Library Stuff

Open Audiobooks Project – From the purpose:

“The goal of the Open Audiobooks Project is for volunteers to work together to create audio books of public domain texts for people to freely download, distribute, and modify. While the results will probably not be a match for books read by professional readers, we hope they will nonetheless be enjoyable and useful.”

I’ve been formulizing a basic framework for practical uses of librarians who work in groups and this project is a perfect example. Librarians can collaborate in providing assistance here in numerous ways, whether it means just lending your voice, or working within your library to provide a full public domain piece (with all library staff volunteering) in audio to the project. Librarians have been working together for a very long time (which is one of the reasons I became a librarian) and we need to continue to do so, online and off. Think of this project as document delivery for the 21st century. And if you want to keep up with the Open Audiobooks Project, subscribe to their RSS Feed. (link via del.icio.us)

Off The Shelf is a weekly newsletter from the Reading Public Library in weblog format! This is the first of its kind that I have seen. It’s obviously been bookmarked and will be showcased in my presentations on weblogs this fall. The one thing that they are missing is a link to their Atom Feed, which is automatically created with Blogger. Note that there are volume and issue numbers for each post. Very creative.

SNT Report links to this Wired article on Txtmob:

“[T]he new service from the Institute for Applied Autonomy was unveiled last month at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. There, TxtMob allowed more than 260 subscribers to automatically blast text messages to the mobile phones of every other subscriber.”

I’m ignoring all of the convention talk (this is not the forum for such discussion), but want to focus more on the technology used by TxtMob. Librarians who work in collaboration with one another can use TxtMob to move documents and ideas back and forth within the group. They don’t even have to be at the same physical library to communicate instantly. I musty admit,I’m a bit behind the times when it comes to using PDAs and other mobile devices to communicate via text-messaging, but I definitely see their potential, especially if one message can be sent instantly to more than 200 people at once. Very powerful stuff.

I started Library Anxiety a few days ago (I’m reviewing it for Public Libraries Magazine). This quote seemed related to my recent posts on group work and collaborative efforts in the library setting:

“…cooperative attitudes were related significantly to barriers with staff, comfort with the library, and knowledge of the library. Specificially, students who had the greatest cooperatove orientation tended to have the lowest levels of library anxiety…[i]ndividualistic attitudes, affective barriers, and mechanical barriers served as suppressor variables” (p 44)

While this needs to be read in the context of the entire chapter (as these phrases are defined therein), the concept that those that don’t work cooperatively (or have “individualistic attitudes”) have higher levels of library anxiety is very pertinent for those that focus on collaborative/group work. Think about your experiences working with patrons. Are those that ask reference questions as a group (this is more likely to happen in a public and/or academic library setting) more or less anxious about their research experience? Do they feed off each others anxieties or is there a calming effect present? These are interesting questions that could be studied in the future.

My fall speaking schedule is in place and I’m happy to report that most of it is local. Not that I don’t like traveling, but I’m glad that my foray back into the the speaking realm starts with local venues. Here’s the schedule:

On September 29th, I will be in Bellport, NY (that’s here on Lawn Guyland) speaking to my fellow Suffolk County librarians about weblogs and RSS.

On October 5th, I will be at the Metropolitan New York Library Council with two presentations. The first will be on weblogs and RSS and the second, on Tracking Technology Trends.

On October 21st, I head up to Connecticut for yet another presentation on weblogs and RSS (sorry, no link yet), sponsored by the College and University Section of the Connecticut Library Association.

Last, in November I will be at Internet Librarian in beautiful Monterey, California where I’ll be taking part in numerous presentations as well as moderating a full day track on information exchange with Jenny Levine.

If you are going to be at any of these events, please make sure to come and say hello before or after the presentations. Also, I have booked two presentations for the spring, but more on those later. If you would like me to come speak at your library association, workshop, conference, etc (my topics usually are on search engines, weblogs, RSS, keeping current, or marketing the professional librarian), I’d be glad to chat with you. Just send me a note or say hi via IM (NYlibrarian).

