Here’s the list of future Skypecasts on similar topics. We’re doing one tomorrow at 1 pm ET, 17:00 GMT. Here is a time converter in case you need one.

In the end, we posted 41 screencasts, podcasts and papers by 51 presenters. More than 12,000 visitors attended the month-long event on the Web, and an additional 1300 attended the two teleconferences hosted by CASE.

We now begin a process of evaluation and planning for HigherEd BlogCon 2007.

Among our questions:

– What key issues emerged that clearly merit further exploration?

– What steps might we take to increase the amount of direct interaction among presenters and attendees?

– How should next year’s event be organized?

To support a discussion of these issues, we’ve created a page in the HigherEd BlogCon wiki where all are invited to share ideas and observations. That’s at http://higheredblogcon.editme.com/.

Also, we’re inviting all section chairs and presenters to join a live online discussion the subject Friday, May 5th at 1 p.m. EDT.

If you’d like to participate in a long-running discussion of this topic with full access to the full transcript, please contact Dan Forbush at dan.forbush@profnet.com and he’ll add you to the BlogCon chat area as a member.

If you’d like to participate only in Friday’s live chat, you may join as a guest at https://blogcon.campfirenow.com/24c45.

Tags: higheredblogcon

Communications and Alumni

• Advanced Organizational Communication is a team blog by Walter Carl’s class at Northeastern University. This semester, the class is collaborating with John Cass from Backbone Media to better understand the reasons, conditions and factors it takes to make a successful corporate blog. Student involvement consists of helping to design questions for the interview protocol, conducting interviews with corporate bloggers, transcribing the interviews, performing a thematic analysis of the interviews, and contributing posts to the class blog that articulate the initial findings and what they learned from the project. Blog and description submitted by Dr.Walter J. Carl.
• “What’s hAPPening!” is the blog of the Appalachian Alumni Association (Appalachian State University) consisting of links to news articles, photos, alumni profiles, campus news and other information relevant to our alumni base. Submitted by Rob Robertson.

Library and Information Resources

• The FLICC/FEDLINK Environmental Scan wiki is a collaborative project to describe external trends and issues that could affect FLICC/FEDLINK’s strategic planning. We describe, annotate and link to societal, information use, library, publishing and government library trends that will help set the stage for a Business Plan being created by FLICC/FEDLINK, a Library of Congress-sponsored consortium of federal library and information centers (http://www.loc.gov/flicc/). Site and description submitted by Cindy Boeke.

Teaching and Learning

• The collegiate education experience becoming increasingly reliant on technology. Yet our high schools and universities have failed to educate their students with the means to take full advantage of the tools available. College v2 aims to arm students with the tricks, tips, and knowledge to put them ahead of the pack. College v2 will also post an occasional news story or photograph that will help you in you everyday life. My aim is to help you take over the world, or at least get out of taking 18 credits alive, and intact. Site and description submitted by Sean Blanda.
• Jason Heath, bass instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Trinity Intenational University, maintains Jason Heath’s Bass Page, a blog for players and enthusiasts of the double bass and electric bass as a way to communicate with both both personal students and for the Chicago bass community in general, providing double bass concert news, lesson schedules, recommended repertoire, lesson summaries and assignments, and the like.
• Skate of the Web highlights new tools for learning by Dr. Antonio Vantaggiato at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón.

Building a Wall of Books
Edward Vielmetti
University of Michigan School of Information

Google Maps and You: Five Steps To Including a Google Map On Your Website
Chris Deweese
Lewis & Clark Library System

Go Where the Patrons Are: Outreach In the Age of Library 2.0
Jason Griffey
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Today’s presentations focus on how libraries can make information/functionality independent of a particular application so that it can be manipulated and reused in a variety of creative ways. An API exposes a set of functions that make up an application and can be used in the creation of other applications. RSS is an XML-based format for syndicating content on the Web. Structured blogging and microformats are ways of creating structured data that computers can understand. The following presenters are using these tools in order to put more information in the hands of patrons, allow patrons more control over information, and allow librarians to disseminate information in novel ways and only to those who would want it.

John Blyberg is the Network Administrator and Lead Developer for the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan, and was largely responsible for their Web site redesign, widely hailed as a model for all libraries. John did a lot of hacking at his library’s catalog and content management system in order to put more information into the hands of his patrons. John will talk about the tools and interfaces he has made available to his patrons and how he has built a true online community on his Web site.

