Should Lessons or Exploration Come First?

One thing that I have been meaning to do is to take the time to write down some of my thoughts and assumptions about teaching and learning in order to make some sense of it all.

I was reminded of this resolution after our now weekly family trip to public arena to teach our toddler how to skate. We strap on skates, a helmet, snowpants and other warm clothes to our son and stay close beside him as he makes small shuffling steps while on the ice. So we're not really 'teaching' him how to skate; we're giving him the opportunity to explore being on skates and in time, its hoped that he'll get a better sense of balance and movement on ice.

When I was a child, my parents signed me up for tennis lessons for two or three summers. The lessons were useful: I learned the proper techniques of tennis and did drills every week to reinforce them. The trouble was that I never actually got a chance to *play* tennis - except for the very last day of classes when there was an informal tournament.

In general, sports lessons are meant to supplement and strengthen play that you have to do on your own time. As well, generally we don't introduce lessons to children until after some period of letting the child get comfortable with the sport first.

So what? OK - here's the question that I'm chewing on: should this combination of lessons that follow and then reinforce self-directed play also apply to such activities such as reading, science, or music.

In the case of reading, I'm reminded of a story on Chicago school reform as told by Ira Glass for This American Life. The goal of the reforms were to get the kids to enjoy reading and writing. To do this, significant time was alloted for student reading everyday. Supplementing daily reading were were field trips to the library and shopping trips to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Simply put, it was not assumed that these children would have the opportunity or the encouragement to read at home. This is one of the reasons why its been suggested that inner-city schools should get rid of summer vacations.

Applied to libraries: bibliographic instruction is all lessons, no play. Information Literacy is the attempt to establish a culture of research through play and lessons.

Eigenfactor: Visualizing Information Flow in Science

This visualization gives an overview of the whole citation network. The colors represent the four main groups of journals, which are further subdivided into fields in the outer ring. The segments of the inner ring represent the individual journals, scaled by Eigenfactor™ Score. In the initial view, the top 1000 citation links are plotted ... We use a subset of the citation data from Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports 1997–2005. The complete data aggregate, at the journal level, approximately 60,000,000 citations from more than 7000 journals over the past decade... [information aesthetics]

The care of the sick unfolds in stories

I can't remember where I heard the anecdote, but author Bill Bryson recommends to play a little game next time you are in a museum and find yourself being numbed by all the objects in front of you: pick out the one object in the museum that you would take home if you could.

I'm playing a similar game to keep myself engaged in my periodical reading and the results can be found in the mother blog under the label maglog.

So far, the most interesting item I've found in the January 19th issue of The New Yorker is an ad on page 11 for Columbia University's Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine.

The care of the sick unfolds in stories. The effective practice of healthcare requires the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.

Coyle's InFormation: OCLC pushes back policy to fall, 2009

Coyle's InFormation: OCLC pushes back policy to fall, 2009

Those of us who promote open access must use this time wisely. First, we need to get some solid legal advice. It's clear that OCLC can propose any kind of conditions in a contract and hope to get signers; it's less clear that OCLC can impose a contract on members 1) without their explicit agreement 2) that covers data created before the contract becomes valid 3) that binds third parties to the contract. Next, anyone who has bibliographic data should release it "into the wild" as quickly as possible. Once the data is circulating, it will not be possible to withdraw it. One solution is to create database dumps and to upload these to the Internet Archive. They will be there for downloading by others, and some of the data may end up in the Open Library. Assuming that bibliographic records cannot be covered by copyright, all of this data ends up in the public domain to fuel innovation and creativity.

The night bookmobile

If you've read The time traveler's wife, then you know that visual artist and author Audrey Niffenegger has a thing for librarians. In her graphic novel The Night Bookmobile you can find out what happens when this fetish for books and libraries goes a little too far for comfort.

User Testing EVERY DAY

Meetup's Dead Simple User Testing - Boing Boing: "Obstacles to getting real feedback are now mainly cultural, not technological; any business that isn't learning from their users doesn't want to learn from their users."

Search is politics

Speaking of superheroes, please read this story by Peter Rukavina in which our hero tries to make public corporate information better searchable and more usable to the public only to have the government close off the means to such access.

