Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

Yesterday I discussed Susan Gibbons’ book on academic libraries and ‘net gen’ students, and briefly mentioned an innovative project run by her library (University of Rochester). The library hired an anthropologist to work with students, to understand exactly what their needs are, and how they go about studying and writing research papers.

Susan got in touch to tell me that the study had been published; available for purchase for $28, or for download for free, from here.

I’ve downloaded it, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. Obviously not everything will hold true for my students, but I’m sure I can learn something about how I can try to understand their needs.

Timothy shares his library orientation presentation, made on Google Docs with images from Flickr.

Meredith asks if any libraries are assessing their use of social technologies.

Annoyed Librarian on deprofessionalisation: “Many librarians want to turn libraries into community centers, but there’s one interesting thing about community centers that a lot of excitable librarians haven’t noticed. Community centers don’t need librarians. They don’t need people with “advanced” degrees in libraries or information or whatnot. They just need people to staff the cafes and plan stuff.”

Micheal Lorenzen on teaching with Wikipedia.

Jessica Hupp lists 25 useful social networking sites for librarians.

Lee LeBlanc on online vs offline education: “What I’m tired of is hearing outdated opinions about how horrible all online education is. That’s just not true.”

I’ve taken a couple of online courses, and I have to say I found them hard - I sometimes had problems hearing the lecturer or my classmates; we often spent time dealing with the technology instead of communicating; and the lack of visual cues made class discussion harder (face to face, you can see if someone wants to talk, and speak up if no-one does. Online we often sat politely in silence wondering if someone was going to speak). And yet: I enjoyed both courses more than most others I’ve taken, and I got my best grades in these courses. A product of the content/the lecturer? I don’t know. I still feel as though the online courses weren’t as good as the face-to-face, but my performance suggests that they may have been.

Nicole Engard on Brewster (Internet Archive) Kahle’s speech at Code4Lib.

Kyle at TameTheWeb on putting virtual reference in the user’s pocket (via cellphone): also a guest post by a librarian, Joe Murphy, who has done just that. I’m still not convinced of the value of 160-character reference transactions, but for short simple questions there’s clearly a role for SMS (me, I need more than 160 characters just to say hello).

Dorothea Salo on (among other things) why writing works better for her onscreen.

Connie Crosby on whether wikis belong in law firms.

Freakonomics on whether social networking is good for society. There’s an interesting suggestion that people might form more homogeneous friendships if they form them online, “cut[ting] themselves off from serendipitous encounters with those who are superficially different from them, ethnically, socio-economically, and even in terms of musical taste.” If anything, I’ve found the opposite: I’ve met people online who I could not (or would not) have become friends with in real life.

Infonatives on ten brainless things an online academic library can do.

Chris Wilson at Slate points out that most edits on social-media sites are actually performed by a small percentage of users. Yep. While it’s true that a large percentage of those who go online have participated in the read/write web, most of them haven’t done so to any large degree, in spite of the rhetoric.