Who is the biggest enemy of learning?

My daughter just passed her first birthday and so its not surprising that I am very fond of Neil Gaiman's benediction for a Blueberry Girl which he wrote for his God-daughter.

One line in this poem struck me in particular: "Remind her that Fortune is blind." This is a sentiment not often expressed in our "you can do anything if you believe in yourself" culture. To know an alternative to this current notion that modern man has somehow wrest himself from fate is one of the reasons why Professor Donald Kagan of Yale thinks we would do well to study the ancient Greeks.

Last week I listened to Dr. Kagan's lecture to entertain myself as I was doing the dishes. There are no slides to see - just 33 minutes of a man talking from a stage. It reminded me of my own university days when a course meant you were given dry facts from a textbook and fluid thought professed from your professor and somehow you had to weave them together into something you could remember for your midterm.

Now that I work at a university, I know that this "sage on a stage" teaching style is frowned upon as it has been largely discredited for being largely ineffectual for memory retention in most students. Instead, faculty are encouraged to engage their students in the classroom and online using a myriad of techniques and technologies. Anything goes - except for reading a lecture to your students. It is as if the new slogan is "The biggest enemy of learning is a talking teacher."

And yet something doesn't sit right with me about this development.

While I acknowledge that the lecture is not suitable for all ages or contexts, I don't want to see the lecture become completely banished from the university. We still need it. Sometimes, intertwining complex ideas need to be unwound in a slow and deliberate manner. Five lectures over five days can change your worldview forever. A keynote speech is essentially a lecture and if you've heard a good keynote (or my personal example: Rick Salutin's talk at WILU 2007) you know that it sits with you and moves you in a completely different way than a "presentation" does.

There is nothing wrong with a teacher talking as long as that teacher is telling a compelling story.

The stories told by the ancient Greeks are so compelling that we still tell them. When I was in university, one of my favourite indulgences was to go to the local comic book shop and buy Neil Gaiman's The Sandman - a series in where ancient myths take both modern and timeless forms.

And then, I would get back to the lectures.

How to reduce the number of missing books on my library lists

We all look at problems from different distances. For me, I tend to look at library things from the network level (far away) or at the user level (close up, but not too close up) and then I try to fit the two perspectives together.

Even though I blather on about grandiose big-picture library ideas in this blog, my library thoughts are also consumed by the minutia of the library experience. For example, it still grates me that its so very hard to create a simple 'shopping list' of titles, call numbers, and floor numbers (!) from the library catalogue that I can print out at home to take with me to the library.

My other complaint I have is that (at least at the libraries that I have recently visited) there is a disturbing number of books on my home-made cobbled book list that should be on the shelf but can't be found. What's particularly troubling, is that I haven't even bothered to approach library staff to fill out the requisite 'Item Missing' forms, and I'm a librarian. Just imagine what percentage of our users take this extra and effort to fix a problem that won't help them with their own immediate needs.

So here's my wish.

I would like a library catalogue to effortlessly let the user create a list of items for retrieval from the library shelves (this will come in handy in the future when our libraries become closed-stacks again, but that topic is another post). AND on this list, I would like a checkbox beside each item that reads something along the lines of "couldn't find this on the shelf". Now the user can check off the items she couldn't find and drop off the list at the front desk (with or without a contact email address for follow-up) and the cycle of missing books on the shelf is closer to closing.

Wisdom is knowing when to break the rules

Barry Schwartz's TED lecture "The real crisis? We stopped being wise " to libraryland for a couple reasons. The first reason is actually minor: Schwarz deftly illustrates how ill-framed incentives can backfire and actually demotivate individuals (library administrators, please take note).

The second and real reason why I think lecture is worth viewing is to listen to Schwartz tell two compelling stories why we have to give individuals the leeway to break from rules, scripts, and standardized operating procedures of their work when one sees an opportunity to act, shall we say, humanely.

The talk reminded me of a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job? While it begins with football, the core of the article is about what makes a good teacher and why its so important:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

I won't spoil the piece's ending by giving away the quality that has been identified as what separates good teachers from bad, but I will say that this quality can only be exercised in an environment when teachers are able to deviate from the curriculum in order to better teach their students. (This This American Life episode also comes to the same conclusion.)

Schwarz, if memory serves, ends his talk with a very small story teaching and how, in the pursuit of consistency we have lost the opportunity to excel and, more tragically, to act with kindness and wisdom.

Takes a community to raise a library. It takes a library to raise a community

If the Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians were specifically meant as a volley back to the The Taiga 4 Provocative Statements, then I think they are a brilliant response to the fear-mongering that is trying to be passed off as leadership.

If otherwise, well, to be honest, I'm not that crazy about the Darien Statements. But that's okay. Those aren't my statements on The (One Big?) Library and Librarians. Its theirs.

But I do want to start a thought of mine from their statement on the purpose of the library. "The purpose of The Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization."

Now saving civilization might be a good idea but I would leave that job up to superheroes and those working towards nuclear nonproliferation. I haven't properly worked out my own idea of The Library's purpose but if I did, it would definitely contain these two words: share and community.

Share is the most important word. We don't sell the stuff we collect. We share it.

And when I use the word community I mean, a group of people with a common interest. So that could be a group of graduate students in a lab or a small town.

I've been thinking about communities and small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens quite a bit lately. Sometimes its been in a library context but more often than not its been more about local politics and the environment. And recently, I've been re-visiting this paraphrased thought of one of my heroes, teacher Vivian Gussin Paley:

the "work" of school is not to learn the numbers and letters as quickly as possible, but to learn to come together and build a community.

Now that's certainly wasn't the purpose of the schools that I attended or have worked for. But what if it was? How would we do things differently? It just goes to show how its not a bad idea to go back and rethink what's the purpose of what you're doing.