Play it forward, Sam

The first time that my husband, myself and my a little-older-than newborn son went outside after coming home from the hospital, was for breakfast at The Lumberjack. Being a damn cute baby, our son got lots of attention from the few customers and wait staff that were in on that quiet Tuesday morning. Halfway through the meal, the waitress topped up our coffee cups and informed us that the two middle aged women who had just been sitting at the table next to us, had paid our bill just before leaving.

"Aw, that's sweet", I told the waitress. But as soon as she was out of earshot, my sleep-deprived reptile self hissed at Greg, "What?! Do they think we're poor?! They shouldn't give money to us! We have money! They should give their money to poor people!"

This is what came to mind as I was checking out the beta version of Akoha: "the world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends". Now, I have to admit that I have a fondness for alternative reality games and so I am tempted to join into this one, especially as the cost of entry is a measly $5 (*including* shipping and handling). And, as an aspiring superhero, I want to do good in this world. But when I review the missions in the Akoha starter pack such as "Send Drinks to a Couple in Love", I just want to gag.

Like a proper game, a player must be willing to endure small pains for larger gains in the future so perhaps missions for advanced players will be more appealing. There's only one way to find out and that's to play. So I have made my decision:

I'll play if you play. Are you in?

I am an example used in an academic paper to demonstrate that sometimes bloggers change their last names

Are Blogs Here to Stay?: An Examination of the Longevity and Currency of a Static List of Library and Information Science Weblogs
Kay Johnsona
Serials Review
Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2008, Pages 199-204
doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2008.06.009

The titles of some of the blogs changed slightly but were still easily identified as the same blog. Authors were consistent on personal blogs, but it was difficult to determine the author or blogmaster for institutional or cooperative blogs. In the case of the “Leddy Library News,” Mita Sen-Roy originally created the site. Now, it is updated by others at Leddy Library (University of Windsor, Ontario,Canada) under a different URL. [36] I found a link to Sen-Roy’s University of Windsor Webpage and discovered her name is now Mita Williams, and she is on leave until November 2009. [37]

I will be a puppetmaster in the future

I’m chuffed!

Ok. I don't expect you to remember this, but I previously wrote about how I was playing an alternative reality game called Superstruct.

Well, one of the superstructs that I founded won The Pandora Award. This award was selected by Chris DiBona, Open Source program manager for Google for “the superstructure that is such a brilliant idea, once you hear about it, you can’t NOT do it”.

And, to boot, I am part of the SEHI 19 which wins me an invite to become a Superstruct puppetmaster next time the game is played next year.


See you in the future!

Picture this - a way to improve the quality of our serial collections

This thought exercise began as I contemplated what visualizations libraries could possibly add to their websites as visualizations are all the rage now, don't you know. I was wondering if there was a logical place where it could be useful to add a sparkline or two.

So I set myself a challenge to develop a graphic that could help students decide which of our research tools would best suit their research need. So I created a graph comparing JSTOR and BioOne with an x axis of 'year' and a y axis of '# of titles'? Its pretty crude and far from a sparkline but here it is:



While this graph does convey a potentially useful snapshot comparison between these two products, I do have one major reservation with endorsing the use of such a visualization: I don't want to imply that having a higher number of titles means that one research product is better than another.

What comes to mind is the research paper "Aggregated Interdisciplinary Databases and the Needs of Undergraduate Researchers" that I think didn't get the play it deserved in the library blogosphere:

Amy Fry, Julie Gilbert and I just published an article in portal (a self-archived copy is here) that had some surprising findings about the long tail in aggregated interdisciplinary databases: looking at use of one of the market leaders at 14 largely undergraduate institutions, 4% of titles accounted for half of downloads, and these were largely popular titles; articles in 40% of full text journals were not downloaded even once at all 14 institutions. We also found that, in aggregate, the number of articles downloaded fell from 2005 to 2006 by 10%, even though the database itself was growing. Curiously, a survey of librarians show they think these growing databases are about the right size and that more full text would be an improvement. Is more always a better investment? Really? [ACRLog]

No, more is not always a better investment. But its an easy sell and sadly, librarians are unthinkinly buying into it.

