BiblioTech Web

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.

Web 2.0, social networking, the social web… all different terms for the Internet phenomenon that is promoting greater interactivity and connectivity between people of similar interests. It’s also my term for what’s going on in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas. With SPIDERS!

Tonight on the way home from work I was listening to NPR’s All Things Considered and heard this story about spiders in a Texas state park. The spiders have teamed up to build a huge communal web that covers some very large trees and stretches for several hundred yards.

Instead of relying on what could be caught in their individual webs, these spiders have created what amounts to one gigantic web. The main trees in question form a curve around a pond which is a breeding ground for mosquitoes. They said that when you walked by these spiderwebs, you could hear this buzzing sound from the mosquitoes trapped in the webs. The spiders were eating so well that they weren’t getting to all the new mosquitoes getting caught in their webs.

Testimonial to the benefits of the Social Web!

It’s funny how technological innovations eventually become commonplace and then forgotten. My six-year-old was doing his homework last night and had to write the first and last letters of things that were pictured on his worksheet. When he got to a typewriter he asked me what it was.

Isn’t that funny? He asked me what it was and when I looked at it, it was clearly a picture of a typewriter.

And then I found myself EXPLAINING to him how a typewriter works, with the keys hitting the ribbon, etc. My ten-year-old got into it then, asking if each letter hit at the same place, so I explained how the roller moves each time you hit a key.

Who’d have thought it?

How many libraries out there still have a typewriter somewhere, available for public use? We’ve still got one on the basement level, but I don’t think it gets used much.

It won’t be long before we’re getting students as freshmen in college who’ve never seen a typewriter before. This year’s freshmen were generally born in 1989! MAN!! I was a senior in college that year! Where’s the time gone?

I was recently told about a study reported in ScienceDaily (taken from a news release by the American Academy of Neurology) that showed that the damage to parts of the brain that results from exposure to lead (whether through occupational exposure, etc.) was significantly lower in people who read more. Reading helps build synapses and connections within the brain that help offset the effects of some kinds of brain damage.

As I was talking to my fellow librarians, we came to the humorous conclusion that reading books can help prevent damaged brain cells resulting from excessive drinking. Or at least you know you’re safer if you read. We envisioned a “Beer for Books” program to help promote reading!

So… want to justify those beers/martinis/orange spiced meads? Read more books!