Librarian X

Audio Books by Playful Librarian via Flickr

I wrote a short article about free audio books for Georgia Library Quarterly’s Winter 2010 issue. It’s for a regular column called “My own private library,” in which librarians write about the books in their home libraries.

GLQ isn’t online yet, but they’ve given me permission to post the article here:

(continue reading…)

I’m emerging from holiday break just long enough to link to my picture on the Geeky Tattoos blog, whose author calls me a “hardcore librarian.” Word.

Zotero just announced a new free storage feature for attachments. I blogged about it over on the library’s site, so I won’t repeat it here.

The first 100 megs of storage is free. I’ve got a fair-sized library, and I’m only using half that. I probably won’t need to upgrade to paid storage until well into next year, but you can get a gigabyte for twenty bucks a year. That strikes me as quite reasonable. I’d pay twenty dollars for another gig in my Dropbox in a heartbeat.

Maybe I’m the last one to discover this feature, but at some point Zotero 2.0 (beta, but I’ve been using it for months with no problems) added a really neat trick.

Click the magic wand button, “Add by identifier.” You’ll get a dialog box prompting you to enter an ISBN, DOI or PMID number. Zotero will grab the citation info online and save it to your library.

Handy shortcut if you’ve got a physical book in front of you and want to save a trip to Worldcat. I just added instructions to my Zotero guide.

I just put up my first exhibit, on virtual worlds and video games. It’ll be in the GSU Library over the summer. I selected the books and wrote the accompanying text, and our awesome designer Christian Steinmetz created the posters to accompany it. I’m particularly fond of my character sheet.

A full list of the books is on the GSU Library blog. (And thanks again to my friends who contributed suggestions.) I tried to choose a variety of books from different disciplines to show that scholars in many areas (art, business, anthropology, gender studies) are writing about games and VWs, and to give students ideas about how they might write about gaming for a variety of classes.

I’ve been working on the ALA Electronic Participation Task Force for a few months, and this week Cindi Trainor blogged about our recommendations on the ALA TechSource blog.

At present it’s called the EParticipation Task Force Recommendations. Hopefully it’ll get a better name at some point. Essentially this is a toolkit of free and cheap options to include remote participants in conference events. We’ve got links for different kinds of participation (audio, video, documents, etc) and different circumstances (one speaker, many, etc), and reasonably easy instructions for all options. This isn’t just for ALA members — it’s relevant and useful for anyone. I wrote the bit on podcasting (naturally) and SlideShare.

We’ll probably be talking about professional development without a budget on the next Adventures in Library Instruction episode. If you have questions or issues you think would be interesting to include, let me know.

EParticipation Task Force Recommendations

If you’re having trouble figuring out the point of this whole Twitter and Friendfeed thing (or if you’ve never heard of Friendfeed since it hasn’t had a media blitz yet), check out this article on Library Journal by my friends Laura Carscaddon and Colleen Harris: “Working the Social: Twitter and FriendFeed.”

They do a great job of condensing and explaining the point of both services, and how and why you might want to use them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a sort of open-source class curriculum called “Teaching Copyright” in response to the RIAA’s “Campus Downloading” site, which has a video and informational documents about the dangers of downloading free music. The RIAA offers a free DVD for educators.

The RIAA’s material:

• Doesn’t identify the sponsor of the site
• Makes blanket statements that downloading music without the copyright holder’s permission is illegal
• Doesn’t mention fair use, public domain, or Creative Commons
• Warns students of the risks of being sued or expelled, without identifying the RIAA as the plaintiff in these lawsuits.
• Links to lots of sites that sell music by RIAA recording artists.

The EFF’s material:

• Clearly identifies the organization behind the site and their agenda
• Discusses the four factors of fair use, the public domain, and illustrates legal examples of reusing digital materials
• Clarifies the stakeholders on multiple sides of controversies in copyright and peer-to-peer file sharing.

Did you ever use sites like martinlutherking.org (I won’t link to it because I don’t want to boost its Google ranking) to demonstrate bias and critical evaluation? Wouldn’t it be a great information literacy exercise to have students analyze the two curricula? And maybe teach them something about copyright and information use in the bargain?

I’ve ordered one of the RIAA’s DVDs to use in class next year.

A colleague and I are presenting a Zotero workshop in a couple of weeks for faculty and grad students in the college of business. We’re hoping it will be the first of several sessions, so we came up with “research power tools” as the theme. Our library’s graphic designer Christian Steinmetz came up with this amazing promotional poster for the workshop, which I had to share. I love the robot guy for some reason.

(Click the image to embiggen.)

Image used by permission of GSU library

Zotero 2.0 beta is out! With this version Zotero becomes social software, adding the long-awaited groups feature to share references online. This looks very cool.

For more details, check out the Zotero blog or the 2.0 beta release notes.