Here's an alternative that came to mind. Let's apply a new limitation to our online serial collections. We can get rid of the filler out of our indexes and aggregators by setting a minimum threshold by circulation count. A library could say that they only want to pay for titles that had over 12,000 readers. And voila! Those annoying regional newsletters that clog up your search results when you are searching a business database? Gone!

Yes this is decidedly populist approach and against the recommendations by Fister et al in their paper. But consider this - such a limitation would have many additional benefits. First, it would be a strike against the Cambrian explosion of new academic titles for every microtopic and splinter school of thought. And some existing fields could stand to have fewer journal titles to improve the quality of the work of the whole. For example, according to Ulrich's there are almost 200 scholarly titles dedicated to library science published in the United States alone - and this doesn't include the open access journals that are now find online.

Secondly, a circulation statistics filter provides a useful means of selling one product (with a moveable threshold) to many libraries rather than having to create a multitude of different research products to meet the needs of all the disparate library communities in the world. In this way, online collections would mirror their print ancestors: smaller, more general educational institutions have libraries with smaller, more general publications while larger research libraries have the budgets to subscribe to many more smaller 'niche' titles.

Yes, there are obvious problems with filtering by circulation statistics and no, I am not a populist myself when it comes to my reading choices. But until someone else comes up with a reasonable alternative, the sparklines that indicate number of titles paid for but never looked at is going to go up.

Clay Shirky Talk - It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure

Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure

There are a couple of stories in this short talk. One is the story of the student from Ryerson *University* who is charged for creating a study group on Facebook. Can we create online learning environments that support collaboration and also filter out free-riders?

A Shoutout to Liszen, Rainbows End and Superstuct

I just want to give a shout out to Liszen - the Library and Information Science Engine. I use its Firefox plugin every time I have a thought that begins with, "I wonder if anyone in the library blogosphere has written about..."

An example. I'm currently reading Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. I'm reading it because it was mentioned by Jane McGonigal in her paper, "Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming." I'm not finished with it yet, but I can already see how it very much applies to future thinking about search & analysis and libraries. And so I thought, I wonder if anyone in the library blogosphere has written about this book?

I'm also reading the book to generate some ideas about the future world of libraries for a game I'm going to play called Superstruct. It's not so much of a game as a collective writing exercise on the future. I've played a game like this before called World Without Oil and won a one-tonne carbon offset during the game. In Superstruct, "prizes" are going to be given out by these honourary Game Masters.

• Tim Kring, creator of the NBC TV series HEROES
• Warren Ellis, superhero comic book author and novelist
• Tara Hunt, social network expert and author of The Whuffie Factor
• Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and essayist
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia
• Ze Frank, funniest person on the Internet
• Chris DiBona, Open Source program manager for Google
• Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media
• and more surprise guests to come!

There are too many of my personal heroes on this list for me to pass this opportunity up. Not that I need the possibility of egoboo to get me into this game. I really enjoyed WWO and I learned quite a bit from it, both about peak oil and how about how ad hoc communities can come together, weave their experiences around each other, and then dissolve when the street lights come on.

So not only am I reading science fiction, I'm now writing it. *Sigh* Just when I thought I couldn't get any nerdier...

If you are skeptical about the intersection between games and libraries, please consider watching this short video from The New Yorker called Saving the World Through Game Design.

Two things you can do for a greener library

Please add this book to your collection:



Need another endorsement to read Cradle to Cradle? Watch William McDonough's TED lecture.

Another thing you can do is encourage your library to join the movement to lend out electricity meters. I'm glad to say that my public library does this now:

Brewster Kahl's TED Talk

Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library | Video on TED.com

The forcast is getting more cloudy all the time

Lots of different thoughts flooded my brain as I watched the introduction video to Ubiquity for Firefox. This video should be required viewing for librarians because its a proof of concept that illustrates what 'web 2.0' or 'cloud computing' can be: the user makes use of a website's services without even visiting that site.

The obvious question is how do we integrate the local library into this new ecology? I've been mulling it over and on first glance, I think that answer might be that we don't because we can't. I came to this conclusion after trying to envision a user trying to add a book or an article that they wanted to recommend to a friend. The most likely scenario is that this is an item in that user's own collection. To this end, I suspect that the most natural fit for this space is a web-based citation service such as Zotero 2.0 or newly released Mendeley. LibraryThing could work for books.

