Is Google the New Microsoft?

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/is-google-the-new-microsoft
Ok, so now Google is challenging Facebook and Twitter by adding new social features to Gmail that would allow users to more quickly and easily share status updates and media.  These features are the heart and soul of Facebook and Twitter and by integrating it into their other programs such as Gmail, Picasa Photos, and YouTube, it poses the question, is Google beginning to look and act like Microsoft by trying to get in on every new innovation and make it their own?  Ever since they first produced their Windows operating system, Microsoft has always taken existing ideas and made them their own.  They have been highly successful and profitable with their flagship products, their Windows operating system and Office productivity suite.  While I still value these products, it seems like in the last ten years, they have done nothing original.  They latch onto a new concept or product developed by someone else and try to make it their own, often times unsuccessfully.  In contrast, Google has been a leader in new innovations and has done very well with their products, which by the way are mostly free.  But as Google expands into an ever increasing array of areas such as their own cell phone, and now these new Gmail services, you have to wonder, are they losing their edge?  Are they becoming another Microsoft?

Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/08/gmail-social-feature-to-l_n_453809.html

Now on Facebook: Your Future Doctor, Partying

OK, so we’ve all heard the warnings about being careful about what we post on Facebook, right?  Be careful to not post anything that could come back to hurt you professionally, like party pictures or anything that might create a negative reflection on you.  OK, maybe not everyone has heard, or at least taken this advice to heart.  The latest edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a front page story about medical school students posting photos of alcohol soaked parties, joining groups like PIMP (Party of Important Male Physicians), and posing with cadavers.  The article is free online at http://chronicle.com/article/There-May-Be-Skeletons-in-Y/63803/ Just another reminder to be mindful of what you are doing in the cyber world.

Social media: A guide for college and university libraries

ACRL has put out a guide for those librarians who are beginning to experiment with using social media services.  This is a good tips and tricks article oh how these services can be best utilized to promote library services and to dialog with users.  Since I am in the early stages of these experiments myself, I found this guide somewhat useful.  The guide can be found at http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/1/10.full

TONIGHT: PBS FrontLine: Digital Nation

This looks like an excellent program on how the digital world and the real world converge.  Looks like it will be a great program; don’t miss it!   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

The Small College Librarian – Part 1 – Introduction

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/the-small-college-librarian-%E2%80%93-part-1-%E2%80%93-introduction/

The Small College Librarian – Part 2 – So Many Jobs, So Little Time

The Small College Librarian – Part 3 – Multitasking/

This is a first of a series of sections I plan to write regarding the balance librarians of small college libraries must strike between service to their user population and other activities regarding professional development.  These activities include many of the traditional activities that librarians in tenured track positions must be involved in to gain tenure.  They are also important to those desiring to remain at a small college for reasons I will explain later.  These include research and publishing, involvement in professional organizations and committee work, service to the university or college or perhaps even community service.  Librarians of small colleges with few staff members, operate in a very different world than those of larger universities.  First, many of these positions are not tenured track, thus there is little if any institutional incentive to publish or be engaged in professional activities outside of their library.  This librarian must be more self motivated and see the long-term benefit for their career in doing so.  But simply being motivated to do so does not make it easier.  Small college librarians often must wear multiple hats and carry on the duties that are done by many librarians and staff members at larger Universities.  Multitasking becomes the norm, both over the course of a stretch of time and within a short amount such as within the hour.  For example, that last sentence was interrupted by a student requesting virtual reference assistance.  Seriously! I kid you not!  I had to switch gears while writing a sentence on multitasking.  How is that for irony?  We have two librarians that provide reference assistance in addition to many other duties and so “reference time” in whenever someone needs help, not necessarily during our scheduled desk time.   I will expand upon the multiple roles we have at Logan Library in my next installment.  While I fully understand the drawbacks of multitasking, I have learned that multitasking can be managed in a way that minimizes the negatives and allows one to control their multitasking rather than having their multitasking control them.   Of course, there are exceptions.

Working in a small college library can be rewarding and fulfilling.  But whether you plan to move onto a tenure track position or remain a small college librarian, there is still a juggling act that one must contend with.  In the middle of this juggling act, service to our users should always come before personal gain.  What time there is for professional development, self education, and service is often fragmented and fitted in when time allows.  Therefore, transitioning from a small academic library to a University can be challenging for those who so desire.  Small college librarians must learn balance in serving their users and staying involved in the library profession to avoid staleness.  This series shall touch upon such topics as performing regular job duties, librarian scholarly publishing, multitasking, keeping up with the latest innovations and avoiding burnout.

Lost in a Sea of Web 2.0

OK, so I am exploring a research topic which in part will evaluate which Web 2.0 applications our students use for communication and various other productivity applications.  I know the quantity of internet tools has been growing over the years, but I am lost in a sea of applications that can be used.  The number of options for “add this” buttons comes to almost 200.  I don’t know what the overwhelming majority of them are for.   My first step would be to classify them by type, social network, social bookmarking, , etc.  Anyone know of an easy way to explore, categorize, and list these resources for an online survey?