Edward Vielmetti, researcher at the University of Michigan School of Information, is a passionate advocate of libraries and is on the Technical Advisory Board at the Ann Arbor District Library. He has designed several applications for libraries, including his “wall of books” display. By exposing the structured data in the catalog through RSS, Ed has transformed the new books feed into a visual display. See how he did it and how you can do the same at your library.

Chris Deweese is the Internet Applications Developer for the Lewis and Clark Library System in Illinois. There, he works to develop Web applications to enable member libraries to provide better services to their patrons. In his presentation, Chris will teach attendees how to use the Google Maps API to put a Google Map on their own library’s Web site using JavaScript and XSLT. Don’t worry; he does all of the hard work!

Jason Griffey is a Reference/Instruction Librarian at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He has been working with his colleagues to develop a way of using Wordpress and the Structured Blogging plugin to create a “catalog” of new books and then to disseminate that information to academic departments. Jason will discuss how structured blogging creates machine readable data that can then be manipulated and presented in a variety of ways.

Here are links to the topics from earlier this week:

April 10: Blogging In Libraries
April 11: Podcasting in Libraries
April 12: Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies
April 13: Issues In Libraries

Tags: web2.0, rss, library, libraries, higheredblogcon

John Blyberg
Ann Arbor District Library
http://blyberg.net/

As I’m writing this, Newsweek is running an issue about Web 2.0 entitled, “Putting the ‘We’ in WEB”. Beside the fact that the mainstream media now thinks it’s safe to start spinning the web as they did during the dotcom era, there really is something to this new phase of evolution in information access. Tim O’Reilly calls is “harnessing the collective intelligence” which sounds ambitious, as Newsweek’s authors cede, but there it is: ripe for the plucking.

As libraries, we can look at sites like Flickr, deli.cio.us, and MySpace and see that they are wildly succesful. We can even take advantage of their services and APIs to enhance and grow our own portfolio of offerings, but the question remains, can we do this for ourselves? I believe that we can because we have several factors going for us that our commercial counterparts do not. First, we have local communities, second, we’re not after advertising dollars, and third, we’ve got physical spaces. The trick is assembling the right components to create unique, immersive experiences for our patrons both online and off. By adopting a long-term strategy of creting an infrastructure that promotes open access to information, AADL has had a fair measure of success in creating personalized “spaces” for patrons. These space are not portals, because, unlike portals, AADL’s offerings act more like a control panel for the library experience.

Warning: I am going to use some technical jargon in this presentation, but I’m using it while being mindful that you, reader, may very well not be a techie. As such, I’ve linked them to their respective explanations. My hope is not that you’ll understand the concepts, but that you’ll be able to file the terms somewhere in the back of your heads with a little bit of context so that when you encounter them again, you’ll enjoy some measure of understanding their context.

Getting your house in order

I mentioned that AADL’s was a long term strategy–one that began several years ago with an initiative to completely overhaul both the network and server infrastructure and a commitment to adopt open-source tools wherever feasible. By ensuring that our environment was condusive to modular growth, we put ourselves in a position that allows us to bring enhancements and features “to market” very rapidly. It was clear to me, when I joined AADL, that the attitudes and environment of library culture were very condusive to extreme programming and I am lucky enough to have a supervisor who is on the same page. Cohesion is only part of the solution however. Putting together a development environment takes some forsight and bringing any of the features I talk about today to fruition requires a fluid, viable development environment.
In AADL’s case, we opted for an entirely open-source set of tools: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (an assemblage sometimes referred to LAMP). Being familiar with these technologies is vital because simply getting them installed can be a challenge for the uninitiated. In addition, a development program needs to encompass version control and delineation between live and testing as well as the roll-out process. Taking the time to do this properly ensures that the best possible product is presented to the public.

