Recently bookmarked (weekly)

~ 22. October 2011 ~

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Seely Brown’s Keynote at IL2011

~ 17. October 2011 ~

I’m not really a fan of the “notes as blog post” genre. Hasn’t Twitter sort of made that obsolete? But, I’ve been taking notes at the Internet Librarian conference. Why not reshape them a little here?

I actually read John Seely Brown’s “Social Life of Information” book after getting tired of it hounding me on Amazon when I was in library school. Pretty good read, and the takeaway—that “working from home” doesn’t usually work that well—made some sense to me as someone who moved away from his grad program, then failed to finish his Ph.D.

I liked the opening of JSB’s talk. He argued that we are in a new moment in which the technological rupture we have experienced is not leveling off, not stabilizing, as technological ruptures of the past have. (Although whenever someone tells me we are in a totally new historical moment, I think, “really, just like the modernists said?”)

The bit about how it is increasingly difficult to evaluate textual authority was highly relevant, and only going to become more so. He had a lovely example of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which for a significant period was only covered outside of traditional news sources. A funny moment: he says, in this context, that librarians are more needed then ever. Of course I agree, but I know that in my organization (I do not exclude myself here), we still play the “these (more mediated) sources have authority, and those (Web/social media) sources don’t” game. We need to face these changes.

At times I could have used a few examples. For instance, “the half-life of a skill is now 5 years.” What kind of a skill are we talking about here? Not plumbing, or car repair. Not Web development—yes, the technologies change, but someone who learned HTML ten years ago would still be able to use a good deal of it, though they’d need to have kept up with developments. Although I guess I’m not even clear on what it means—sort of complicated to use “half-life” this metaphorically.

Like so many good talks, it sort of petered out as he told us that we need to embrace play for learning—I mean we knew that, right, even without the rest of it? Then remix, Harry Potter fan fiction, and we’re done. So, in summary, winners: Carla Hesse, David Weinberger, Andrew Sullivan, Piaget; losers: stuffy people everywhere.

homo Luden's

I have lots of notes from other panels…

p.s. Many of the ideas in the talk appear to be in an article called Minds on Fire published in the Educause Review.

From a communication textbook

~ 29. September 2011 ~

I was preparing an orientation class and found this gem in their textbook. 2nd edition, 2007:

For the iframe-challenged, or if Google Books pulls the preview, there’s  a section starting on page 98 called “Using Library Resources” that includes the sage advice:

The card catalog indexes all the library’s books by author, title, and subject. This catalog is your primary guide to books in the library.

Nice, eh? Worldcat shows the first edition of this as being 2001.

My peeved letter to Ebsco support

~ 22. September 2011 ~

I submitted the below at Ebsco’s support site yesterday. It’s funny because I was not a fan of netLibrary and I do think EBSCOhost is a better platform for the ebooks, but that really doesn’t even matter given the problems with session timeouts.

One important detail here: all of our netLibrary/Ebsco ebooks were purchased as part of collections shared with various members of a consortium of California community colleges. So the ripple effect of longer timeouts is much bigger than it otherwise would be.

I am writing to express my concern over the steep decline in access to ebooks we are seeing as a result of the transition of our netLibrary collection to EBSCOhost. Because EBSCOhost does not “close” ebooks until the end of an EBSCOhost session, which can take anywhere from 15 minutes to, potentially, hours after a user stops using the ebook, long periods go by when our concurrent user limit is effectively not 1, but 0. We are seeing a dramatic increase in turnaways.

In the 2010-11 academic year for the Sacramento City College netLibrary collection, turnaways as a percentage of total requests were 19%. For September 2011 alone up until now—bearing in mind that for many students research projects have not yet hit their peak—our turnaway rate in the Ebsco eBook Collection is 36%. For one highly-used title, students have been turned away in 78% of their requests (79 turnaways out of 101 total requests).

Ironically, I was excited about the transition’s potential to bring more exposure to our netLibrary e-book collection, which has been underutilized. Instead, because Ebsco neglected to take book “closing” into account, students are hitting walls and potentially getting the message that our e-books are simply not available to them.

