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.
Former Google Video user? If so, you should think back to see if you have any files there you want to keep.
Google has decided to shut down Google Video, which actually stopped allowing uploads in 2009. If you’re (were) a Google Video user, here’s some info that can help you save your files. You have until May 13.
[Thanks, Kate!]
Last fall, Google released a new collaboration product, Shared Spaces. This allows you to create customized collaboration work spaces with anyone. You can create a place to play games, plan a trip, make lists or search Amazon, with people you know.
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.
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.
As Libraries think about data curation, why don’t we start with our own data? This Code4Lib article from NCSU talks about how to plan and execute a data analysis project for helping to make decisions and share with stakeholders for various programs.
Some examples include:
Reference Transactions
QuickSearch (NCSU’s homegrown federated search)
Library Course Tools
Special collections usage
“Although there is undeniably a time-commitment involved in initiating this kind of effort, especially in cases where data-analysis and interdepartmental outreach are not part of one’s usual responsibilities, we think the short term and long term benefits are significant. At NCSU Libraries, a grassroots approach to data analysis with cooperation between technically-oriented librarians and departmental stakeholders has yielded positive short term results, helping a variety of departments to answer questions about how patrons use specific library applications and services. Developing strong collaborative partnerships between departments is both a challenge and a positive outcome of this approach. Longer term, we hope these efforts can increase awareness of good data collection practices and of the opportunities that exist to leverage data to answer questions that can help libraries improve applications and services, as well as foster a spirit of collaboration between library departments.”
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4258
Image from thewildernessdowntown.com
Most of the time the difference between one web standard and another isn’t obvious in day-to-day use, but HTML5 is different. It’s currently supported on many browsers, and will enable several features that will make (y)our Internet experience much, much better. Via CurrentCites, here’s the beginning of an article in Technology Review that goes over the details and explains what’s what. Drexel Libraries has access Technology Review if you want to read the whole thing, which I’d recommend.
One example of HTML5 in action is the experimental interactive video The Wilderness Downtown by Arcade Fire. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check it out. It combines the video with information you provide, making it a custom video.
Some features pointed out in the Technology Review article:
You’ll be able to drag and drop images from web pages to email, and so on. GMail allows this now, but this will be ubiquitous with HTML5.
Video and audio will be easily embedded into web pages, eliminating the need for Flash.
There will be increased browser storage. This means that interactions with web sites will be much faster because your browser will have less constant back-and-forth with the server. This also means that more information will be stored in your browser, so even if you’re not connected to the internet, you’ll be able to send emails, or change your fantasy football roster and your browser will sync it up when you reconnect.
IM+ now has a web application that works a lot like our beloved Pidgin, but also has the capability to integrate with Skype chat accounts. It works on the desktop now as well as in their popular mobile interface, and it just came out of beta.
Try it out!
Google Wave apparently wasn’t so popular with the users. From the Google blog;
“But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”
Full post here.
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
