a group where you would look

Goals met?

• Easier to schedule and less prep
• Teachers less familiar with instruction were more comfortable
• Students were engaged
• Met baseline goals, begins with”The information literate student…”
  • can determine nature and extent of info needed
  • efficient and effective informatin gathering
  • evaulated information and sources critically and incorporate know. base and value system

Likes

• Discussion
  • more critical of Google and Wikipedia than expected
  • inventive and interesting sources sought (art exhibits)
• Hands on resources
  • Both Library and IT were more comfortable
• Less difficult
• Students liked it, so did faculty

Question: What do you do to facilitate discussion?

A: Developed Tip Sheet to deal with lack of participation, graduated questions.

Lessons Learned

Streamline so that discipline portion can happen (60 minutes)

Discussion is critical 

Include Refworks for 90 minutes

New Video and topic (should include broad topic and key argument)

Q: Formal Assessment?

A: Yes, will do another in the spring, but mostly informal.

Q: Did faculty attend?

A: Yes, strongly encouraged by Library.

Q: Do you see more students because of session (removing “mystique of librarian” because of non-judgmental presentation)

A: No formal numbers, but consultations have gone up in last couple of years. At orientation, introduced selves as Liaison librarians even to parents to emphasize that they are here for students.

Q: How do get class time.

A: Part of 12 year program which has “trained” faculty. All first year courses must have library component.

Information Commons with Stacey Greenwell

First session at the Library Technology Conference at Macalester College. Stacey is Head of Information Commons (the Hub) at the University of Kentucky. Her interview with Michael Stephens on ALA TechSource in September 2008 is a good introduction to the concept. Stacey also has a blog, The Uncommon Commons.

The basic concept is that libraries combine the traditional reference service with IT technical support at the same location within the library. Stacey is a leading voice in this model. Her talk focuses on applying it in other libraries. She came from public libraries.

What is it?

1999 – Coined by librarian Walter?

Learning Commons is viewed as more specialized version of Information Commons but she thinks they are synonymous.

Well equipped with tech supplies and supported by librarians and technologists. Has scanners, plotters, etc. but must also have staff to support. Not just glorified computer lab.  Even can have fun and parties there.

Why have one?

• Draws students (some libs have 80%? of students in building)
• Encourage active learning (group projects)
• Expand available technology (more partnerships with other departments)
• Just in time IT suppport (passwords)
• Computer management uniformity
• Expand infrastructure (cell phone access – repeater on top of building) 

Planning and Lessons Learned

• Timing was right – goal to be top 20 research, mandated by State Leg.
• Talked to other inst. Obtained funding, produced whitepaper
• Working Group formed
  • (all campus groups, architect, interior designer. student group)
• Field work
  • met with students, faculty, Facebook group

How they got the name – “The Hub”

Met with students to see what they would call it.  Also found out what students currently called the library, Willy T’s.

Actual location was centrally located in the building.

Better marketing of the service. Didn’t like “Commons”.

Library Help

Hours – 1-10pm

Students wanted more

IT help

 Passwords, Laptop, Wireless

Took some struggle for them to be involved

At first they weren’t doing much, but had them answer the phones.

Became distributed help desk throughout campus.

Mac Lab

IT has student consultants to help with this

Power bar – Phone chargers, adapters

Student Computer Lab

Regular meetings between staff

AV Services

Check out Laptops – not everyone has them contrary to popular assumption.

Furniture

Herman Miller – Brand

Canopy Work Island – has white plastic above

Caper chair – good 15 year warranty

Tall Tables for open access - ADA compliance

Lounge chairs – comfortable but would be better if they would roll.

Whiteboards – Most popular item.  Do serious and fun things on them. (she takes pictures of them to share on Flickr)

Markers run out and have to be replaced (significant expense)

Food and Beverage

Demand was high for this service.

Fewer spills because people are more honest when spills happen.

Use vending machines – wanted Starbucks but were denied.

Video Windows

Ceiling mounted Video windows

Can play video games, show video

Creatives exhibits – Mustaches of the 1900’s (highlights special collections) – appeared on Boing Boing.

White Board Signs

Flat Panel Displays – wishes she hadn’t gotten them. Not looked at

Signs

Floor sign is really popular. Projector enabled by wireless card.  Private network of laptop connected to projector.

Special Events

Hubbub Party – 800 students attended!

Prize drawing – but doesn’t want to do it again. Takes a lot of time. Kids enjoyed but she didn’t

Pizza – bought 100, long line

Pop a shot basket ball rental – kids loved but broke it.

Balloon Animals – they loved it (200 bucks) she would definitely do it again.

Video games on projectors

Guitar Hero was set up even at Dell’s Campus.

Tarot Card Reading

Makeovers – Approached business and said that it could be a good marketing opportunity

Photo booth

plastic green cloth, batch of props, camera, release form, Photoshop

Halloween hand out candy – show kids they care

Stats

Library Stats database from University of Wisconsin

Can be dowloaded at Google Open Source Area

Used stats from here to get more Wireless Access. Kept sending problem reports to CIO.

Door Counts

Marketing

Press releases

Students wrote one up unsolicited in a Newsletter.

Promotional video