I have heard from our consortium and from our Ebsco sales representative that Ebsco is working on a solution to this problem. We have not, however, heard anything about how high a priority this fix is, what specifically it will consist of, or when we can expect to see it implemented. Meanwhile we have heard that interface enhancements to the desktop and mobile EBSCOhost platforms are slated for this Fall. If these enhancements occur and we still have no assurance that our much more pressing e-book needs will be met, our confidence in Ebsco’s competence in serving its users will be severely shaken.

It is not only our existing Ebsco ebooks that are at issue here. Like many community college libraries, right now we are actively exploring our options for increasing our number of ebooks, which until now has consisted largely of consortium-purchased shared collections. It is unthinkable that we would purchase ebooks from Ebsco while these problems remain. I hope that fixing them has been escalated to your highest support levels and welcome any communication on when a solution will arrive.

Turnaway screen: Sorry, this book is in use.

New URL converter and widget updates

~ 1. August 2011 ~

I’ve been thinking for a while that we need to give more support to faculty who might want to use database materials in their classes. Profs who like to use the databases and actually have students read particular articleswill likely provide PDF or HTML full-text files via our LMS. That’s not really the correct way to do it, of course, and those profs who do want to do it the correct way shouldn’t have to jump through too many hoops or internalize knowledge that we librarians are paid to keep up with.

image We use the Innovative WAM proxy (or at least I think that’s what it’s called, I don’t administer it) for off-campus use, and it’s pretty simple to figure out how to convert a URL from one to the other, but why not at least partially automate the process? I saw a poster at the IUG 2011 conference that showed one librarian’s solution, went to his website and modified the code for our own use. I ended up adding a couple other touches, e.g. providing some dummy text in the initial input box that disappears upon clicking, and allowing a single click in the converted URL’s text box to select all. (Whenever I’m hunting for those scripts on Google—since of course I’m functionally illiterate in Javascript—I feel like I’m one of the students we complain about, who already know what they want to write but are just looking for a few sources to use as citations.)

Our website already had a page purporting to explain how to link to articles, but it was out-of-date, stingy with explanation, and hard to find. So, after my improvements, it is now up-to-date, overly detailed, and still almost impossible to find from our home page. Best of all, I managed to get this done while working at the ref desk this summer.

I had thought long ago that I might create a bunch of search tools—opensearch plugins, bookmarklets, search toolbars and the like—so I took the liberty of creating a directory in our website (which I do not control) for “tools”. But this directory for a long time had only our D2L search widget. Now that there are two, I needed a listing page as well, which will perhaps spur me to add more….

Databases tab of the D2L widgetOn to the other thing. Way back in April, I made a few changes to our D2L widget: I updated the JQuery (now using the Google-hosted version), made a separate OPAC search box limited to ebooks, a Google Scholar search box (since we now have Google Scholar integration for our Ebsco and JSTOR content), and replaced faculty-oriented blog headlines with the more student-oriented Twitter feed. Also finally updated the Ebsco search box. It seems that Ebsco replaced its search box builder sometime after I made the original box, I have no idea when since this sort of thing does not rise to the level of their support news. But the previous version had some unpleasant attributes, such as forcing Boolean rather than the automatic “and”-ing that is the default on our search page. All better now….

Tab 1 of the D2L widget, with "new features" linkHaving done all this, I added a small, red “New Features” link on the front page of the widget leading to a Google Doc summarizing the changes. 19 unique viewers clicked it! More than I expected. (I’ve removed the link now, it’s been months.) And it makes me think: that is some real estate that could probably be used productively…

Then, more recently, I updated the widget’s Google Analytics code to the latest version. Word to the wise: this update broke the “virtual URL” version of outbound link- and search-tracking, and, worse, made all those searches open up within the widget frame. Not a bad thing in the end—after I hastily removed all of the extra tracking code, it was an opportunity for me to figure out the newer, more rational version of event tracking, where you categorize and label the events. I’m pretty happy with the system I figured out, since it will allow me to quickly get more views of how the thing is being used.

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