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

New BOPs and BIFs!

New or updated on COBRA this month

BOP = Business Opportunity Profile
BIF = Business Information Factsheet

BOPs
Gas Fitter and Central Heating Engineer
Fashion Designer
Window Cleaner
Translator
Aromatherapist
Tattoo Artist
Travel Agent
Aquatic Retailer
Computer Shop
Freelance Editorial Services
Book Publisher

BIFs
An Introduction to Understanding Financial Ratios
A Guide to Renting Premises for your Business
An Introduction to Tax, National Insurance and VAT
Choosing and Using an Insurance Broker
A Guide to Completing a VAT Return and Making Payments
A Guide to Costing and Pricing a Product or Service
20 Tips to Help You Choose a Business Idea
A Guide to Business Rates
A Guide to Fire Safety Measures
An Introduction to Value Added Tax (VAT)
A Guide to National Insurance
A Guide to Corporation Tax
A Guide to Tax Self-assessment for the Self-employed
An Introduction to Consumer Legislation
An Introduction to Applying for a Consumer Credit Licence
An Introduction to Business Regulations When Starting Up
A Guide to Flexible Working Regulations
A Guide to Meeting Tax Deadlines in 2008
A Guide to the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006

Market Synopses
Advertising and Promotional Services
Complementary Therapy

Mini BOPs
Kite Retailer
Mystery Shopper
Perfumer
Haggle Website
Lap Dancing Club
Log Cabin Holiday Organiser
Pet Taxi Service
Second-hand Book Website
Wigmaker
Stonemason
Kitchen Designer

Solent Life enquiries

My Solent Life enquiry duty hours are now Thursday morning 9-11. I'm going to try to be at the virtual enquiry desk during those hours. I will be multi-tasking, which I find quite difficult with Second Life, so please make allowances if you ask me a question in there!

New ebooks via Bized Premier

We've had an ebook collection for some time now, but it didn't include much in the way of core texts or books on reading lists. We now have access to some of the more sought after titles - such as Blythe's 'Principles and Practice of Marketing' - via Bized Premier.

Mintel now contains Snapshots

Mintel has acquired Snapshots International, so you can now access Snapshots market research reports through the Mintel interface.

Free books!

Well it's a library, of course we have free books. But this is different. This is a free book you can take away and keep without anyone writing to you asking for it back. Or you can be nice and pass it on for someone else to read. We're taking part in Southampton's Reading Slam. Soon you too could be reading Slam. There's also a chance to meet the author and win a signed copy of the book.

Reflections in Wonderland

The latest issue of Sconul Focus has an article that a colleague and I wrote based on our experiences of Second Life during the project we've been doing over the last year.

New things

Long time no blog entry. Not because I've been on holiday all the summertime, but because the summer is busy in it's own different way from term time and because I'm even more sure than usual that nobody would be reading this!

So what's new in business information? Well, we have a new online information source for marketing - TGI (Target Group Index) providing data from consumer surveys. We have a new library catalogue which will be getting a lot of new features added in the next few months. We hope that by Christmas you will be able to search it for journal articles as well as books, which I think will be a big step forward.

There are also quite a few more new things being planned but not quite ready for general release yet. As with so much of life the theme is 'constant change'.

Courses: project management

I was relieved to hear in this course that planning is not a natural process. It certainly doesn't come naturally to me! I was also relieved to hear that detailed plans can only be applied to stages of three month or so, and for longer projects you need an outline with the detail to be filled in as the project progresses. In fact I think that is more or less what we have done with our project, although without a lot of formal paperwork, so maybe I'm not as disorganised as I someimes feel!

Citation tracking coming to Proquest databases

Proquest databases ABI Inform and European Newsstand will be unavailable on Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 3:00am for twelve (12) hours.

This is to add a feature showing 'cited' references and 'cited by' references which will allow users to track and view documents which have been cited by other researchers.

This feature was previously only available in specialist citation indexes.

Conference: BBSLG

The BBSLG is the British Business Schools' Librarians' Group (although a name change is under consideration and I hope the new one puts less of a strain on my ability to use apostrophes correctly!)

The conference this year was looking at something called 'OurSpace'. It's always interesting in creative writing exercises to see how different people interpret the same theme, and this applies to conference themes too. One speaker saw space as implying boundaries and asked us to think about where our work boundaries are, a couple looked at physical spaces, and another talked about managing our own personal head-space.

