RefWorks 2.0

RefWorks 2.0 is coming!

A chance to win $100!

Proquest, publishers of ABI Inform and European Newsstand, are asking for your feedback and offering the chance to win a $100 prize.

RefWorks competition!

RefWorks is running a 'Tweet and Seek Challenge' competition next week - prizes include iPods and gift vouchers.

New media literacy

It's been an interesting week for thinking about information literacy, media literacy and such things. Old media have spent a lot of their time recently reporting on what's been happening in new media. This article in The Media Blog has an interesting graphic of what's been going on.

Swine flu

Swine flu is one of those subjects where there is a large amount of information available, some reliable and some not.

For those looking for reliable information about swine flu at work XpertHR have now added a dedicated swine flu resource, available to staff and students of the university. Follow the 'Shibboleth' option and use your university username and password to log in.

Information literacy

It's Information Literacy Awareness Month in America. This reminded me that I was once asked how to correctly format a reference in Harvard style for a web page that didn't have a personal or a corporate author. While it would be technically possible to resort to 'Anon' I couldn't help wonder why anyone would trust information if they had absolutely no idea where it had come from.

Tour guides

While I was on holiday this year I visited a wildlife conservation centre and, for some reason, during the talk in the great ape area I got to thinking about our induction week tours. The guide was struggling against the wonders of modern technology. Her mike crackled and popped and then gave out half way through. So she carried on without it. She didn't have a particularly loud voice but the group gathered around to hear because what she did have was real enthusiasm for her subject and that communicated itself without any need for amplification.

Multi-media-tasking

I can almost feel the brain cells stretching to accomodate all the various communication channels I am tuned into these days. Today I've sent and answered email, am following colleagues tweets from the CILIP Umbrella conference, have commented on a JISC blog and am helping prepare a script for a video intro to our Second Life island. All before lunch!

TGI

Got a good turn out for the TGI training last week. Much searching was done on what sort of people buy Innocent, and not so innocent, drinks!

It seems we are the first university to sign up for this service, although others are showing interest. So, for the moment, our students have an advantage in being able to get to know how an information source that's widely used in the business world works. Definitely something worthwhile to put on the CV.

Brave new web 2.0 world?

Have been reading the JISC report Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World and wondering if I was born in the wrong generation. I've always seen the web as social and interactive. That's how I've always used it. One of the first things I found the brand new internet/web thingy to be good for was collaborative writing experiments. I was on discussion lists and bulletin boards from way back in the mists of time. I saw my first flame war break out in 1996 on a birdkeepers mailing list called BIRDTECH-L. I was in virtual worlds when they were text-based and known as moos and you had to move around by typing 'go north.'

Ok, so the applications are much better and easier to use these days, but it's always been possible to see the web as a facilitator of two-way or multi-way communications rather than as a broadcast medium. I'm slightly at a loss to understand why this is seen as some kind of scary new development that us old people can't understand. After all, it's just a matter of making the online world more like 'real' life, by making the online life social.

MetaLib (no, it's not a librarians heavy metal band!)

I now have a much better idea of what MetaLib can do for us - thanks to the willingness of fellow info professionals to share their knowledge and experience!

Hopefully it will allow us to present our databases better, allow some of them to be cross-searchable, add features such as alerts, bibliography and reading list style outputs, and provide (via SFX) quicker and more reliable links to full text. All good things that I'm pretty sure will be appreciated by staff and students. I think I might enjoy training sessions more with once it's up and running.

Maybe we'd get better attendance if we spread the rumour that it is a librarians heavy metal band though?

Twittering librarians

Attended a meeting via Twitter yesterday, which was a first for me. Can't say it had quite the same sense of 'being there with others' as meetings I've attended in real or Second Life, but it did at least allow me to be somewhat involved in a meeting that I had no hope of attending in person due to work commitments.

It was also excellent in that it was discussing how librarians and specifically CILIP (1) could make use of web 2.0 tools, and it was doing it by.... making use of web 2.o tools! What a good idea!