If we do want libraries to provide this service to our users (and I do), I think at a minimum, our library catalogue has to provide a means for a user to create their own virtual collections of books that include items from their library and from their own shelves . From my understanding, Bibliocommons is the only library catalogue service that can do this.

On my list for next generation library catalogues - lists

One crucial feature that is missing by most library catalogues (and LibraryThing, to boot) is the ability to make and share lists of books. I consider it a crucial feature because I have this notion that most of our formal education consists of actively learning through works of text.

But there are other more subtle reasons why a listing making function is important for a library catalogue. For example, allowing users to create public lists of books is one of the few ways that readers can be connected with each other in a way that they can control.

Lists, I believe, are also an untried means by which collections librarians could share the reasons why they have selected some of their choices for the library. For example, some time ago the English Literature librarian at MPOW added We need to talk about Kevin, Vernon God Little, and Elephant (and others that I have forgotten - natch) to our collection because they were all cultural responses to the Columbine shootings. When I was collecting for science at MPOW, I actively sought out and acquired books on a number of topics (such as works about Tallgrass Prairie) that would be too narrow to properly represented in any of the traditional collection development policies. If I had the ability to create lists, I could group material together that were related but not necessarily represented by the same formalized subject heading.

Biblicommons does a fabulous job of providing users with the ability to create and share lists and does one better by automatically creating a "For later" list for each registered user. This will hopefully cut down on the inevitable "toread" tags. Although seeing a library catalogue filled with toread tags wouldn't necessarily be a sad sight to see.

With COinS, every library catalogue can be your library catalogue

I learned from Roy Tennant's post today that The Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University has gone live with its VuFind library catalogue.



I tried it out and it is very nice. One feature that I especially enjoyed is that the are COinS links available so now I can add entries into Zotero and I can use their catalogue to search my catalogue.

Because Ideas Matter - Finding Special Collections on the web

Some years ago MPOW made the painful but necessary decision to remove the bibliographies that were are all grouped together in the Reference Collection and to re-catalogue each one so that each bibliography could be found with the subject it was about. This meant that bibliographies on Shakespeare could be found with the other Shakespeare books which would make it more likely to be stumbled upon and more likely to save the user a trip to another set of stacks in the library.

I bring this up because this project came to mind when I was doing some follow up research on a book by and about Jane Jacobs. The book contains material from the Jane Jacobs Papers that are located, not in New York City or Toronto as one would first presume, but in Boston College. Now those papers are from her life from 1916 to 1995. Jane Jacobs passed away in 2006. Where are the papers from her last decade? That's not a rhetorical question - I haven't found out where they are yet.

If the future of academic libraries means currating our unique collections, we have to start doing a better job of letting the world know what we have to offer. This means recognizing that most people search for a subject - not for a bibliography or a directory of library special collections. But how can we achieve that? How can we nestle information about the unique and rich collections in our libraries right beside the subjects that they are about in the online world?

There is a way. Thank you Wikipedia.

Now you go to it! Add your library's collections to The Free Encyclopedia right now!

At one time, I also used to feel sorry for the lonely books on the shelf...

Look on my reference works, ye mighty, and despair | Ask Metafilter

Good design is being mindful of the details

Today I was inspired by IDEO's Paul Bennett's TED Talk Design is in the details.

When I clicked on the video, I was expecting a showcase of stories of the design genius behind IDEO's many product successes but instead I pleasantly surprised as a Bennett described great design ideas in a hospital setting that were suggested not by his team, but by the nurses on the floor.

Bennett reminds us that good design requires mindfulness and humanity.

I was trying to think of similar instances in which the library or reading experience has been redesigned or hacked in small but significant ways and couldn't come up with any offhand.