Where to begin

Long before launching our website, I spent a good six months testing and playing with various open source content managment systems (CMS) and finally settled on Drupal because of it’s intrinsic API, taxonomy system, unique and lightweight approach to content delivery and large support base. Of course, ADD MORE HERE

Because we want to create an environment that is unique as well as functional to the library patron, single sign-on is essential. Without it, the patrons’ online experience immediately becomes a fragmented mess. The problem we ran into is probably the same problem other libraries will as well–it was the fact that we chose Drupal as our CMS, but our automation system, III’s Millenium, provides only the most basic authentication APIs and does not provide an API at all for conducting business within the OPAC (online public access catalog) such as fetching checkouts and holds or requesting material. This will pose a challenge. In our case, a piece of middleware (an invisible piece of software) actually performs a “reverse proxy” against the III server, meaning that we are able to hijack all traffic going to and from it. The middleware utilizes PHP’sCURL implementation and does the trick nicely. Once we were able to solve the single sign-on problem, all the tools were in place to begin creating any service we could concieve of.

Designating a control center

To begin, a major section of the website was dedicated to managing user affairs. If you look along the top navbar of the AADL website, you’ll notice the rightmost option is the “My Account” area. Clicking on this will take a logged-in user to the accounts section which is, in essence, a dashboard view of that user’s account. Much like other library systems, patrons can view their holdings and requests here. They can also customize the view so that they see only a few items, sorted by due date. From this page, patron’s have the option of renewing items, removing material from their holds list, changing their default pickup locations, visiting their checkout history, viewing their “virtual card catalog” collection, or managing their wireless devices. Most of these advanced features go unnoticed by many users, but a growing group of die-hard library patrons are begining to rely heavily on this library control panel. It allows them easy access to virtually every aspect of their online library experience both on and off the premisis.

The basics

The default pickup location was something we added in order to enhance III’s hold process. Out-of-the-box, Millenium’s hold process requires that a requestor specify a pickup location for every item. This can become a tedious task if a large number of items are being requested. By using the solution developed for single sign-on, we can provide patrons with the an option to select which pickup location should be pre-selected for each request. As with many of our services, this is an opt-in selection, meaning that there is no default and selection is not mandatory. This particular option does not neccesarily carry with it any privacy concerns.

You’ll notice in the screenshot, that the library card number is configurable field. This is because new Drupal accounts do not require a card number by default. We want to give anyone the opportunity to create an account on our website, no matter where they are from. Because we’ve created our services to be fairly ubiquitous, they can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone. I think that’s an important consideration when developing your new website policies. Bear in mind that the more participants you attract to a service, the better it becomes.

Keeping track

Checkout history, on the other hand, does. III’s built-in checkout history is an opt-in system and we were able to piggyback some advanced features onto their system while integrating the option toggle into Drupal’s framework. The checkout history (or “record check-outs” option) allows users to maintain an inventory of items they have previously checked out. Unfortunately, III’s implementation only allows users to view a tabulated list of their histories. In anticipation of some very large histories, we wanted users to have the option of searching and filtering. After all, what good is the data if you can’t find what you’re looking for. The result is a system that gives the patron complete control over their entire history. Patrons can search, sort, and filter results. If they wish to delete one or all records, they can, with the assurance that the data is dispatched from our system permanently.

Opening the front door

I can’t begin to approach the topic of library blogs as well as Michael Stephens can. I’d suggest that readers become familiar with his work to evangelize library blogs as his coverage is complete. Early in the website design process, we made the decision that blogs would constitute the nucleus of our dynamic website content. In addition, we wanted to enable commenting on those blogs. We really had no idea what kind of response we would get–of what form that response would take. Just a brief look at our Director’s Blog will illuminate the fact that the blogs promote a constant two-way dialogue between our director, Josie Parker, and the public. Of course, making this succesful requires a director who is courageous enough to regularly face the public head-on. But if you’re not ready to go there, be sure to take a look at some of AADL’s other blogs that are staffed by some very clued-in, bright minds. Virtually every material type garners it’s own blog. New blog entries are added several times a day. Often, blog entries serve to promote what, otherwise, may be obscured by the bigger names. In essense, blogging your material taps into the long tail by putting oft-overlooked titles in front of eyeballs.

Feeding frenzy!

Bloggers know that RSS feeds go hand-in-hand with blog content as a means of syndication. Over the past months, we’ve worked to provide a number of useful feeds, not just for our blog content, but for patron and catalog data as well.

One of the major benefits of modular programming with APIs is the ability to reuse code frequently and easily. We were able to do just this when we write the code that creates a feed for patron checkouts and holds. These particular feeds were interesting and required a little bit of tought as to how we would handle authentication. We, rather quickly, determined that a token-based feed would be preferable because it would allow users to share the feed if the so wished. The feeds can be very helpful in tracking material due dates and hold queue positions.

