Greetings!

...from Wynne and a very Merry Christmas from me.

The library and this blog will re-open on the 2nd Jan 2008.

Not too good to be true?

They say that 'if it looks too good to be true, it probably is!' I've found that to be good advice at times, but it is just a tad cynical. Some rare things look good and actually ARE good!

I've been poking around a site that looked far too good to be true for a while now and can't see a catch. It's associated with reputable organisations, and looks like a simply excellent idea. It's called FreeRice and it claims to develop your vocabulary while simultaneously helping to end world hunger.

Why am I blogging about this here? Well (she says, thinking quickly) increasing your vocabulary has got to be a good thing from a librarianish point of view, and one of the things I try to emphasise in my training sessions is how important it is to evaluate your sources of information rather than placing immediate trust in them.

Proquest downtime on Sunday

The Proquest databases ABI Inform and European Newsstand will be down from the early hours of this Sunday morning until the afternoon. If you were thinking of getting up early on Sunday morning and doing research I can only apologise and suggest a lie in.

The reason for the downtime is so they can add supplementary digital materials - audio, video, spreadsheets, etc - to the dissertations that are on there.

For some reason the idea of digital appendices reminds me of this blog entry I chanced upon recently.

Virtually there

I'm now most of the way through the Intermediate course in Virtual Librarianship I'm doing with the University of Illinois. (Does this mean I'm virtually a virtual librarian?)

It uses Moodle and Second Life for course delivery as well as them being the subject of the course, which makes it an interesting double level of learning. I've found myself behaving in a very 'studentish' way at times. Last week I popped into Moodle at the last possible minute to do a quick stab at the previous week's questions before the next class!

What I found really interesting is the effect of having my avatar present with other avatars in a virtual environment for the two hour weekly classes. There have been some weeks when the subject matter was not of the greatest interest to me personally, but I would have found it surprisingly hard to just wander (or indeed teleport) out of the class once I was 'there'. Almost as hard as it would be to do so in a face to face class. Quite different from logging in briefly to add a few comments to a discussion forum on Moodle.

Hints and bits

Following on from my last blog entry (where did November go???) I find that odd things I throw into training sessions or research workshops, almost as asides, are often greeted with the most enthusiasm and appreciation. For example pressing Crl-F to find a word on a webpage, or alt-tab to move between two open windows, putting quotation marks around the words to find the exact phrase in a search, or using Bloglines to keep track of infrequently updated blogs, creating a concept map in Credo Reference, or the fact that you can set up an alert on Google News. Maybe I need to devise a training session on useful hints and bits?

Stephen Fry on the net

"You’d be amazed... by how often friends of mine say they can’t find something on the net, simply because they haven’t stopped and thought about how to frame or phrase input search terms."

Stephen Fry on his blog (and in the Guardian)

New look for XpertHR

The XpertHR information database for human resource management has got a very nice new interface design.

Sadly the Athens Users link that HE staff and students need to find is still very, very tiny indeed and hardly stands out in it's subtle grey-on-grey colour scheme.

No spark

A while ago I ordered a book called A Spark from Heaven. I've since had a report from our suppliers to say that A Spark from Heaven 'doesn't seem to be available'. Which I found amusing in an ironic sort of way.

New look for Mintel

The Mintel market research database has a new look, now with a what's hot? link to the hottest industry stories and a media homepage link for ad campaigns, agency news and more.

Web 2.0 explained

This is simply excellent. One of my favourite people talking about one of my favourite things! Stephen Fry on Web 2.0.


VideoJug: Stephen Fry: Web 2.0

The student experience!

It's the summer time and so I'm.... busier than ever! When does the quiet time come I wonder? I've just started an online course with the University of Illinois, so am learning not just the course content but also about how online courses work from the student point of view. We're using Moodle and Second Life and as it's all new for most people there is a lot of learning going on! Two weeks in and we've covered the basics and started thinking about future potential. It's all a bit mind boggling.

Time passes...

Yesterday I received a long service award, which came as something of a reminder of the passage of time!

I've been doing what is supposedly the 'same' job for the last 15 years. The good thing about it is that it's not the same at all. For example, when I started here almost everything the library provided was print based. There was one computer for online searching, and the librarians searched databases on behalf of researchers. It was too arcane an art for anyone to be expected to do it for themselves. Not to mention it being charged on a per minute basis. Then came CD-ROMs, then came the internet.

Goodness only knows what this 'same' job will be like in another, say, five years. My prediction, which I will rashly publish here, is that the boundaries between life offline and online will blur and merge to the extent that terms like 'e-learning', 'distance learning' and 'blended learning' will become quaint and old-fashioned, because distance won't matter and all of life will be blended.