One thing that did surface was this photo which doesn't really follow the ideas I'm pursing in this post, but does illustrate one small way in which something that is necessary and functional in a public building can also be designed to be beautiful

Collaborative Story Telling as a Game

I have never played this game but I can't wait for my children to get to the age in which I can try it out with them:

The game is called Shadows and it's a very simple role playing game that even very young children can play. In Shadows, the game master is the narrator of a story. The story begins with the characters waking up somewhere from a noise. The game master will then begin a story and occasionally interrupt it to ask those who are playing to do three things: say what they want to happen next; say what "Their Shadow" - a character that always wants to get into trouble - wants to happen next; and to roll two die. If the Shadow die comes up with a higher number than the "Good" die, then the story will unfold as The Shadow wants. [LionKimbro's unalog]

I have never played role playing games myself, but my friends and I in high school and in university, used to write "add-on short stories" (otherwise known as the Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse) via email. Looking back at them, I would say that the characters we constructed were all Shadows of our own selves.

What detractors of games in libraries may not understand (or may care not to understand as is more often the case) is that gaming can be thought of as something much larger than following a set of rules to determine a winner and a loser. I'm following the work of Jane McGonigal trying to better understand what this much larger force is and can be.

Newspapers as scaffolding for local stories

When I was cobbling together my information for my last post about the current drama about my local public library system, I had to resort to sources other than my local newspaper. This is because The Windsor Star puts all its articles older than 30 days old behind a paywall. And so in order to link to background information to provided better context to what I was describing, I had to resort to these articles unofficially reprinted online elsewhere and to local blogger commentary that wasn't exactly objective.

It made me realize something. Newspapers don't just describe events that become the historical record - they provide an important structure that supports discussion of those events. Now that The New York Times has made its archive available online, users can now link to articles to provide historical context to their online writings ("I'm so GenX that I still swing it on the flippity flop").

But smaller papers haven't made this leap of faith, and so our local memory is all short term. For example, today the mayor announced a plan to build a canal and marina in downtown Windsor (link will expire in time - a related problem). My husband told me that the local CBC news also reported this story and, unlike the Windsor Star, mentioned several other instances going back into the 1980s of similar failed plans for a marina downtown. I wasn't in Windsor in the 1980s and so this local knowledge was news to me.

There's another opportunity here. With a little bit of cataloguing and perhaps some semantic linking like Harper's Magazine has done, a newspaper archive could slowly evolve into its own reference work. Maybe an arrangement could be made. Libraries could trade staff time and cataloguing expertise in exchange for making the archives available for free to the public.

There has been discussion as of late whether Google (aka The Internet) is making us stupid. Maybe that's so, but by not putting our stories about local events on the Internet, we are in danger of being perpetually ignorant.

The City Council, The Windsor Public Library Board and The CEO

The CEO of The Windsor Public Library is today's front page news after some investigative journalism has revealed that Brian Bell has been articling at a local law firm while on sick leave from his library administrative duties. According to Bell, there is no malfeasance because working at a law firm is as relaxing as pottery lessons.

The WPL has been embroiled in this sort of drama for some years now. Here's the context as I understand it.

City councils in Ontario do not have the authority to make management decisions regarding libraries because of laws designed to protect library collection decisions from political influence. The Windsor Public Library is accountable to its Library Board. And yet its safe to say that The City of Windsor have been trying to gain control of The Windsor Public Library Board. Here's the evidence:

In March of this year, Windsor City Council requested a "line by line" financial audit of the WPL despite the fact that a similar audit performed two years ago found that the library system was running efficiently. Why so many audits? "Under provincial legislation, the only way council can take over [a library board] is if there has been mismanagement, and that's the driving force behind the financial request". Also in March, Council requested that the library cut its budget by $400,000 while stipulating that there would be no reduction in hours or services. Furthermore, in May, the City tried to prematurely end the terms of the WPL Library Board members.

Complicating matters it is no secret that the mayor of Windsor and his allies in Council are not fond of Alan Halberstadt who is the only remaining city councilor on the library board. In fact, they had the knives out for him after he did not side with City Council's recommendation for such large budget cuts (addendum) and again after it was learned that the Board mistakenly applied an Pay Equity payment to "funny how the former director of Human Resources could make such a mistake" Brian Bell. As an aside, I have a tremendous respect for Alan Halberstadt and I feel that the call to remove him from the Board by some of his fellow city councillors was deeply hypocritical.