Of the keynote speakers the one I most enjoyed was Michael Comyn on stress and resilience. How could I not like a session that referred to entrainment? (As in the Van Morrison song!)

The members sharing sessions - short presentations on current projects and issues - are a regular feature of the BBSLG conference and one of the best bits, giving everyone a chance to find out more about whats happening in other places. This year we presented on Second Life which, it seems, is a space few business schools are as yet exploring.

The best news was that the BBSLG website is getting an upgrade to web 2.0!

The biggest disappointment had to be the very poor internet facilities in the hotel.

On returning home I was happy to find that the herring gull chicks I've been watching for the last few weeks had not fledged while I was away. They've been trying their wings today - lifting them up, catching the wind and hovering, then dropping back onto the roof. They'll be off and away soon.

Courses: Approaches to induction

This course reinforced an idea I have been getting from a variety of sources recently. To get your message across you need to keep it brief and to the point and make it relevant to your audience. Otherwise you risk your message getting lost in the background noise of information overload we all live with these days.

Wizards in the back office!

Half way through my second day of training on the new library system and have been only very slightly boggled some of the time. I have certainly understood enough of it to see that we will have some very nice new front end features to play with once it's up and running. The technical stuff is accessed via something called a back office wizard, but luckily we have our own real live back office wizards to deal with that!

Courses, courses, courses!

One of the things I have found this blog excellent for is keeping track of the various courses, conferences and training sessions that I attend. I can look back and remind myself of what I did when and any key points I might want to act on in future.

I've not been blogging much lately due to the usual excuses of pressure of work/life etc and I would like to get back into the habit. This week seems like a good time to do it as I have training events on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday!

Monday's was a course in supervisory skills. Today and Wednesday I get my first sessions on the rather interesting shiny new system that we're getting to replace our old library catalogue. Then on Thursday I'm off to London to a course on library induction where I will be presenting on our approach and, hopefully, doing a bit of what Tom Peters calls 'creative swiping' - being inspired by other people's ideas.

Word work/word play

Constant change

I did feel sorry for the student in one of my training sessions who, at the end of his second year, had only just worked out how to search for things on the library catalogue, only to be told that we'll have a new one when he comes back for his final year. Hopefully it will be better, not just different. I just wish that constant improvement was as inevitable as constant change!

New features on ABI Inform and European Newsstand

Proquest are going to be doing some work on their databases at the following times

Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 03:00 for two (2) hours
Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 03:00 for twelve (12) hours

What they're doing is adding the option to create RSS feeds for searches and also adding a new Arabic interface to their language options.

WARC - digital

The World Advertising Research Centre database has added a new 'digital' section looking at things like top viral campaigns, digital consumers, how people use the internet, and impact on agencies.

The library -
exercise for body
and mind




I'm on leave next week - moving house, but Mary and Jane will be in ML107, on floor 1, if you need any help.

Pajamas

I've never been to a conference* in my pajamas before. Virtual pajamas and real pajamas in fact. That's the sort of thing that can happen at an international conference held in Second Life.

I think this unusual style of dress for professional networking can be excused seeing as the latter part of the programme ran from 12 midnight to 5am.

I must admit though, I have been looking for an excuse to wear the rather lovely pjs I found and, in SL, there's really not much chance, as avatars don't sleep (although they have been known to nod off briefly if sufficiently bored.)

I did wear more appropriate clothing for the (relatively) serious part of my day when I - along with a brave colleague - did a presentation in both text chat and voice simultaneously. And we were not too put out to find in a later session that there was a technological gizmo that would have made the process much easier!

There's always more to learn.

If I've done it right there should be some pics of the event here.

*Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums

Conference

I'm doing something weird next weekend. I'm going to be presenting a paper on Second Life at a *conference in Second Life. If the technical gremlins will allow, that is.

I say I am going to be presenting it, but am I? Or is it my avatar, Wynne, who will be doing that? Will she claim ownership of the copyright?

*More info here Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums and here is a Video

Evangelised!

I saw a presentation the other evening by Metaverse Evangelist Roo Reynolds from IBM. He certainly lived up to the job title!

Key points that I picked up on were...

