Co-edited by yours truly.  From our press release:

We are pleased to announce the release of a new book, Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog, based on user research for eXtensible Catalog, available now from ACRL or Amazon.

As part of the development of eXtensible Catalog (XC), a project to develop open source software sponsored by the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries, and funded by the Mellon Foundation and project partners, four institutions conducted eighty interviews and numerous workshops to understand how researchers learn about, acquire, and use scholarly resources. Research findings informed the design and development of XC, a set of open-source applications that provides access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards. In this volume, members of the project team report on key findings of the user research that was done at Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University, and discuss the value of including library users and technology specialists from many disciplines in the software design and development process. Editors: Nancy Fried Foster, Katie Clark, Kornelia Tancheva and Rebekah Kilzer. Authors: Jennifer Bowen, Kaila Bussert, Katherine Chiang, Katie Clark, Maureen Donovan, Nancy Fried Foster, Gabriela Castro Gessner, David Lindahl, Melissa S. Mead, Kornelia Tancheva and Wendy Wilcox.

EDUCAUSE is running an interesting experiment — they’re holding a 5-day online event called the Mobile Computing 5-day Sprint.  It’s a collection of five days worth of webinars, including polls, interactive discussions and other features.  The live sessions are booked, but they promise to post recordings each day.

I’m especially interested in tomorrow’s theme: Teaching and Learning.

The full list of themes for each day, and details on the sprint format, are available.

After observing the technology knowledge gap between undergraduates and librarians at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library created a self-directed training program for staff, offering incentives and methods for improving technology skills in a flexible manner.

From the article:
The Technology Challenge was implemented from June 2007 to January 2008. HBLL staff included 175 full-time employees, 96 of whom participated in the challenge. (The student employees were not involved.) Participants were asked to spend fifteen minutes each day learning a new technology skill. HBLL leaders used rewards to make the program enjoyable and to motivate participation: For each minute spent learning technology, participants earned one point, and when one thousand points were earned, the participant would receive a gift certificate to the campus bookstore. Staff and faculty participated and tracked their progress through an online board game called “Techopoly.”

Participation was voluntary, and staff and faculty were free to choose which tasks and challenges they would complete. Tasks fell into one of four categories: software, hardware, library technology, and the internet. Participants were required to complete one hundred points in each category, but beyond that, were able to decide how to spend their time. Examples of tasks included attending workshops, exploring online tutorials, and reading books or articles about a relevant topic. For each hundred points earned, participants could complete a mini-challenge, which included reading blogs or e-books, listening to podcasts, or creating a photo CD. Participants who completed fifteen out of twenty possible challenges were entered into a drawing for another gift certificate.

The full article is available through our databases:
Bridging the Gap: Self-Directed Staff Technology Training Quinney, Kayla L; Smith, Sara D; Galbraith, Quinn. Information Technology and Libraries29.4 (Dec 2010): 205-213.

One of the common complaints about electronic book formats is the loss of marginalia — the little notes that readers add as they read through a print book.  Researchers use these notes to gain insight into a famous reader’s thought processes, or to keep track of their own thoughts as they read through a volume.

This O’Reilly Radar article talks about the options for marginalia in the digital world — even as a revenue source.

From CurrentCites, Jakob Neilsen did a study of 43 students to review how they interact with websites, including university sites.

The results busted three myths of student Internet use:

(1) Students are technology wizards

(2) Students crave multi-media and fancy design

(3) Students are enraptured by social networking

The students often preferred simple design, and repeated comments that have been heard again and again in website usability studies (e.g. website text should be easy to scan). Other findings included that students were skeptical of sites that lacked depth, and they often have multiple tabs open at once and switch contexts frequently.

The summary is here, and the full 259-page report is for sale, here.

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) just released their 2010 Study on Undergraduates and IT.

Some highlights:

• Over 40% of undergraduates are “power users” of internet-capable handheld devices, compared with only 25% in 2009.
• 95% of respondents ages 18-24 use social networking sites, as do 58% of those 50 and older.  96% of these use Facebook.
• Most students are accessing course information via a Course Management System (CMS), such as Blackboard, but the number of participants who “feel positive” about their CMS has dropped to 51% from 77% in 2007.

The full report, and key findings, are available for download.

