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.

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.

Join us for our next Spark! event on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at Hagerty Library, room L33.

Because staff suggested that a longer time slot with fewer presenters could be beneficial for the audience, the 5×5 event has been renamed Short Talks and will feature 3-5 speakers leaving 20 minutes at the end of the session for discussion.

This month’s event features the following speakers:

• Emily Missner: Clinical Faculty Workshop Series
• Diane Kinney: Tips for Getting Organized using Microsoft Outlook
• Rob Sieckiewicz: Online Internships
• Jenny James: Preparing the Annual Report

The event will be webcast and archived.  Please see your meeting invitation for the webcast information.   We’ll provide some morning snacks, so bring a drink, and enjoy!

A question came up recently about whether it’s possible to search Summon using a DOI.  I did a little research and discovered that it is, in fact, possible!  Simply type DOI: and the number into the search box, like this, and go directly to your article entry in Summon:

DOI:10.1177/1746847708088735

You can also use the Article Finder via GetIt to search by DOI.

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

Apptivate

Here’s an application that allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to functions on your Mac that don’t already have a shortcut. For example, you can assign a key combination to allow you to open programs, run scripts, etc.

It’s free!  If you try it out, post a comment with how it works for you.

[From Mac360]

MasterCard is planning to release an API in coming months, allowing certified developers to create applications that interact with MasterCard.  PayPal is already paired up with Bump Technologies and  allowing people to make payments to one another by bumping their iPhones together, and Visa with Visa payWave to just pass their card in front of a sensor to make payments.

Could this help libraries?  We could make it easier for patrons to pay fines, or even make donations?

Last week, several of us attended the IRT e-Learning 2.0 Conference, themed Technology Use in Teaching and Learning, held here at Drexel.  Gary Childs, Larry Milliken, Tim Siftar, Jay Bhatt and I gave a talk about using web-conferencing technologies to mitigate the distance for online and distance learning students.

There were several other interesting sessions, and here’s a few comments from Meg Finney and Gary Childs, who offered to share their thoughts with the rest of us.

I was really impressed by Christina Jenkins’ presentation, “Saturation Powerpoint.” She was definitely the anomaly at the conference and raised a bit of a scandal by dismissing Blackboard as an “inauthentic learning experience.” I thought she was fascinating.

Essentially, she posed this question: When does technology help educators and when does it inhibit them?

She was coming from a K-12 teaching environment, so it was an odd fit for the eLearning Conference, but she still had some great ideas. She identified four problem areas related to technology in the classroom:

1. Technology being used to replicate analog processes (resulting in redundancy, “tech for tech’s sake”)
2. Technology being used too much for “entertainment” or fluff rather than in more constructive ways
3. Notion of technology being inherently good/to be approached passively as an end-product
4. Over-reliance on the notion that “digital natives” (i.e., recent generations) really understand technology and/or appreciate it

Among her ideas to rectify those problem areas, she offered:

1. Crowdsourcing (building digital artifacts from the ground up, using the community)
– E.g., Christina used a social network/wiki to allow students to roleplay the Revolutionary War
2. Using games to educate like LittleBigPlanet, where you create your own levels/objectives
3. Encourage students to use the computer actively, with software such as those based on Logo
4. Teachers should consider what would change if they had to produce all their own materials, rather than simply re-distribute what has already been made. Try making teaching materials by hand.

Links to her page with Parsons, including her thesis on the subject:

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The other session Meg took away some helpful info from was the IRT session on open-source alternatives to rich media software, titled “Building an Open-Source Rich Media Workbench.”

They presented three different pieces of software:

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
– Comparable to Photoshop, etc.
*Meg uses GIMP myself extensively, and thinks it is a great program.

Audacity (audio recording and editing)
– Comparable to Sony Soundforge, Adobe Soundbooth, etc.

AVIDemux (video editing)
– Comparable to iMovie, Windows Move Maker, Adobe Elements, etc.

All these programs are completely free, and are supported by robust communities. Complete user manuals in multiple languages as well as tutorials are available in some manifestation for all three.

These two applications were mentioned Paul Evangilista’s talk, Lowering the Bar: Simple Tools for Online Blended Courses.

Pixie
“Pixie is a utility made especially for webmasters and designers. It is a color picker with few extra goodies.
Run it, simply point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. You can then use these values to reproduce the selected color in your favorite programs. Pixie will also show the current coordinates of your mouse pointer. ”

Kuler was nice as well.  It suggests color themes.

This recent article in The Economist has details on the technology behind e-book reader displays.

There’s also mention of PlasticLogic’s QUE proReader, which is set to launch next week.  Here’s a brief article from engadget.

PlasticLogic's QUE proReader

From the current issue of Code4Lib, an article on getting quick user feedback using a new tool.

Infomaki is an open source “lightweight” usability testing tool developed by the New York Public Library to evaluate new designs for the NYPL.org web site and uncover insights about our patrons. Designed from the ground up to be as respectful of the respondents’ time as possible, it presents respondents with a single question at a time from a pool of active questions. In just over seven months of use, it has fielded over 100,000 responses from over 10,000 respondents.