And something that might be completely irrelevant or just might be further complicating matters is that Brian Bell succeeded previous Library CEO, Steve Salmons, who may or may not be the "former librarian" referred to by local columnist Gord Henderson who is part of the Ontario government's Detroit River International Crossing team, which is, incidentally, currently battling a heated turf war with the City of Windsor's own plans for a crossing.

I'm not sure how this is all going to resolve as the WPL operates under the Carver Protocol, a commercial governance model which, according to City Councillor David Cassivi, "largely renders the library board impotent" as it vests all responsibility in the office of the library's chief executive officer.

Everything I Think I Know About Designing Library Websites

Summertime is usually a quiet time in an academic library – except when during the year in which it’s been deemed that the library website needs a major overhaul. Then there is a team of library staff frantically hacking away as the September deadline lurches closer and closer.

I have been involved in such three library web redesign projects at MPOW over the years and have been meaning to write down some of the things that I think I have learned from the work before it becomes irrelevant. I want to qualify these statements as things I think I know because I can’t back up these statements with proper user testing. I am a huge advocate of re-iterative user testing but that’s not something that the web teams that I have belonged to have done enough of. I once received an email from a librarian who asked me what was the process by which our web team came up with the final design. I told her that we had frequent meetings and we argued a lot. She didn’t write me back. So much for honesty.

Since most academic libraries are more alike than different – they all tend to do the same things but just at different scales – it’s not surprising that most academic library websites tend to resemble each other. We are all trying to ‘solve’ the same problems and so it should not be surprising that we come up with similar solutions. I’ve come to believe that there are only a small number of academic library website archetypes that result from the answers to some simple questions.

How Do We Fit Everything We Do On the Front Page?
Libraries do lots of things and, in general, they want all of the things that they do represented somewhere on the library’s front page (along with a sizable real estate dedicated to ‘library news’). If you want all your offerings represented on the front page, you have one of two choices: you have drop down or fly-out menus or you create categories where each service goes. If you opt for drop-down menus, the site tends to be made up of two or three columns of the most important text with the less important stuff in the menus. If you don't want these menus, then your site tends to run to four or five columns of text broken down into categories such as 'services' and 'resources'.

At MPOW, we also did something slightly different. We knew that we were restrained to two columns of text because of the web template of our university but we didn’t want to use drop-down or flyaway menus. So instead, we developed a philosophy that the main body of text on our website would be dedicated to services that we could foresee a student or researcher use every day: the library catalogue, our indexes, online journals, citation management, interlibrary loan (which, in an ideal world, would appear as a link in an index or library catalogue when a failed search occurred), booking a library computer, and book renewal (which admittedly doesn’t exactly fit the criteria of daily). Most everything else is found in the groups “About the Library”, “Research Help”, “Computer Help”, and “Writing Help”. The benefit of using this approach is that you are less likely to screw up the major deliverables that your website is supposed to provide. But there is a cost – some things do become lost.

The Search for Search
When we designed our library’s website, we thought that our sitemap would be the answer to the problem of our hidden content. But since then I have come to realize that the average user doesn’t look for a site map and have noticed that site maps are now becoming scarce in the rest of the online world. We have a link to a ‘search this site’ page but even though it has prime real estate on the front page – it is rarely used. Why? My hunch is that is that if users don’t see a search box on a web page, they will assume that no search function exists and won’t look elsewhere on the page for this. At the time of the re-design, we didn’t want to put a search box on our front page because we knew from experience that user will gravitate to it and automatically search what are looking for (title of a book, journal article, journal name, library hours) completely undaunted by whatever the search box is labeled.

Beyond The Question of Language

And yet we know that the choice of words is very important to the success of a web site. I think it’s now commonly understood that users will understand ‘books’ more than ‘library catalogue’ and understand either of those terms much more than a brand name such as ‘Infobridge’ or ‘Voyager’. What still not been excised from our way of thinking about academic library web sites is the word and the notion of ‘database’. As librarians, we tend to think of ourselves as a database supplier for our users. But the word ‘database’ means nothing to students. The same goes for the words ‘Resources’ or ‘E-Resources’. That’s because in the rest of our users’ online experiences, they are never asked to visit different ‘databases’ of a particular site. The solution is not just to find other words that make more sense (we use ‘Research Tools’) but to create a web experience in which the parts of a library’s online services come together as an integrated whole to make such labels unnecessary. I’m also hoping that our future academic website will resemble the non-scholarly world and present customized services and information about services through an ‘Account’ section.