New date & time for this session!!

November Presentation : November 4, 2010 : 11 am : L33 Hagerty Library

Please join us as iSchool faculty member Christopher Yang presents his grant project on creating unified subject categories across institutional repositories  He would especially like to get feedback on this idea from librarians and practitioners. The project abstract is below.

The November session will be videoconferenced using Adobe Connect and the URL will be distributed with the meeting invitation.  Finally, please welcome Rebecca Goldman as co-organizer of future Spark! sessions. Please feel free to send ideas for future Spark! meetings to either Rebecca or Rebekah.

Project Abstract:

Owing to the information explosion, today’s libraries face the necessity of building unified collections derived from different repository sources and integrating resource types from different institutional repositories. In this situation, it is imperative to integrate the distinct subject directories such as classification and taxonomy into a unified subject directory. This will facilitate federated searching of information resources and will in turn enhance the user experience of seamless information access. Furthermore, the importance of information and resource sharing through collaboration across libraries, museums and other institutions have been increasingly recognized; accordingly, there is a critical need for integrating subject categories and taxonomy derived from different repositories. However, there are enormous challenges for information professionals in undertaking such an integration task. The core of the challenges stems from the fact that each of these subject directories evinces a complex semantic and syntactic structure that is embedded in local collections; moreover, there is no existing tool to support the integration task. In order to overcome such obstacles, it is necessary to devise a semi-automatic tool to support information professionals in apprehending relationships from the subject categories of different repositories and in recommending plausible changes and fine-tuning of the integration process.

To address these critical issues and challenges, in this two-year research project the research team at the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University seeks to develop techniques for facilitating an effective integration task and developing open source tools which enable information professionals to successfully integrate and expand taxonomy and subject categories derived from different repositories. Toward this end, we shall test our techniques using the Internet Public Library 2 (IPL2: http://research.cis.drexel.edu/index.html) IPL and Librarian’s Internet Index (LII)–and develop a new platform to share the open source. The platform will also be used to obtain feedback from information professionals to enhance our tools and will serve as an online community forum (i.e., a social networking site) through which information professionals express and exchange experiences in using the developed techniques and open source tools for the integration tasks.

The goals of the project are listed as follows:
Goal 1: To determine relationships between subject categories from different repositories (e.g. IPL and LII) through several text classification models.
Goal 2: To develop integration operations and process based on the identified subject category relationships of IPL and LII.

I was listening to a webcast that Peggy recommended and I found a section of the talk very interesting regarding organizing electronic documents in support of research.  The second presenter that focused on organizing pdfs in support of your research, and other tools that can help you organize your research documentation and citations.

You can listen to the section of the webcast here.  This particular section starts at about 16 minutes in, and it’s only about 10 minutes long.

Some of the featured product links:
Papers for reading/organizing

Sente for citations

Scrivener for writing

Onto the side of a building!  Here’s the link.

In a recent article in Library and Information Research, Andrew Walsh discusses the results of a study that explored the attitudes students have toward mobile services in the academic library.

A few things that I found interesting were that students felt that getting texts from the library would be welcome if the information was useful. They’d also be okay with being automatically subscribed as long as it was easy to opt-out; they didn’t want to miss out on a useful tool.  They don’t really want to experiment with new things unless it’s clear how it will be useful to them as individuals.  Utility is clearly a theme.

From the conclusion:

The results suggest that libraries considering increasing their services aimed at mobile users should:
a) Initially introduce services that use text messaging, not the mobile web.
b) Concentrate on services that potential users can immediately see benefits for, such as “reminders” of overdue books, rather than services with less obvious, or less mainstream benefits.
c) Make sure that any mobile friendly services are marketed carefully, selecting the groups most likely to benefit from them and directly stressing those benefits to the potential users in any promotional activities.

Some of the things mentioned in the study that might be worth exploring, at least as a pilot:

Text reminders for overdue/renewals
Text reminders for work shifts
Text when a book comes in
Texts for room booking reminders

The study was conducted at the University of Huddersfield in the UK in 2009.

Citation:

Walsh, A. (2010), “Mobile phone services and UK Higher Education students, what do they want from the library?” Library and Information Research. Vol.34, No.106, pp.22-36.

[PDF here]