Now this is great news. My “Keeping Current” cohort Steven Bell and his colleague, John Shank, have created an online community with the help of Hope Kandel (whom I worked with on a few occasions) at Learning Times. It’s called the Blended Librarian:

A Blended Librarian is “[an] academic librarian who combines the traditional skill set of librarianship with the information technologist�s hardware/software skills, and the instructional or educational designer’s ability to apply technology appropriately in the teaching-learning process.”

“From the beginning, Bell and Shank decided that Blended Librarianship needed to be more than just a concept. It had to be a working organism through which library practitioners would help each other to improve their knowledge of and ability to apply the theory and practice of instructional design and technology to improve our ability to connect with faculty for the purpose of achieving student learning outcomes. To facilitate this vision, working with Hope Kandel of the Learning Times Network, an online learning workspace was created to provide the necessary learning community. What takes place there is the exchange of information. This takes the form of online chats, webcasted events, the sharing of resources materials, discussion forums, and it facilitates librarians with shared interests and goals connecting with one another. At this time, through the support and generosity of the LearningTimes Network, librarians are being invited to join the community at no cost. In the future membership information will be provided here. Temporarily, interested librarians should contact Bell or Shank directly.”

Good luck guys. You’ve already done yourself a huge favor by working with Hope. She’s a visionary librarian with a lot to offer our profession. Just one more plug: They are running an online workshop in September entitled “Effective Collaboration for Campus-wide Information Literacy: The Blended LibrarianÂ’s Perspective on How To Make It Work”. Impressive.

I know this belongs over at LISBlogsource, but I couldn’t resists posting the news here. Walt Crawford has started a weblog for Cites and Insights, complete with an Atom Feed. Walt, you made my week. Thanks.

Randy writes::

“I have thought about embedding blogs into individual courses, and am aware of at least one professor, a good friend who teaches at U Lethbridge, who uses blogs in his classes. Last year, I began suggesting to students in some of the fourth-year engineering design courses that they consider using blogs as a means of communication between design group members. In other words, pure project management. This fall, in my library and research skills instruction sessions, I will be encouraging the students to use blogs from the outset to manage their design projects, thus reducing the number of phone calls, e-mails, text messaging, and other means of communication, as they work in teams on their capstone design projects.”

I have been fascinated of late with groups that work with blogs to communicate with one another. There was an article published recently on the use of project blogs in the corpoarate ennvironment. Called “plogs”, they incoporate weblogs into projects as a communication tool for it’s members. Of course, RSS fits right in here, so that one need not access the blog directly to read any updated information. Plus, the collaboration aspect fits in as well. In our small world of library science, we have LISNews as an ongoing “plog”, although I’m not sure what that project outcome would be. Do all projects need outcomes? Or can they be ongoing?

Gary linked to an interesting article from Federal Computer Weekly entitled, Mr. Rogers’ new neighborhood. A quote:

“Communities of practice were once considered a radical concept in government, but that is no longer the case. Now feds are warming up to the idea of sharing knowledge and using such communities as forums to make it happen.

A community of practice is a place where a group of people, bound together by a common passion and interest, meet to ask questions, respond to others, and exchange ideas and information. Now advances in technology are making online communities of practice more commonplace.”

I’m not always positive about our government, especially in the way they communicate wih one another. Could there be a change on the horizon? I hope so. I’m only in the beginning of my studies on social networks, social software, and community and group learning (I’ve been looking through my library’s databases for articles to download), and I’m getting the feeling that the theories are pretty sound, but haven’t been put into practical use in the library setting on a consistant basis. I could be wrong (I hope I’m wrong!), and I know that I need to do more investigating, so don’t flood my inbox with hate notes telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Heck, flood my inbox with case studies in this area. I wantto hear from you. Jenny turned me on to a few things the other day on the phone (Yes, she is alive and well), so I’ll look into that.

This is so fun for me, reading about a new medium. This reminds me of when I started to read and write about RSS….

Here’s a cute use of RSS. Roosster has scraped sites that offer cheap prices on electronics. For those that want to save a few bucks on gadgets. Lots of feeds to choose from. (link via Logical Disconnect)