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'.