The catalog search feeds proved to be a little more of a challenge to produce, but have yeilded some very intersting results. Each feed is essentialy it’s own, self-contained, custom syndication. Creating a feed from the catalog is as easy as doing a search, then subscribing to it via the RSS button that appears on the top of each hit-list. Because results are sorted by catalog date, any new material matching that search will appear at the top of the feed, allowing subscribers to be alerted to new items in the catalog. We’ve discussed using this feed itself to offer a service that will automatically place holds on items for patrons. Many times, a feature like this will open the door to new posibilities you may not have previously considered.

If our patrons aggregators aren’t full enough by now, they may find some satisfaction in our top and new item feeds. These are updated nightly and are vital tools for disseminating that information. These feeds tend to be our most popular and show up on Ann Arbor residents’ websites. If your library makes this information available, creating an RSS feed can prove to be a relatively simple excercise. Many PHP tools, like MagpieRSS, exist to do just that.

Embracing nostalgia

What started as a side project to kill a little time, quickly grew in scope and resulted in a popular virtual card catalog service. There are essentially two components to the card catalog system. First, are the cards themselves. I’ve written a full description of the cards on my blog. Essentially, I wanted to gauge community response to social interaction within the OPAC and social software in a library setting. Each catalog record can dynamically create a vintage-looking catalog card on-the-fly. By themselves, they do look quite authentic, but accompanying them is a tool that allows users to write marginalia comments on the cards. It’s a fun little service. The second component gives the user a measure of control over what happens to those cards. Users can add cards to a personal card catalog for later retrieval. Once card are added to a personal catalog, they may be viewed any time and even sent via email to anyone vith an attached note. As the project grew in scope, patrons were given the option to share their card catalogs publically via a unique URL. In some ways, the service hails to LibraryThing’s published catalog service. In the future, RSS feeds and the ability to search, sort or filter the cards will be added.

The Card catalog service has been extremely popular, garnering thousands of marginalia entries and just under a thousand card collections. Given the fact that it is an unadvertised service, those numbers are quite remarkable. Those numbers also support my theory that library websites can become a destination as well as a resource and the OPAC can play a key role in making that happen.

Cutting the cord

Shortly after I began at AADL, we were given the green light to go ahead and implement system-wide WIFI coverage. Knowing this, and simulatneously charged with the job of redesigning the network from the ground up, I was put in the serendipitous position of being able implement an infrastructure that was condusive to guest access, development, future expansion, and software development for the enterprise. At the heart of our network is a linux firewall utilizing a very powerful piece of open source software called IPTables. Because IPTables is open-source and insanely configurable, it slid right in to our development agenda and allowed us to write our own guest access system with PHP and MySQL.

When a device that is unknown to the system tries to access a web page for the first time, it is redirected to an authentication screen–much like you would find at a hotel hot spot. Users are prompted to enter their library card number (guest numbers are available from our information desk clerks), at which point they are free to use the service. Devices registered by card holders are registered for a full year. During that time, they will never need to enter their card number again. Guests are registered for one month. The process is painless and, given the thousands of registered users, we have very few support requests for it.

There are limitations to this model, however–limitations any library that offers wifi should consider. If you follow Engadget, you’ll know that, with increasing frequency, new devices are being produced that take advantage of wifi, but do not neccesarily have a web browser. These devices range from gaming platforms like the Nintendo DS to Skype VoIP phones. While some libraries may ban such devices outright, we believe that we should accomidate them, but their lack-of-browser limitation leaves them out cold with our default registration system. Enter the Advanced Wireless Device Management console.

The WIFI device management console is a tool that is presented to our cardholders on our web page. The tool allows users to view a list of all their registered devices, add a description for each, delete them, and even renew their registrations. Perhaps its most useful functionality, however, is it’s ability to add new registrations manually

Game on!

Our IT manager, Eli Neiburger, has been the brains behind what is possibly the most succesful library gaming programs in the country. The spectacular aduio/visual experience we provide to the teens, however, couldn’t happen without the software to back it up. Of course, that software has a web component.

If you’ve ever tried to put on a gaming tournament, you’ll doubtlessly be aware that registration and scoring can be a very complex process. When you draw over one hundred participants, you need a way to manage the chaos. Our AADL-GT software is now is its third iteration and can be seen on the AADL-GT website. A quick glance at the GT page will show how blogs, scoreboards, and registration all come together to build an experience that lasts well beyond the day of the event. One blog entry triggered over 460 comments! The question you need to ask is, how often do teens spend this much time on a library website?