The only realistic way I've found of discovering which web 2.0 tools I might have a use for and which I don't is to try them. It's also almost impossibly difficult to convince anyone of their usefulness in the abstract but a demonstration, or better yet opportunity to try them out for real, can be a lot more persuasive. (Hmmm, that probably applies to information skills too!)

Lots of interesting issues were raised but I think the only vaguely useful input I made was to suggest that CILIP might look to the ALA (American Library Association) as a role model. I've since realised - after being reminded by a colleague - that the US SLA (Special Libraries Association) also does a lot of good things.

If you'd like to see how it went here is a Twitter feed transcript and wordle.

(1) Note for any non-librarian or non-UK based readers this is the UK librarians professional body.

Open access lectures

Academic Earth looks interesting. Video lectures from the world's top scholars - or so they say themselves. I haven't had time to have a proper look at it yet, (I am on leave today after all!) but the entrepreneurship section could be useful. Thanks to David Burden for alerting me to this resource.

Buying books

Went to Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford today. Bought a lot of books for the library and one for me.

JISC Libraries of the Future debate

Now THIS is the sort of thing that Second Life is good for. I was interested in the JISC Libraries of the Future debate, but it coincided with a day of in-house SFX training. The option to attend via Second Life meant I could - just - do both.

It's always interesting to attend a combined Second Life/'Real' Life event. (I do dislike the way that terminology implies I am somehow less real when mediated by an avatar than I am when physically present.) The focus is - in my experience - always firmly on the physical meeting. This event was better than most in that respect, with someone aware of what was happening in both spaces and chanelling communications between them. When it came to questions though, the sl audience only managed to get - if I remember correctly, and it's quite possible I missed some - two communicated to the panel.

As to the substance of the debate I was surprised to hear that the future of libraries is to be buzzing with activity and groupwork. I must have time travelled and be living in the future right now! I enjoyed the lively debate started by the speaker who had some good, if provocative, points to make about the relevance of libraries to the scientific research process, and the madness of a system whereby universities buy back the products of their labours from publishers at outrageous prices in the form of journal subscriptions. Long live the glorious Open Access revolution! Or maybe not?

Information finding

Updated the Just In blog which does an occasional brief review of selected highlights from the professional press. Haven't done this for a while which gave me the opportunity to spot a number of articles from different journals published over the last few months all on a similar theme: how people go about finding information. The oversimplified version appears to be...

Students use Google and course texts first then the library.
Academics use Google and journals first then talk to their colleagues.

Comments on this would be wonderful!

Web 2.0 kerfuffle

Librarians are not an especially excitable, argumentative lot on the whole, but occasionally a little kerfuffle breaks out. The latest one is over Twitter and other Web 2.0 communications media. It started with this blog post from Bob McKee (chief exec of professional body CILIP) and this response from Phil Bradley - if you're interested you can follow the debate from there.

Why might you want to do this? Well, as a reader of this blog you might just possibly be a fellow librarian, but even if you're not this might still be of some interest. There are big issues at stake here over authority, responsibility, participation and democracy, about how individuals and organisations communicate... or fail to. Organisations of all kinds and their members, customers, clients or supporters are going to have to address these issues soon, if they haven't already started doing so.

Courses - Making web 2.0 and social networking work for you

I often feel like I'm struggling to keep up with web 2.0 type things, so it was a relief to find that there was not too much referred to in this session by Karen Blakeman at the University of Winchester that was complete news to me!

On the other hand it was good to find out about a few things that were new to me and to compare notes with others about how they're using the enormous range of web 2.0 tools there are available now.

New (to me) things that I definitely want to follow up are...

• Friendfeed.com - a way of pulling together the various aspects of your web 2.0 life into one place
  
• Blogpulse blog search engine with a very nice trends graph feature

Obama on libraries

"Guardians of truth and knowledge, librarians must be thanked for their role as champions of privacy, literacy, independent thinking, and most of all reading."

"...truth isn’t about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information"

Barack Obama 2005