Librarian gets a (second) life

A wet bank holiday weekend seemed to be the perfect opportunity to get a Second Life.

Although I'm looking at the potential of Second Life as part of a work project I suspected (rightly) that there would be a lot to learn in a new world, so I thought I would devote some of my own time to it initially. If I'm going to walk into walls, fly into windows, sit on inappropriate things, or lose items of clothing I'd rather not do it at my first serious professional conference or meeting!

So that's how I came to spend the weekend meeting and chatting with a fox, a zebra with attitude, an eco-geek and several librarians.

Essay mills join Google blacklist

I've just been alerted to a very interesting article on the BBC news about Google banning ads that offer essays for sale. Excellent news.

Having looked at some of the essays for sale on this type of site it's clear that the quality of many of them is lower than most students could produce for themselves, given a very little effort. Add to that the fact that plagiarism is getting very much easier to detect and it really makes more sense to just do the work yourself and save your money!

Smarter student

If there's one book I'd say was well worth students buying it's a book on study skills. It's excellent value as it will apply to every course, not just one. I don't know that I'd recommend any particular book as what works for one person doesn't always work so well for another, but this one is new in and gets lots of stars on Amazon, so it might be worth a look.

McMillan, Kathleen. The smarter student: skills and strategies for success at university. (Floor 1 - Study skills section - 029.6)

Who and why?

Why do I write this, and who do I write it for? Those are questions that occur to me once in a while, as I suspect they do for many bloggers. I suppose I write it because I like writing about what I do, and would like more people to know something about what I do. If I didn't like doing it I could never keep it up.

As to who I write it for, I think that has to be for anyone I might cross paths with in the course of doing my job. Students, lecturers, and other staff at the Uni mostly, but also other librarians, visitors or people who get lost and wander in by mistake.

That happens in real life too. Mostly they ask where the way out is.

Enforcing civility

Sometimes I go to blog about something and find that I don't need to, all I need to do is point to someone else's blog entry that says it all.

Wikipedia again

Wikipedia makes the news again in this article in the Times.

I thought the days of the 'information superhighway' silliness, when people predicted that the internet was going to replace all the libraries and be the answer to everything, had been left behind back in the 1990's. Apparantly not. It's doesn't help that the other camp seem equally keen to say that everything web based is rubbish and should be banned.

Surprisingly enough the internet is just like anything else, a mix of the good, the slightly dodgy and the downright bad. Education, surely, ought to prepare people to tell the difference.

Improbable Research at Portsmouth

I recently attended a remarkable event: an Improbable Research evening at The University of Portsmouth, as part of National Science and Engineering Week. (Although, improbably enough, it was organised by the Business School.)

The event (see the video) was designed to showcase “research that makes people LAUGH, and then THINK.” Marc Abrahams, editor of the world renowned journal 'The Annals of Improbable Research' and newsletter MiniAir (available in the Alternative Library Roof Garden) told us about some fascinating IgNobel Prize winners.

The competition for the IgNobel Prize for Literature seems to be particularly keen and has produced some world class work. In 1999 it was won by the BSI for what The Guardian called "the hot, steamy prose" of BS 6008: Method for Preparation of a Liquor of Tea for Use in Sensory Tests. Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University won it in 2006 for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, who won the IgNobel Peace Prize last year, deserves a special mention for inventing an electro-mechanical teenager repellant.

The evening also featured a live performance of Atom and Eve: a mini-opera in four acts, the Great Inertia Debates (of which ‘yes v. no’ was probably the most hotly contested) and five minute presentations by previous IgNobel Prize winners in person.

John Hoyland, creator of the Feedback column in The New Scientist, provided statistical evidence of the dangers posed by tea cosies, while C.W. Moeliker, (see his tour diary) of Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, who won his IgNobel Prize for Biology in 2003 for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck, also introduced us to the 'Domino Sparrow'.

This bird became famous by flying in through a window and knocking over 23,000 dominos just a few days before a grand domino-toppling event, which was to be televised live in 11 countries. The unfortunate bird was shot, stuffed, and now forms part of a collection of famous sparrows, along with the almost equally well-known 'Cricket Sparrow', killed by a cricket ball at Lord’s in 1936.

Help!

As I'm feeling slightly boggled by technology at the moment I particularly enjoyed this video.

Another approach to Wikipedia

Having blogged about Jimmy Wales saying it isn't a good idea to cite Wikipedia, and about the US college that said the same thing, it was interesting to see an alternative approach being taken by a UK university. This BBC article describes how postgraduates are being required to write Wikipedia entries and updates as a way of developing their research skills.