An Aside
One of the reasons why I write is because I find it’s a helpful exercise for me to clear the fog and figure out what I know and what I don’t know. And as I have been writing this, I have again come to the realization that I don’t know as much as I thought when I started putting fingers to keyboard. That’s as good as a conclusion I can make at the moment : I think it’s a useful exercise for academic libraries to figure out and articulate what we know and what we don’t know about academic library web design. There’s so much to being honest.

One reason books are beautiful - less diapers to worry about

OK, I am fully aware how silly this story will sound but parenting is serious business dammit.

The day after my son first read his new book Uh-Oh Gotta Go by Bob From Sesame Street he started using the potty on a consistent basis.

Its pretty incredible, when you think about it, that a simple picture book depicting happy toddlers using the potty can inspire a real two year old to do the same.

Oakville Public Library and BiblioCommons

Yay! Oakville Public Library has launched its BiblioCommons library catalogue!

Using Google and FriendFeed to Create a Collaborative Research Environment

Some months ago, I suggested that one way to measure of a success of a library's discovery system is to compare it to Google. I've been thinking about extending this measuring stick to the rest of the support that libraries provide to their researchers. So, I created a Google account for a fictional Cloud Researcher.

After creating a Gmail account for "Cloud Researcher" I started a Google Reader account for her. It was shockingly easy to add an RSS feed of the most recent issues to the more well known journals such as Nature and Science. Now my researcher can stay up to date in her field.



Google Reader makes it easy to share items by allowing instant publishing to a clippings blog. (This feature will prove important later on)



I then created a customized Google search engine so whenever my researcher needs to refer or research, she can just search this index of just the journals and websites that she trusts. If she wants to cast a wider net, she can always opt to search with Google Scholar or even plain old vanilla Google.



If her affiliated academic library provides authentication by IP address, then our researcher can keep up with her journal reading on campus without ever visiting the library's website even once - even if she's off-campus by using Windows XP Remote Desktop option to access her work computer. And if she has a loving, caring library, she can authenticate and access research using LibX, which also comes in handy when she uses Google Books.

I'm glad I actually went through the exercise of actualizing this example because in doing so, I had a small epiphany which was this: the future of learning online space is going to be an aggregation of online services. I realized this when I started playing with FriendFeed.

I've been using FriendFeed for about a week now and I still find it a strange beast. The way I would describe it is FriendFeed = Twitter + RSS reader. I think FF is an improvement on Twitter because it allows others to comment directly to a post. But FF is not a conventional RSS reader like Bloglines or Google Reader as the emphasis is on following friends - not publications. But what you can do with FriendFeed is create different 'rooms' for your different circle of friends. I created a room called The Cloud Research Lab Room.



What would happen if FriendFeed could share structured bibliographic citations from Zotero?

I think it could be something wonderful.

Library Labyrinth

Perhaps it was my recent visit to IKEA or perhaps its from my daily lurking of Find The Lost Ring ARG (which is dedicated to the lost sport of Labyrinth Running), but I keep thinking that there should be a library that contains bookshelves organized so that they create a labyrinth path.

The meandering but purposeful path of the labyrinth is a metaphor for life. Unlike a maze, there is only one path in and out. There are no shortcuts, no dead ends, and the entire path must be followed to complete the journey. The labyrinth visually reminds us that we are walking a common path. Often circular in design, they represent wholeness and unity. Interest in the labyrinth as a tool for relaxation, healing, building community, solving problems, and nurturing intuition, creativity, and artistic expression has increased significantly over the past several years. They can be found in hospitals, parks, schools, prisons, retreat centers, faith- based organizations, and private gardens. [the library as labyrinth]

Z for Zotero!

I've been holding out from using Zotero but I think I will be making the switch as soon as these features come out of beta:

• synchronization of work from different computer browsers
• adoption of Endnote citation styles
• communication with the Internet Archive
  
• zeroconf!

I'm also particularly intrigued how Zotero and others will take advantage of RDF and the Semantic Web now that a Bibliographic Ontology has been established.