• Virtual Worlds (VWs) are about people, they're fundamentally social spaces
• The average age of people in Second Life is around 34
• What Second Life has over some other VWs is user generated content
• Its ok to start small - send in a few explorers
• Things in VWs can be ephemeral - its easy to build and to destroy
• Do we want to replicate the real world? Or be creative with the posssibilities of VWs?
• It's not just Second Life, watch out for new worlds
• Watch out for the real metaverse - joined up VWs!

£200 prize up for grabs!

JISC are doing the first ever national survey on the use of and perceptions of e-books.

There is a £200 prize up for grabs for staff and students that enter the survey before February 15th.

To participate in the survey please visit the JISC User Survey 2008. The survey will take around 10 minutes to complete. There is information for faculty staff and students if you want to know more about it.

Literature searching: theory and practice

I'm being painfully reminded lately about the difference between theory and practice.

In the early stages of trying to get a paper written, with a colleague, to submit to a conference, I have to keep reminding myself to keep track of what I've read and might want to quote from or refer to. But after several months of "scan, flick and `power browse’"- as a recent research paper calls it - that is proving to be very much harder to do than it sounds!

JISC Ebooks

We've recently subscribed to 5 new business and management studies e-books through the JISC national ebooks observatory project.

• The Dynamics of Employee Relations - Paul Blyton 3rd ed
• Marketing Strategy & Competitive Positioning - Graham Hooley 3rd ed
• Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach - Derek Rollinson, 3rd ed
• Integrated Marketing Communication - David Pickton, 2nd ed
• Management Concepts & Practices - Tim Hannagan, 4th ed

These e-books can be found via the library catalogue and are available on the MyiLibrary platform (using your Athens username and password if off campus.)

Staff and students can copy, print, and paste parts of the e-books and can, for educational purposes, incorporate excerpts of these e-books into teaching materials, essays, course work, presentations and MyCourse units.

Facebook

I am hopelessly word addicted. I realised this when I discovered the (for me) killer app on Facebook: you can play Scrabble on there!

I do realise that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the written, or indeed tiled, word, or for books and literature and the whole text based world of ideas, and I know that these things can be taken too far (as shown by this cautionary tale) but I think its probably a good thing if your chosen career involves something you are just a tad obsessive about.

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.

Looking forward to the New Year

It's been getting quieter and quieter over the last week. Winding down for Christmas. Which is just as well as there are quite a few things to prepare for in the New Year. In January there's a conference called Creativity or Conformity that sounds like it could be really interesting (or scary when I remember that I'm tabling a paper there!) and then there's the new Business courses for the Army, supported mainly online, that start in February. One of the things I like most about this job is that it doesn't stay the same, there's always something new happening.

Courses: Marketing the Virtual Information Service

A very interesting day, even though it started badly with over-running engineering works that meant missing the introductory session and coffee.

How best to market a library service has always been a debatable question and with the 'virtual' (or should that be digital or online or 'e'?) dimension it becomes even more difficult to answer.

Something that came up in several sessions struck me as potentially the way we need to go. That is segmenting our market and tailoring our marketing to different groups. How to segment though? By subject? By level? By mode of attendance? And how to find out what those groups want so that we can market effectively to them?

There's also the question of Google. Google has something our customers value highly (ease of use) and we're trying to sell them what we value highly (quality of information.)

Of course we're just lucky, in the business area, that we have so many high quality and easy to use resources like ABI Inform, Mintel and (oops, I seem to have slipped into marketing mode!)

Whatever did I do without Bloglines?

Not so very long ago a colleague suggested I might like to use one of those newsreader, newsfeed thingies to keep up to date with all my news alerts, blogs and so on. I said that I didn't really see the need, as I was quite happy to visit my favourite web sites and do searches to check for news updates. I agreed to give it a try though, and set up a Bloglines account.

Just recently Bloglines hasn't been alerting me to updates reliably, and I've been surprised to find how much of a loss this has left me at. Somehow, without my really noticing, it's become something I rely on. I just expect it to be there, working properly, and I get quite indignant when it isn't or doesn't. I don't have time to go chasing around the internet searching out things that should all come to me! Maybe it's a shrewd marketing ploy on their part?

[Today it told me I had 95 new updates on one of my feeds - I think it's finally caught up!]