New look coming for business databases

Keep an eye on market research database Mintel and human resource management database XpertHR: they're both going to be getting a new look soon, with some new features.

ABI Inform - new feature

That excellent database ABI Inform has a rather nice new feature.

When you look at your search results you may notice that some of the articles have a little 'link to full text' option under them. This takes you to other databases that have full text when ABI itself doesn't. It only appears where it knows that there is full text available somewhere else.


[Note! This has only been set up in the last couple of days and some of the links don't seem to be working yet, but most do and we're working on the rest.]

Scientific evidence for why you fell asleep in your 9am lecture!

If you're a teenager who needs an excuse for drifting into dreamland during an early morning lecture, blame your circadian rhythms. Print out and keep this article from the Yorkshire Post as evidence.

One of the most fascinating sessions at the 'Creativity or Conformity?' conference I went to recently was by Russell Foster (Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford University) in which he explained how young people's body clocks run to a different rhythm than older people's. The result, when combined with 9am lectures and part-time work, is a lot of chronically sleep deprived young people.

Of course your lecturers have an equally good excuse for yawning through your late afternoon presentations!

Don't cite wikipedia: 2.

There's been another kerfuffle in the library blogosphere lately about Wikipedia. (What do you mean, you hadn't noticed?)

This article from the Guardian started it with it's report that a College in Vermont has 'banned students from citing Wikipedia'. In fact, as you read on, you discover that they were not saying that students shouldn't use Wikipedia, but that while Wikipedia may be a useful source, it should not be regarded as authoritative, and so should not be cited.

I did like the alternative suggested, of getting all students to take an introductory course in scepticism.

One for Advertising students

If only any students ever read this blog I could use it to tell them about things like this excellent new book we've got in the library that they would do well to get their hands on.

Swimming in the sea of irrelevance

There's an excellent article in the Times Online today about Google's continuing efforts to digitise everything it can lay it's hands on, including the content of libraries. It contains a warning.

"Google is a profit machine. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we don’t delude ourselves into thinking it is an entirely neutral source of information."

Well fair enough, and non-neutrality is definitely something to bear in mind when searching Google, but surely libraries, being much more selective than Google, can hardly claim to be neutral either? I don't think neutrality is the issue here. What libraries do that Google makes no attempt to do is to be selective and to select on grounds of quality.

All this reminds me of that classic, which I think I've referred to here before, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he says [my italics]

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy."

Another thing that libraries do is to give 'swimming lessons', and surely those are needed now more than ever.

Creativity - what's that got to do with libraries?

As one of the very few people at the Creativity or Conformity conference who was what they call support staff rather than academic, perhaps I should try to account for the relevance?

One great benefit was that I got to take part in discussion of the issues and concerns of those who I'm supporting. I take 'support' to mean that my job is to make it easier for other people to do their jobs, and I think it's likely that I can do that better if I understand what it is they are trying to do.

Another was that it made me realise that while libraries are excellent at supporting the traditional style of learning (individual, based on the written word and existing knowledge in the subject area) they are not so great at facilitating more creative styles (collaborative, visual, lateral thinking, idea generating and problem solving.) Our physical spaces and our resources and (dare I say) our rules, are very much geared towards the former.

I've seen some examples of what others are doing to make universities and their libraries more active in support of creative learning. The projects involving iLabs and c-spaces * in particular were something that I think we should be aware of. Of course these things take time and resources... but let's not start singing that old song again (see previous post!)

*
Essex
Coventry
Bedfordshire
UEA

Conference: Creativity or Conformity? Cardiff 2007.

I think what I like best about the concept of creativity is its tendency to be positive. It's so very easy, especially at work, to slip into negativity. We would do wonderful things but we haven't got the money, we haven't got the time and, of course, they won't let us. It's a familiar refrain rather like one of those irritatingly catchy Eurovision songs that gets stuck in the back of your mind and you can't get rid of it. It's annoying how hard it is to get rid of, and I've caught myself humming it quietly now and then even since the conference.

As someone said in one of the final discussion sessions (apologies for paraphrasing and for not even being able to remember who I'm paraphrasing!) what it comes down to in the end is, never mind the excuses, did you make any difference or not?

Blogging about having nothing to blog about

It has been pointed out to me that I haven't updated my blog this year. Which is odd, when you think about it, as no-one ever reads it. It's quite spooky really.

The thing is, I haven't actually done anything worth blogging about yet this year. I expect I'll have lots of things to say after next week's conference though, so watch out for updates next Thursday or Friday.