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/lost-in-a-sea-of-web-2-0/

Becoming Library 2.0 the Right Way

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/?p=132
As Logan Library moves towards Library 2.0 by integrating Web.2.0 technology, there is already discussion in the blogosphere about Web 3.0.  Any discussion of this by librarians at this point is premature at best.  Many libraries have rushed to embrace Web 2.0 technologies without having asked themselves why they should.  Many have jumped headlong and into creating a library blog and adding other features without it being tied into their library’s strategic goals.  An article in Information Today “Making Web 2.0 Work—From ‘Librarian Habilis’ to ‘Librarian Sapiens’ by Milica Cvetkovic makes the point that it must be tied into a library’s strategic goals.  Without doing so, two problems soon become apparent.  First, technologies are adopted by the library and not by their patrons.  Second, librarians often do not have the time to work on these technologies once they are launched.  It is something extra that they take on their own and considered secondary to their job.  On both of these points, I have something to say.

On the first point, I have always been reluctant to adopt something without foreseeing a direct benefit to our users.  However, I did try a few things through trial and error.  First, we started virtual reference a year and a half ago, it was hardly ever used.  But we used an external commercial service where we could only have one librarian logged in at a time and we had the link to the service only on the library’s main page.  With our implementation of LibGuides, we have placed chat widgets for each of our reference librarians (2) on every LibGuide.  Every Libguide page has at least one chat widget.  Thus, they can see if we are available wherever they are on our website doing research.  The response has been excellent; we get several IM reference requests per day.  The second experiment was to use Twitter to inform a class on updates to a specific LibGuide as well as for other library news.  In three weeks, we have only gained only four followers.  I have conducted a survey by show of hands of over 300 students during Freshmen College and Life Skills classes, asking how many use Twitter.  I often got zero hands or occasionally one or two.  But Twitter does have a scrolling ticker widget that we were able to put on our webpage so it was not a total waste.  On the second point, the title of my blog says it all.  I already do many jobs and so engaging in blogging and managing Web 2.0 platforms is just more work for me…and more stress.

It was quite timely that I read this article today (it came out today) because just a few hours before, I decided to conduct a study.  The study will 1) survey our users on what Web 2.0 technologies they are currently using (social networks, social bookmarking, communication, etc;  2) Reevaluate how our library resources are being utilized by all of our user population (database usage, location usage, etc); and 3) survey our students on their research practices.  This purpose of the study will be for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and for our own knowledge as we revise our strategic goals and objectives.  As Logan Library wades into the murky waters of Library 2.0, we will do so armed with factual knowledge of our users and not just assumptions.

Redefining Library Relevance at Rose-Hulman

ACRL Value of Academic Libraries Comprehensive Research Review and Report is a RFP “seeking proposals for the development and delivery of a comprehensive review of the quantitative and  qualitative literature, methodologies, and best practices currently in place for demonstrating the value of academic libraries.”  The relevance of academic libraries is being questioned as a result of changing user expectations due to search engines like Google.  Libraries are scrambling to define themselves as relevant to their user community.  At Logan Library, we are doing this in a few ways.  One is through increased emphasis on information literacy.  We are changing the way we teach library instruction and trying to reach more classes each year.  Our goal by the end of this academic year is to develop a more comprehensive methodology for turning out information literate students by the time they graduate.  This process starts Freshmen year and builds in complexity throughout their four years at Rose.  Since we are starting with Freshman through Seniors all at once, it will take four years before we will see a group of students move through this process.  We are still hashing out this process which we will continue to do throughout this academic year.

The second way in which we are redefining our relevance is by our transformation to a Library 2.0.  While our users may not have any idea what this means, or simply think we are making up some trendy  sounding name for ourselves, they are aware of web 2.0 technology as it is already an integral part of their lives online.  We have done this through the implementation of LibGuides; chat widgets available on our LibGuides pages, Twitter to inform our users of changes to LibGuides and other library news.  We have also added a Twitter widget to our library home page to make our tweets visible to those who are not followers.  We will soon explore uses for facebook .

The transformation is taking slowly taking place.  So far the response has been positive.  We already knew that most research by students is being done outside of the library, so the chat option was implemented to reach students at their point of need.  So far, so good; we are getting several chat reference requests per day.  We have gotten positive feedback from the professors we have conducted library instruction for, and the students seem to be more engaged during the process.  While we do not have the funds currently to build a new library or add a number of new resources, we are in the process of redefining our role within the institution and hopefully increasing our relevance as well.

FINALLY, a use for Twitter

I have finally found a use for Twitter.  Yesterday I created a LibGuide for a Technical Communications class we did library orientations for (6 classes last Friday).  We started seeing students asking for research help the same day and already I have heard students mentioning that they forgot some of the resources that we mentioned.  Unlike in the past, I did not create a paper handout for the students to use as a reference.  Instead, I created a LibGuide just for that class, making this the first class I have done this for.  The email alerts feature in LibGuides only alerts users of new Guides, not changes to already existing guides.  Since I am sure I will be making changes to the guide and adding information, I wanted a way to update our users of new information.  Ahhh, Twitter to the rescue.  I created a Twitter account “loganlibrary” and posted my first update.  I sent all six sections of the class the news of the new guide and of the Twitter account and so now we’ll see how it plays out.  I’ll post an update on usage of the guide and the Twitter account later.