June 2011
102 posts
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What Does This Mean to Me, Laura?: Where’s the... →
At the most base level, every patron is asking, knowingly or not: “What’s in this for me?” If you can successfully answer that question for them, you have made that personal connection. Personal connections can result in more broad-based support.
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Brain Traffic: The Value of Content, Part 2:... →
7 steps to measure the value of your content:
Don’t worry about exact numbers
Start by defining what you’re measuring
Assign values to your functions and characteristics
The more ways you measure, the more certainty you get
Establish a baseline
Measure regularly
Be realistic about measurement budgets
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In the Library with the Lead Pipe: Understanding... →
Demonstrating connections between library use and undergraduate student achievement has proven a difficult task through the years. Several authors have suggested outcomes to which academic libraries contribute such as: retention, grade point average, and information literacy outcomes.[9]
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“To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and,...”
– Melvil Dewey (via readingriotgrrrl)
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Tame the Web: What is “Social Reading” and why... →
“Social reading,” as a concept, is actually quite simple: people want to share what they have read with other people and receive feedback about their thoughts and ideas. Technology is the great enabler for social reading, and the natural place for this activity to cultivate. Social reading has several key characteristics. First, social reading is an extremely public activity. Gone are...
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NYT Opinion: The Sun Is the Best Optometrist →
Parents concerned about their children’s spending time playing instead of studying may be relieved to know that the common belief that “near work” — reading or computer use — leads to nearsightedness is incorrect. Among children who spend the same amount of time outside, the amount of near work has no correlation with nearsightedness. Hours spent indoors looking at a screen or book simply...
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Computer: What was an Encyclopedia? →
infoneer-pulse:
Gene Roddenberry did a pretty good job back in the days when he predicted in the Star Trek series that in the future we would just ask “Computer. What is XYZ?”. Just last week Google rolled out voice search and it seems to work quite well, actually. For standard phrases and questions at least. If I ask Google for my name I’ll get all sorts of witty and peculiar results whereas...
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“Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet...”
– BBC News - Internet access is ‘a fundamental right’ (via interestingsnippets)
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Open Cover Letters →
If you’re looking for good cover letter examples, here’s the site for you.
Are you currently applying for jobs in libraries or archives? This website hopes to open up the mysterious world of hiring by making real cover letters open to the public, with personal information redacted.
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Free Government Information: E-Gov: are we... →
Do we want governments to favor “customers” who require “personalization” over citizens who are seeking information? I worry that such an approach will likely lead to government web sites that silently filter out relevant search results in an attempt to show you what the government (or Adobe) thinks you want. If we do not know how this process works and if we have no...
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OhMyGov News: GOP organization in hot water over... →
When it comes to social media, sometimes a tweet is in the eye of the retweeter…except when it isn’t. Or at least that is what the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) learned earlier this week when it was discovered that some NRSC staffers decided to retweet messages sent by prominent Democrats, with the only problem being that the Democratic tweets had been completely...
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The Krafty Librarian: Will Data Plans Squash the... →
The cloud can be great but it requires Internet access and that is being actively throttled or capped by cell phone companies. But that is using 3G or cell networks to get your data. You can still hop on a wifi hotspot like at home and download data to your glutonous content. Oops not anymore, Pogue reports home data plans are starting to get capped. (I can attest to this, 4 months after...
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Library Journal: New Ebook Service Launched, Takes... →
The Freading service will offer library patrons unlimited, simultaneous access to the available titles. There’s no access fee for libraries (although there’s a $150 setup fee for first-time customers of Library Ideas), and libraries budget a given amount for access to the collection.
Patrons can then download books for a two-week loan, with a two-week renewal if desired....
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“Where is human nature so weak as in a book store?”
– Henry Ward Beecher via The Writer’s Almanac (via thelifeguardlibrarian)
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Library Babel Fish: How Libraries Trump Big Media →
Libraries are different. They belong to their users more than media belongs to its audience. Librarians facilitate the selection and arrangement of material and do their best to serve as many needs as possible while being good stewards of limited resources, but it’s done with community input. We’re local in ways that (at least according to one recent study) news organizations no...
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“There is no such thing as content. There is no content industry full of content...”
– From This Is Not Content
This. So wonderfully and aptly stated.
(via modernandmaterialthings)
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FDA: Cigarette Health Warnings →
I really think the new cigarette warning labels are way beyond what’s necessary. I mean, what’s next? Putting pictures of cirrhotic livers and car wrecks on every bottle of alcohol?
