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.

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

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.

June Open Format : FindIt! Summon One-Search : June 8, 2010 : L33 : 10 am

Our next Spark! presentation will be an open conversation style meeting about FindIt! our new Summon “one-search” tool and the transition from SFX to 360Link.  We’ll talk about what it does, how it works and have a conversation about methods for making FindIt a success here at the Drexel Libraries.  There will be a quick demo and we’ll have some library “experts” on hand to discuss the implementation process, branding, the rollout this summer and any other questions that may come up.

5/6/10 Update: Peter will provide our demo, and John and Nancy will have some information to share about the new OpenURL resolver, 360Link.

As always, we’ll have tasty morning snacks, so bring a drink and your questions!

February Presentation : February 2, 2010 : 10 am : Location L33

Remember that interview you did over the summer?  Well, the Information Audit Report is available and ready for your review.  You can find it at L:TeamsInformation AuditInfoAuditFinalReport.pdf.

This month’s Spark! presentation will be for discussion of the report’s recommendations and any other questions or feedback you have about the report and the interview process.

We’ll provide light refreshments (probably delicious muffins!) and you should bring your own drink.

Please join us!

Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey for Library Staff Events that Jess and I distributed recently.

As we mentioned, this is an exploration and a method for getting everyone’s input on how best to organize Library Staff Events, growing out of the idea of the Brown Bag presentations and the Technical Services Snack Bag which has been so popular recently.

We got 54 responses to the survey, and of those 63% usually attend events now.

Here are a couple of charts that show what keeps people from coming, and what would get people to come:

Other things that came up:

• Staff want to see events held at both locations
• Over 90% think that Tuesday or Thursday mornings are the best times
• People would like more encouragement to attend, topics that are relevant to their jobs, and food!

After reviewing your responses, Jess and I have fashioned a plan that will establish a schedule for events.  We’re looking to hold an event each month, in one of three basic formats.

1. A presentation-style format, similar to the Tech Services Snack Bag.
2. A “5×5″ format, where 5 people talk for five minutes each about one of their projects.
3. An open format, to facilitate discussion on a specific topic.

We’re also planning to hold at least one of these, per quarter, at Hahnemann Library.  Based on your feedback, we’ll be sending out calendar meeting requests for each event via email, and we’ll be posting the full schedule to this blog so you can see who will be presenting what topic at any time.

We hope you’ll continue to give us feedback as the process goes along, and we want to make the series as useful as possible!

I recently attended a workshop on DragonDrop, IRT‘s media conversion tool for Drexel faculty and staff. They’ve improved it in many ways and here are some features:

• Has a built in capture function for quick (5 minutes or less) videos with audio. There is no editor, so if you want to be able to edit the capture, you’ll need to use Camtasia or the like.
• Integrates with Camtasia Relay, which also has a Mac version (unlike regular Camtasia).
• Files remain on the IRT server until you delete them.
• Can create “playlists” of uploaded files, and password protect them to make them accessible to certain groups, or accessible using date ranges.
• Can upload a text file to create a text-to-speech file.  Here’s an example of this post converted to speech.

Features coming soon include podcasts by phone, allowing you to call in a podcast which is then directly posted to your playlist.  Also they’re working on the ability to publish directly to YouTube or to iTunesU.

If any library staff want a quick overview of how this works, or wants to know more, please let me know.  To get Camtasia or Camtasia Relay, you will need to attend a training at IRT.

The recent issue of Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights (which I admittedly don’t regularly read) has an interesting column on when Web 2.0 approaches are worthwhile.  It includes impressions and opinions of various bloggers in library land, and calls some approaches into question.

For example, do we want to offer a service that people are unlikely to use, simply because it’s easy to create?  What kinds of in-library services should we focus on, in order to bring our base level of service to excellent?  Take a look.

First, we’ve got a YouTube Channel!  Kate said it well when she pointed out that there are many modules built around YouTube already.  offering our video content via YouTube allows students (or anyone) to grab video that is easily viewable on an iPod or cellphone, and allows us to be where our users are.

So far, we’re posting some of the English 101 Tutorials we’ve produced.  The video quality isn’t stellar, but we’ve got the originals on our site and they’re linked from the YouTube versions.   If anyone has any video they’d like included on the YouTube channel, get in contact with me.

Thanks to our friends in systems, we now have a Facebook application that allows users to search the Libraries’ catalog from within Facebook. This was a popular request from several of our librarians, and can be a good way to provide access to our resources in new places, beyond our website.

Those of you who use Facebook should give it a try and let me know what kinds of things you think can be improved, or adjusted to make it more usable, or friendly.