BiblioTech Web

For what it’s worth, I’m doing a little presentation today at the IOLUG (Indiana Online Users Group) Fall Program called “Reaching Digital Natives and Immigrants: Library 2.0.” They’re having a Science-Fair-style session where different people are “exhibiting” different programs and I get to do LibraryThing! Below is most of what I’ve got in a handout (and will also be in the Proceedings booklets):

What can I do with LibraryThing?

• Catalog your books online
• Find other people who own the same books you do
• Check out what other people have in their libraries
• Get recommendations for new books to read
• Social Networking in all its forms
• Discuss books in online groups
• Display my library in customizable sort views including a Virtual Bookshelf, which displays the covers
• Access my virtual library from my cell phone while standing in a bookshop (point cell phone’s browser to http://www.librarything.com/m)

Why should I use LibraryThing?

• It uses the Z39.50 protocol to standardize information.
• Fully web based
• You can search Amazon, the Library of Congress, and almost 100 other collections to add the exact volume you own.
• Who better to recommend a new book to you than someone who owns a similar collection to yours?

Cool Features

• Zeitgeist
• Groups
• RSS feeds for recent books added by your friends or groups
• Tag clouds, author clouds, widgets

How Libraries can use LibraryThing

• Collection Development
  • “People who own this book also own…”
  • Search or browse tags
  • Find foreign-language books
• Book Reviews
• Zeitgeist - http://www.librarything.com/zeitgeist
• LibraryThing For Libraries - add tag-based browsing, book recommendations, ratings, reviews and more to your OPAC - http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/
• Widgets to display new or featured books on your library website

Presented at the “Blinded Me with Library Science” Fair by Scott Pfitzinger
My LibraryThing profile: http://www.librarything.com/profile/spfitzinger

LibraryThing has now gone the next step and allowed integration between its now-massive database of information and your library’s OPAC (that’s Online Public Access Catalog for those who haven’t been through Library School–what people nowadays simply call the online catalog or just “catalog”). Imagine your library patrons being able to add tags and recommendations to the entries for your books, and without you needing to struggle to program it all. LibraryThing’s done the work for you, so you just need to add a few lines of HTML code and that’s it!

http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/ gives you all the information you need, including a handy “Take the Tour” link.

I just came across this Flickr photo thanks to Library Stuff. What a great marketing tool for libraries! Makes you want to go to your local library and check out one of the “starring roles,” doesn’t it?

I love that! “They are smarter! They are stronger! They are HUNGRY!”

Sure made me laugh. What a fun thing to encounter on a Monday morning. (Click the picture for the original size.)

Last week I found out about one of the coolest library technologies that’s come down the pike. It’s a Web 2.0 application designed for Library 2.0. It’s called LibGuides and it’s worth getting excited about.

It’s a system for providing information and resources to library patrons in an engaging and organized way, but without the information providers (mainly librarians) needing to learn code or some complicated system. (I’ll refer to the people creating content in LibGuides as librarians from here on in, although they can certainly be non-librarians.) Statistics are even kept automatically, so you can see how many times each link or file was actually clicked on. They count click-throughs, not page views, so your statistics are more accurate.

The coolest part is that LibGuides interfaces with Facebook, allowing your students/patrons to browse your Guides, search your library catalog, and link to various resources that you provide on your library website, all from within Facebook. Librarians who use Facebook can even add the Guides that they’ve created right into their Facebook profiles!

Once you’ve created some Guides, you can make “widgets” that are basically little applet boxes that you can embed on websites, blogs, and even various social networking programs.

Another big part of the LibGuides program is the Community. Librarians can interact with others who are using the system, finding other librarians that specialize in the same subject areas and sharing ideas. You can even browse the Guides from other libraries!

For that matter, the LibGuides are publicly accessible unless they are intentionally made private. So you can use them for internal communications, training, etc., and also make resources that anyone in general can use. There’s even a list of libraries who are using LibGuides along with links to their LibGuides sites.

If you’d just like to see some great examples of Guides that have been created with LibGuides, visit http://www.springshare.com/libguides/examples.html.

NOTE: Butler’s LibGuides are also now available at http://libguides.butler.edu

If you’re interested in learning more about LibGuides, you can get lots of information on their website: http://www.springshare.com/libguides/. Of special interest is their “Introduction to LibGuides” video, for which the link is in the bottom right corner. If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend viewing this.