Another enquiry

I usually enjoy enquiries, but I'm not so sure about this one. I was asked for help in tracking down a *book that I recognised as being one that I had read on my own degree course. Up to this point I was quite happy. Then I found the following note on the catalogue record. "This edition published on the 30th anniversary of its original publication." Hmn. Where did those 30 years go?

[*Folk devils and moral panics by Stanley Cohen.]

Unsuggester

A funny thing happens at this time of year. Terms starts, the clocks go back, and time accelerates at a lunatic pace.

Anyway, I just found a spare 5 minutes to say how much I enjoyed LibraryThing's Unsuggester. You can type in the name of a book you disliked and it'll tell you which books are most unlike it! What a good idea!

Enquiries

I enjoy a good enquiry. I thought I might share a couple of my latest favourites, suitably anonymised of course.

The first was 'I've got to read chapter 10 of a book by Jones, where can I find it?' What I enjoyed most about that one was that I managed to find the answer. It makes you feel almost useful when you can answer questions like that.

The second was about how to decide on a brand name for a new product. I suggested the WARC database which has loads of information about such things. I can't help but wonder what the people who decided on this name for their new product were thinking of, but I'm sure they know what they're doing.

Scary

Things people typed into search engines recently that led them to this blog -

scary things
scary things about spiders
how to cite wikipedia
compartmentalised furniture

I hope you all found what you were looking for.

X-rated database

Library resources are not always on their best behaviour during training sessions. They have been known to crash in the middle of being demonstrated, mysteriously change their interfaces between one session and the next, and sometimes turn up some rather unexpected results.

Xreferplus turned up a very odd result during training this week. This database includes a concept map option, a nice little feature where you can type in a word and get a diagram of related terminology, based on the dictionary and encyclopedia entries it contains. Once they'd been shown how it worked students had an opportunity to try it out for themselves. What I hadn't realised was that one of the reference books it contains is a dictionary of euphemisms. It seems that there is more to 'business' than is included on the syllabus!

Search engines

MsDewey, the new search engine for those who like their librarians with attitude (and without scroll bars.)

Let me out of here...

If I seem to have disappeared from sight lately I'm probably in the basement. That's where our training room is, you see, and I'm pretty much booked up with training sessions, showing students all the delights the library has to offer.

Plus some less than delightful things, including unmemorable passwords; unhelpful help screens; small, hard to find links you have to click on; links that don't link; a remarkable variety of error messages... you know the sort of thing.

This is the time of year I most deeply appreciate the publishers of those resources that simply do what you expect them to do, without any fuss or bother of the technological kind, and get very, very tempted indeed to cancel the rest in a fit of bad temper!

Weekend posting

I give up. I tried to find an excuse to claim Last fm was work related but it just isn't. It's much too good not to mention though. It claims to find music you'll like based on a sample of what you're listening to and... it actually works! I'm now sitting here happily listening to bluetadpole radio. Well, after 10 hours of information skills training sessions this week I think I need something on the life side of the work/life balance.

One day in history

Now here's an intriguing idea. One Day in History. It's not strictly to do with business information but it is going to be stored by the British Library, so there's a library connection, and it's just far too interesting not to mention. A one day mass blog event collecting snapshots of what YOU did on Tuesday 17th Oct 2006.

What I'll be doing most of the day is talking to small groups of students about all the library resources available to them. I've got 6 hours of training sessions booked for Tuesday, so won't have time for a great deal else!

Forthcoming conference

Looking forward to the Creativity or Conformity conference in Cardiff next January - this is the reason for all the activity with remote collaboration tools!

Don't wait...

Two things happened today that made me do this. I spoke to the first student this year who said what many have said in previous years: "I'm in my 3rd year, and I never knew you had all this before!" and I wanted an excuse to play with SlideShare. So, let's see if this works...

Slideshare

I found another collaborative tool - Slideshare lets you share presentations. It's a bit like YouTube for Powerpoint slides. Hmm, perhaps that doesn't sound too exciting... but then, it all depends how exciting your presentations are!

[This is a beta version and you have to request an invitation to join. I've signed up and have got a few invitations to give out if anyone wants one.]

Kind of blue

You know those silly internet personality quizzes...? I can blame someone from the Uni up the road for alerting me to this one.