They claim the warnings are to
increase awareness of the specific health risks associated with smoking, such as death, addiction, lung disease, cancer, stroke and heart disease;
encourage smokers to...
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British Library: The British Library and Google to... →
This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will...
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“And yet [… the library] remains essentially the same. […]...”
– Dewey: A Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. p. 163-164
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San Angelo Standard-Times: Libraries without... →
…As with classroom teaching, the library offers different resources to meet individual needs.
Computers are available to access both the Internet and provide a way to express thoughts through creative writing experiences, as are magazines and newspapers, CDs, DVDs, resources on microfilm and, of course, books, which are available to all who wish to use them.
In other words, the...
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Library Journal: The Problem is Not the Homeless →
Hardly someone else’s problem, homelessness is prevalent and even more persistent owing to the recession. “We are continuing to see increased numbers of people experience homelessness due to the economy and the foreclosure crisis. Right now, there is an upward trend,” says Whitney Gent, development and communications director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty....
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Internet users now have more and closer friends... →
infoneer-pulse:
Have a computer, Internet connection, and no Facebook profile? Now you’re the weirdo outcast. In a new study done by the Pew Research Center, collections of data from thousands of participants showed that people who use social networking services are now not only likely to have larger networks than those who don’t, but also have more close friends. The authors of the study don’t...
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Library Babel Fish: Dispatches from the Future →
…this is our future if publishers prevail. We may have to adhere to a strict and highly conservative interpretation of old guidelines drawn up by – you guessed it – publishers, who back in 1976 were troubled by that disruptive new technology, the Xerox machine. If they call the shots, we will have to create a bureaucracy to enforce copyright compliance or face litigation. We will have...
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“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with...”
– Roald Dahl (via libraryland)
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Public Libraries News: Reasons for public... →
Public libraries are currently under attack as never before. Quite apart from the imperatives of cutting council spending, many critics question the point of public libraries. With the advent of the internet and the ebook, public libraries are described as out-dated. They are also accused of being too Middle Class and of being a luxury we cannot afford when other services are...
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Read Write Web: Library E-Book Checkouts Get a... →
The number of people who check out e-books via their local library is still pretty small - less than 15% of people in a recent survey indicated that they turned to libraries for their digital content. In part, it’s been difficult for libraries to offer e-books to their patrons, but as the popularity of the e-books and e-readers has skyrocketed, it’s clear that libraries are keen to find a...
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Twitter in the Classroom: Watch This Teacher... →
infoneer-pulse:
Still skeptical about the value of using Twitter as a tool to engage introverted students in classroom lessons? You’re not alone. A recent survey of almost 2,000 teachers found that half think that using Twitter (and Facebook) in the classroom “is harmful to the learning experience.” But, Los Angeles history teacher Enrique Legaspi disagrees with the naysayers. Last year he went...
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The Consumerist: Federal Courts: Schools Can... →
In a pair of rulings by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week, judges sided with students who contended in separate cases that they were unfairly punished for publishing fake MySpace profiles of their principals. But the victories may be construed as defeats for student free speech, because judges’ opinions held that students can be punished for speech made off-campus...
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“I guess they think libraries don’t have lawyers.”
– Me, getting a little blunt, in an article in the Library Journal about the tension between the STM group and ARL regarding international ILL. A recent statement from STM advocates limits on library lending that are much tighter than U.S. law allows. (via arlpolicynotes)
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Save NYC Libraries: The Library is Dead, Long Live... →
So apparently a certain director (Mark Page) of a certain city agency (Office of Management and Budget) doesn’t think that libraries are necessary any more. According to this august personage, the internet and ebooks have killed us off.
Yay!
For that to be true all of the following things must have happened! This is great for our city and our society in general!
[…]
This post...
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Library Journal: Unlocking Hathi Trust: Inside the... →
I find it frustrating that to download a PDF of something, you have to belong to a ‘partner institution’ (i.e. university). The publication I was after was a gov’t pub, so copyright wasn’t even in play.
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Sourcebooks Next: Ebooks. How far? How fast? →
Stories seem to be at the heart of ebooks right now. Even the successful non-fiction ebooks we’re seeing skew to narrative - memoirs and biography and history. They’re all stories – and they’re all linear reading experiences.
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“So the federal government will do more with less, improving how it delivers...”
– TooManyWebsites.gov | The White House (via infoneer-pulse)
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EPUBReader →
Read epub files in Firefox with this addon. :)
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