Picture Ann Arbor

The Picture Ann Arbor (Picture A2) service is a little like Flickr in that it allows users to upload their own photos. The online service is occasionally coupled with scanning sessions on the library premise. The purpose of this service is to begin building an archive of Ann Arbor photos from both past and present. Picture A2 is run on the open source project, Gallery 2, utilizing a Drupal plugin as the glue that binds the two projects together.

Putting data in physical spaces

AADL-GT is a prime example of how ubiquitous data can add value and immersion to the web site experience. How about putting it to work in physical spaces? Electronic signage is something we’ve been serious about for several years now. The project has been dubbed “Greetsaver” and began as a flash application using an open source middleware library called AMFPHP. It looked very much like a dashboard, pulling together news, local weather, and library events. With our recent Pittsfield Branch opening, came a second iteration “written” or created, rather in Apple’s Quartz Composer by Eric Klooster. The new version slides eloquently through event listing and takes advantage of the aformentioned top and new items feed to display new and hot material. As visitors enter the branch, they are greeted by this software running on a large LCD panel where they can glean some cursory information from it before they head off into the stacks. What’s important here is that there is zero barrier to entry for this service as far as the patron is concerned and it is both useful and, once again, let’s our data play out in the library experience.

Movie #1 - Welcome Screen (mp4) :: Movie #2 - Book Display (mp4) :: Source download

For the geeks

Ann Arbor has its fair share of techies who tend to respond to techie interfaces like that of our REST interface. REST (Representational State Transfer) is a way of allowing software to talk to other software via friendly XML. Essentially, it’s a computer programming tool that talks to our systems. Our REST interface sits atop our catalog and within the Drupal framwork and allows developers to create applications, plug-ins and mashups with our data. You’ll see an example of this with Ed Vielmetti’s wall of books [link to his presentation], and some of his other Superpatron projects. An XSLT-formatted example would look like this.

Providing developer tools to the general public represents a completely new attitude toward library boundaries. For instance, if a library has a number of developers hacking on a REST interface, producing software that can sit in a task bar or bezel, and that application is passed around, suddenly, the library becomes immersed in a user’s computing environment. This effectively blurs the edge of our reach. I believe this murky area holds a tremendous amount of promise as a venue for library interaction.

What’s next?

It’s been an exciting time at AADL as several years of work has finally culminated in a product that resonates with an atetntive public. We can’t, however, lull ourselves into a sense of complacency and believe that our offerings will suffice indefinately, or even over the next few years. Becuse the nature of our online world changes constantly, so must our approach to delivering service. How we go about assembling the product should also be an important consideration. At AADL, we’ve chosen to abide by the tenets of the open source philosophy because it’s very compatible with the philosophy and mission of libraries themselves, not to mention the flexibility it affords.

We are also keenly aware that AADL is blessed with the financial and human resources required to pull off the results that we do. By sharing our experiences, our knowledge, and our code wherever possible, we hope to lower the barrier for entry into this arena.

Just as each library community is different, so should our deliverales be, but at the heart of it all should be the idea that we’re building and fostering a community. In return, our users wil be stewards of an online palace of information that fronts for tangible material–books that illuminate, movies that stir, and music that moves us.

Tags: libraries, library, higheredblogcon, web2.0, drupal, socialsoftware,

One of the popular destinations in any library that is regularly acquiring new books is the shelving where they are placed before they make their way into the stacks. These new books collections are usually placed in high traffic areas, and I’ve seen them highlight featured books or otherwise do much more in the way of attractively displaying what’s available than standard dense spine-out stacks shelving.

Library online catalogs, sadly, don’t often do this display justice. A long list of new titles is hard to make your way through if you don’t know really what you’re looking for, and it’s tough to display enough text on a small screen to come anywhere close to the visual impact of well displayed covers. This is an account of how I recreated the “wall of books” that I don’t see quite often enough at the Ann Arbor District Library.