"You scored as Blue. You are considered to be a very calm person who takes things one at a time and does not worry too much about the consequences. Whatever happens, happens, is your moto. You are the one people come to for advise on most topics, because you are filled with limitless knowledge. You can handle any situation."

Yes, that and the fact that I spend a fair bit of my time behind a desk over which hangs a sign saying 'Enquiries'!

[Example of limitless knowledge: I know that a 'moto' is an Italian motor scooter. I think they mean motto.]

Poll Builder

Today I found that those clever people at The Center for History and New Media have a very nifty Poll Builder which lets you... you guessed? Build polls. It literally takes a minute to do. That is, it took me a minute to do once I'd switched to Firefox, it didn't seem to want to play in Explorer (I haven't tried it in any other browsers as yet.)

Writely

Another collaboration tool I've recently signed up for is Writely, which lets you share word processed documents. You can import a document from Word or create it in Writely and invite whoever you want to view and/or edit it. It beats sending files back and forward as attachments via email.

As you may have guessed from recent posts I'm experimenting with ways of writing a paper with someone in another location - a university 'down the road a piece' from here.

Seething with life

Suddenly there are alot of people about. What was, until last week, a quiet, almost deserted campus is suddenly seething with life.

I get an odd idea, at this time of year, that someone might actually read this blog. I'm not sure that a librarian's blog is all that appealing in terms of reading matter but sometimes, when you know you really should be reading the set text, almost anything is more appealing, so you never know. Anyway, if you are a new student and you're reading this - hello and welcome!

Gliffy!

I found something that's both fun and useful. It's called Gliffy and it's a way of creating and sharing diagrams, flow-charts, floor-plans, mindmaps etc. The benefit of sharing diagrams created in Gliffy is that you can work collaboratively on them, from any pc.

Conference : The International Learner: Enhancing the student experience.

I was lucky enough to spend the last two days out of the office at a conference put on by the Business School. We were looking at the international student experience. This left me mulling over the usefulness of generalisations. It can be useful, in terms of providing services, to know that students from other parts of the world may be more likely to have problems with this or that or the other thing, but generalisations are positively unhelpful if we start trying to apply them to individuals. No one likes to be treated as a 'type' rather than as a person.

Something else it left me mulling over is that no one else in the world seems to like English food.

A bit of a panic

I got back from my holidays and had a bit of a panic over the number of things I'd not yet done to prepare for the new academic year. There are the routine things like updating leaflets, checking that we have books people have requested etc, and I think I'm on top of those now. Just about. But there are other things that are more work but are also more fun, like trying to keep up to date with new developments in the wider information world. The wider information world is a seething mass of new developments, of course, Google alone would be enough to keep tabs on, which makes it quite a challenge.

A librarian by any other name...

At various times in the librarianship world the issue is raised of whether to call ourselves something different. It's all to do with the thorny issue of the 'public image' of librarians which, to be quite honest, is not good.

I hadn't come across the word 'infornography' until recently. Perhaps we could start calling ourselves infornographers?

Reading about Library 2.0

I try, when I can, to fit some professional reading into my working day. (I'm a librarian for goodness sake why should I, of all people, feel guilty about being seen reading - as if it isn't 'real work'!?)

Something I've noticed lately is that I'm finding more of interest in online and open access journals than I am in the print journals we subscribe to, and occasionally I come across an article that is even worth blogging about, like this one from Webology on that complex mix of things that is often referred to as 'Library 2.0'.

It suggests that one of the greatest challenges for libraries, (and I'd imagine it's the same for all organisations) is that of giving up control over the virtual environment and being open to involvement from, and participation by, the whole community.

What would happen if we let students add tags to our catalogue records, chat online, contribute to wiki's, take part in podcasts? Would it be anarchy and chaos? Or might it be fun?

Bookshops, budgets and Basingstoke.

Sometimes, as a special treat, we get let loose in a bookshop with a budget to spend. That's what I was doing yesterday, in Blackwells in Oxford. Actually being able to pick up and handle real books as a way of selecting stock is good once in a while, although using bibliographic databases and reviews is probably a more sensible way to do it most of the time.

Luckily, for the sake of my personal budget, my time was fully occupied in the Business section and I didn't have time to get distracted by areas of more personal interest!

On the way home I got an unexpected evening excursion to Reading and Basingstoke. Whenever I travel by rail, wherever I am going, I always seem to end up in Basingstoke.