The following is information from their website. Since it describes LibGuides much better and more succinctly than I can, I figured I’d use it. (The original page is here.)

Description

LibGuides is a “library 2.0″ online publishing system. It combines the best features of social networks, wikis, bookmarks and blogs, to help librarians share information and promote library resources to the community. LibGuides is fully integrated with Facebook, and LibGuides widgets enable the distribution of library content on social networks, blogs, and courseware systems. Patrons can also subscribe to the email updates of their favorite LibGuides content. Simply put, LibGuides connects you with patrons, wherever they are.

How Does It Work?

Every library gets their own customized LibGuides system. The librarians then aggregate and publish useful information by organizing it into Guides. These Guides can be subject guides, info portals, class guides, community guides, research tips… or any type of useful content (see examples). Documents, links, podcasts, rss feeds, videos, search boxes, polls, and any type of dynamic content can be put into Guides, for a true web 2.0 learning experience.

Connect With Patrons

LibGuides provides many options to connect with patrons and distribute information:

• Every librarian has a profile page listing their contact info & all their content.
• Patrons can chat with librarians from any Guide, on Meebo, Plugoo, AOL, Yahoo IM, Google Talk and MSN Messenger.
• Users can participate in polls, rate the resources using star-rating system, and leave comments.
• Everything published in LibGuides is instantly available in Facebook, thru LibGuides Facebook app.
• LibGuides Widgets display LibGuides content on any webpage, blog, or a social network.
• Users can subscribe to email updates whenever new content is published.

There you go. Check them out! Yes, they’re a subscription service, so you do have to pay an annual fee, but it’s surprisingly low–much less than some databases we subscribe to and which hardly get used, while THIS resource is practically guaranteed to see some heavy use.

Open Access is a big deal to librarians. Or at least it should be. It’s all about getting free and open access to scholarly literature. Many publishers are against this because it will mean they’ll lose money. They cover their greed, though, by invoking ideas of authority, quality, and the need for peer reviews. While those are important concepts, they’re a distraction from the main idea here, that scholarly research needs to be shared and not hidden in journals whose prices go up an average of 18% EVERY YEAR!

Today I read an excellent blog post on the ACRLog, written by Marc Meola. It’s about PRISM, an activist group that’s a part of the Association of American Publishers and which is against open access. The post is called “Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access.” This post isn’t terribly long and it’s full of great links, so please click and give it a read.

Another good article was posted today in the Chronicle of Higher Education and is called “Playing Craps with Copyright?“. It continues the discussion about the copyright issues that Google’s book digitization project has stirred up. Also has good links.

Are we becoming a more specialized information-seeking culture? Given the advent of the internet, it appears that students and other information seekers are foregoing the use of general resources and heading straight for where they think the answer is. Keyword searching has brought on a mentality of pinpointing information rather than locating general topical resources and browsing through them for a glimpse of the big picture.

Of course, subject-specific resources are not bad and certainly have a place in libraries and learning, but the proliferation of these kinds of resources, both online and in print, is having some unintended results.

No more significant example can be provided than the use of encyclopedias in library Reference departments. Even encyclopedias have increasingly become more specialized. Why go to a general print encyclopedia like Britannica for a shallow treatment of a subject when you can grab a subject encyclopedia that uses a couple of volumes to go in depth on different aspects of the subject?

Just as the internet has changed people’s search habits by fostering immediate gratification (e.g., searching for full-text articles online rather than locating a print copy), so, too, have subject encyclopedias. The result is that people are using general resources less and heading right to the more specific items. Library usage statistics bear this out as well. In general, not only are people preferring online resources to print ones, but in both media formats they are turning more to topical sources with the assumption that the answer will be found more readily there.

While we can’t say for sure how this trend will be affecting scholarship in the future, it is safe to say that learners are settling for specific, detailed information rather than an education about the broader picture. By avoiding general resources because they’re too shallow, people are ending up with a shallower education. General resources have value in providing that big picture that helps people take a new topic and relate it to what they have already learned. Instead of constructing their own learning, they are answering questions as directly as possible, transferring information rather than assimilating it.

If this trend continues, not only will general resources be dropped from library collections, but learners will not retain their new information, thus reducing their learning. Specialization is good, but not to the neglect of the big picture, or of learning in general.