RSS feeds from the catalog

I was fortunate in starting out with this project because a lot of the data was available to me as a patron without requiring any new coding by tech librarians or any new development on the catalog. The Ann Arbor catalog has a list of new books and popular books available on its web page, and you can readily page through it 10 or 20 at a time. More interesting and ultimately more useful was the availability of this same information as an RSS feed, with full information about author and titles and even links to book cover images.

I won’t go into RSS as a format, but for the purposes of this discussion it’s useful to know two things about what made it so helpful. First, it’s relatively easy to parse, and doesn’t require lots of code to untangle session IDs or tables or other display formatting codes that are necessary for an online catalog display. Grabbing an RSS feed from the catalog is one line of code from the Unix shell (use “curl” or “wget”) once you have located the source of it.

The second and ultimately even more important part of the equation is that every book search in the Ann Arbor catalog has an RSS feed associated with it. This allows for novel combinations not anticipated by the site designers. I can construct a URL that points to new books on knitting and have that collection returned. It depends on good cataloging, and some tasks (like returning only non-fiction) are harder than you’d like, but generally as long as you’re trying to get a slice of the bookshelves that are already well described it’s easy.

The direction that’s visible in the search area which will hopefully show up in more library catalogs is support for OpenSearch, a format built up around RSS that standardizes how search terms get put into URLs so that RSS formatted results come back. If the Ann Arbor catalog had supported OpenSearch from the start, the tools I built could have been the start of a solution for any similar catalog independent of vendor.

Assembling a page of books

Identifying the appropriate search string and getting RSS formatted results back is only the first step in this process. The task remained to format the results neatly on the page to get the appropriate visual impact of having a screen full of book covers.

I cheated here, and rather than building proper tools that unpacked the HTML inside of the RSS in some clean and elegant way, I resorted to writing a few lines of obscure but powerful Unix regular expressions. The actual code is very simple - it looks for image links in the RSS stream, and deletes everything else in each entry until just the image and a link to the catalog entry remain. The alternative approach, which is on the docket for this code’s rewrite, is to use an HTML library that goes through the “document object model” or DOM in each entry and picks up the right page elements. That would have been 40 or 50 lines of code instead of 4, so it’s best left for the start of something more ambitious.

In some sense the current approach is much too simple, and comments from low vision readers of my Superpatron blog (who view pages with a screen reader and who are interested in what’s new) suggest that keeping a lot more text information hidden away for access will be useful. Given a book image there’s all kinds of catalog information that you could have pop up when you mouse over the cover, and with Yahoo’s new user interface library it isn’t even as hard as you’d think to imagine a nifty catalog interface where you drag books that you want over to the checkout area. But that’s also not 4 lines of code, so it didn’t get done in one evening.

From prototype to service

The final piece of this effort is getting it into the hands of people who might actually want to check out books. The initial tools and prototypes I built on my Mac iBook laptop, and while I was content to get that done for the sake of doing it, it seemed reasonable to want to make it more visible.

The first thing I did once I had something that was worth showing off was to post an image to Flickr and link to it from my blog Superpatron. That had the immediate impact of being something that people could see even without me writing any more lines of code. Getting images of work in progress into the hands of a wider audience is very helpful in gaining feedback, and that particular screen capture has been seen 500+ times to date.

A second part of the process is to secure server space on my personal web site and to automate the build process for updated collection snapshots so that it would be a single command to push out the current set of new issues and not a long series of half-remembered cryptic commands. I’m most of the way there in turning that into a one line process, which could then be added to a Unix “cron” script and done completely automatically.

It would be possible to update the new books list in real time every time someone visited the page, but that seems to be a bad direction to follow and I’m not planning that tack. For one thing, it really doesn’t change more than a few times a week as catalog changes are loaded, and it would be a waste of time and effort and bandwidth to refresh the page from scratch just in case it changed. Serving up the page from a cache is more reliable and takes a lot less overhead.

Book image sources

The images in the Ann Arbor wall of books are linked from Syndetics, the vendor who provides them to the Ann Arbor District Library. In general they are of good quality, and I use them only because the AADL has licensed them already.

A second source for cover art that may be more accessable to someone building this outside of a library context is Amazon. Amazon’s artwork is neatly retrievable by ISBN and is available on reasonable terms as long as you make a link to their store for purchasing the items.

A noticable omission in my efforts is a total inability to get a good new DVD wall in place because of missing cover art. The best source for movie artwork is the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), which is owned by Amazon; so far, however, I have not been able to come up with a shared key between the two systems to help me go directly to the artwork from any catalog data.