Discovery is not the problem that needs to be solved

I admire Eric Lease Morgan's ability to distill ideas into words. In his latest musing, he writes about Next-Generation catalogs and begins with asking this key question: To what degree is it an inventory list or a finding aide?

Next generation catalogues are also called discovery layers and on this matter, I would like to quote my favourite passage of the piece

"Discovery" is not the problem that needs to be solved. People can find more information than they have ever been able to find before. We are still drinking from the proverbial fire hose. What is needed are tools to enable people to use, to integrate, to exploit, to understand the things they find.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

This post fulfills my Ada Lovelace Day pledge.

Branches of Branches of The One Big Library

Well it took just over three years, but I can now say with much conviction that I am a believer of One Big Library. (It just goes to show you that I'm not that swift but I am persistent.)

One Big Library is the notion that "there are many different kinds of libraries (public, academic, school, national, medical, special) but really there's just One Big Library with branches all over the world". Unlike the phrase "Library 2.0", the idea of One Big Library (and its credo "help people build their own libraries") lends itself as a means to understand where we are and in what direction we should be heading. As one commenter put it, the phrase is pregnant with possibilities.

One Big Library is a useful directive that has taken my thinking well beyond the obvious mandate of helping our users get the books and articles they need onto their netbooks.

It happened when I was thinking about branch libraries and I thought of my own experiences with them. I attended McGill's Graduate School of Library & Information Science back in the day when they not only had the word Library in their name but when they even had their very own library to support the school. But that was for a few short months until McGill decided to cut costs and integrate the school's library collection into the larger Humanities and Social Sciences Library.

After leaving McGill, I was lucky enough to find employment at the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library. Some time after a short summer contract in its systems department, I worked part time in the library's periodical department. Some of the librarians I worked with spoke wistfully of a time when Reference Library was organized by subject - sciences, humanities, social sciences, business - and each discipline had their own periodical section, book collection, and reference staff who only answered questions in that discipline. But in order to cut costs, most of these specialized sections became absorbed into one collection that was reorganized by format: books in one area and periodicals in another.

Lesson learned? Separate branches mean redundancy in staffing and, frequently duplication in library materials. A library is only a growing organism if its regularly fed. Otherwise, its going to be absorbed by another library.

But this lesson only applies to physical libraries. These constraints largely don't matter in the digital realm.

For example, I work at the Leddy Library which collections for all subjects taught at The University of Windsor, except for Law which is served by its own library. While the physical collection is separated by format (books in the main building, serials in the west building), the digital Leddy Library is additionally organized by subject. Some of these subject pages feature links to indexes, key reference works, important journals in the field, contact information for the librarian subject specialist -- subject pages are starting to resemble a digital branch library for that subject.

Other libraries, such as The University of Rochester, are using an even finer degree of granularity : they are organizing their digital library resources by individual course. One course = one library.

Let's break it down even further. What if we could dynamically present our users with a subset of library resources - books, reference works, articles, journals, bibliographies, literature reviews - for every subject query that they ask of us? Isn't that what we really want a "discovery layer" to do for us? To create an instant library of potential resources for our users?

When I first considered Dan Chudnov's introduction to One Big Library, I had difficulty reconciling it with pre-Internet librarianship. But, three years later, I then realized that the digital realm not only makes One Big Library possible, it makes it inevitable.

iTunes has a Reference section

A couple of times, as I was promoting the LibX Firefox toolbar, I was told by librarians that we should not expect our users to take any extra effort to add functionality to their browser.

To them, I say, have you visited the Apple App Store recently?

Storytelling Games and Short Storytelling Games

Click To Play

This week I participated in an event called Talk20. I was one of six speakers who presented on the subject of Windsor in the style of Pecha Kucha: 20 slides at 20 seconds a piece. A video of my talk is above. I can't get myself to watch the video but my mom says that the audio is pretty good and my slides and speakers notes are here.

While the title of my talk was "The City As Playground" and the subject was "using games to discover new geographies of Windsor" most of the "games" I spoke about were less like traditional games and more like "story generators".

And just on the night of my talk, I discovered a new sort of game that I have a liking to. It's a thought-experiment designed to harvest and unravel predictions about the future of space. Like Twitter, players can only express themselves in 140 characters or fewer through a simple, elegant interface.

There are three rounds. While round one has already finished and the second experiment is set to launch on March 3rd. I'm in - my player card is below.

The Leddy Library blog is robust

A few success stories
I’d originally thought of including all Robust blogs — but that’s too many blogs. Here are the 19 academic library blogs that were very fresh (a post within 2 days) and visible (GPR 5 or 6 as of December 2008), with quick notes, noting that in all cases “2007”
means March-May:

Leddy News, Leddy Library, University of Windsor.
17 posts in 2007 quarter, averaging 101 words each.

From Walt Crawford’s Shiny Toys or Useful Tools (pdf) [librarian.net]

Research is not about finding everything but

“Excuse me, but research isn’t about finding everything. That’s not really how it works at all … this idea of a single search that brings back every relevant item is not like the process of research as it is actually practiced. Research involves finding a few, or even one, good thing, then checking what that one thing references, and checking those sources … then branching out rapidly from there. Literature is not made up of a colection of items connected by having common keywords … a literature is composed of a collection of items connected by common ideas and a community of thinkers who are influenced by each other’s works. It’s about following the network of citations, really.”

Crowd : (nodding)

Me: (now all excited) ”So, what search should do is get your foot in the door, not hand you “everything” … Google works because it gets you some stuff, not everything..."

The above is from a post entitled Search and Research from Doug's Mind. I think his epiphany is worth expanding upon.

What if libraries tried to create a something that brought you some of the best starting points to research?

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!