Librarian X

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.

It’s up! We had fun recording this episode.

In the course of post-recording dissection, we all agreed that the interviews and discussion segments are a lot more interesting to listen to than the solo segments. We’re going to to more of that in the future.

We’re serious about wanting contributions from other people, so let me know if you’ve got something instruction-related you’d like to talk about on the show. I’ll do all the heavy lifting and audio engineering.

Links: to the episode, the ALI podcast, RSS feed, and subscribe in iTunes.

 

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I love this video by by librarian Carrie Donovan at Indiana University promoting their services for students. That is all.

Dear online information providers: disabling your users’ browsers is not the way to keep them coming back to your site.

I was trying to use the New York Times’ online book review page in a screenshot as an illustration for a web guide this morning.  The feature I wanted to show involved the right-click context menu.  What happened when I selected some text on NYtimes.com and right-clicked?  This:

See that little question mark next to “Amityville Horror”?  That’s where my context menu should be.  It took me about three tries before I figured out what was going on — and I supposedly know what I’m doing here.

If you click on the question mark, it searches the NYT’s site for your selected text.  Why would I want that instead of the standard right-click menu I’ve been using for ten or fifteen years?  (Hint: I wouldn’t.)

One of the casualties of budget cuts at my library was the size of our browsing collection — the rotating collection of books for pleasure reading that we display near the front entrance.

I love the countermeasure that the library came up with.  There’s now a shelving unit near the circulation desk for the Book Swap collection.  They’re books that anyone can pick up and take for free.  We seeded them with books donated by library staff, but the idea is that once you read a book, you can put it back, or keep it, or bring in books from home you no longer want.

I’ve had a lot of old novels at home that I’ve been giving away on Bookmooch one at a time for a while to make shelf space at home, but I’m going to start bringing them in to work a stack at a time now and adding them to the swap shelves.  (And this morning I found a novel that I didn’t know about by a fantasy author I like.  I’ll re-swap it when I’ve read it.)