Related work

Several organizations have pursued related work, and I’ll share those here.

Dave Pattern from the University of Huddersfield in the UK has pulled out information from recently circulated books from their catalog and used a display that focussed largely on cover art instead of a list of titles. He’s working in an experimental part of their catalog, and there’s a degree of fun in his approach that’s not generally what you’d expect in OPAC design.

Eli Neiburger and John Blyberg have been tremendously helpful at the Ann Arbor District Library as I nudged them into adding the data into their existing RSS feed that made this work so easy. For every line of code I write, John writes at least a hundred, but then again he’s library staff and I’m just a patron.

Eric Klooster at the AADL has written a Quartz Composer application for the Macintosh that takes these same new book feeds and animates a series of book cover images for patrons waiting at the circulation desk at the brand new Pittsfield branch of the library.

Some closing thoughts

Book covers these days are quite attractive, especially popular works - they have to be, to attract the eyes of buyers as they are piled high in bookshops for their brief shelf lives before being relegated to the stacks and then mercilessly remaindered.

By taking advantage of cover art already in library catalogs, and by using RSS and search techniques to zoom in on items of interest, I was able to put together an attractive and useful “wall of books” for the Ann Arbor District Library. The display is purely visual and does not have a word of text, and early user comments suggest that it’s useful but that more work is needed to add back in detail and accessability.

Getting reusable data from the library’s catalog was key to this effort, and it points to a proper direction for development efforts where library software starts to track popular standards efforts whenever possible.

Tags: rss, library, libraries, higheredblogcon, OPAC

Two thousand five saw the rise of the API: an open interface that allows outsiders access to data. Just about every major search company and “web 2.0″ sites offer an API that developers can use to create their own “mashups”. Google’s Map API is one of the easiest and most flexible out there. But don’t be scared. Google Maps does not require you to be a “l33t hax0r” to include a map on your site. With a little data and these five easy steps, you can have a Google map on your site too.

Click here to view the presentation.

Tags: googlemaps, google_maps, library, libraries, higheredblogcon

As a new librarian at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, one of my first efforts was to identify places where technology could assist, replace, or improve existing workflows or projects. The Reference librarians had been, for some time, holding book covers and manually creating displays for different departments on campus of the new books of interest that were recieved by the library. The service is definitely a needed one, and is a great method of outreach to different departments. The problem comes from the enormous time commitment necessary to implement, and the overall complexity of managing all that paper.

Enter: the Digital New Book display. A Wordpress driven solution that leverages a couple of specific plugins and makes distibution automatic, to anyone who wants our new book list, at any level of granularity. This presentation will be a walkthrough of the installation and configuration of a brand new Wordpress blog, complete with plugin installation and setup. After the setup, I’ll explore a couple of ways that this particular combination of technologies can be used at an academic library at a university to reach out to the campus, and talk about what I’d like to see this do on our campus here in Chattanooga.

First, the software needed:

• Webserver with PHP/MySQL support
• Account/database on MySQL server
• Latest version of Wordpress (as of the time of this presentation, 2.02)
• Structured Blogging plugin
• Exec-PHP plugin
• Browser (I highly recommend Firefox)
• FTP program to upload from your local machine to your server (Recommend:
  Filezilla)

The best thing about all of this? Completely free, open source software. Even the server could be running what is commonly referred to as the LAMP web setup, all of which is free and open software. This entire process can be accomplished with nothing more than the willingness to take the time to do it. Many librarians believe that Open Source software is the future of computing, especially in libraries, and I couldn’t agree more.

Step one will be to download and unzip all of the above software bundles. Filezilla can be installed if you don’t have another FTP program, while Wordpress and the plugins can simply be unzipped into a folder on your desktop.

Once everything is unzipped, we’ll need to edit one file inside of Wordpress before we upload it: wp-config-sample.php. It’s located in the root /wordpress folder, and can be opened with any text editor. I’ll use Notepad, since most of you are probably going to be doing this on a Windows based machine, but any basic text editor will do. I’ll suggest not using an actual word processor like Word, because it can sometimes introduce hidden characters that will make Wordpress very unhappy.

SCREENCAST ONE (800×600)

So after you’ve edited your config file to include the appropriate information, it’s time to upload Wordpress to your server. The username, password, and database name are self explanitory, but the Table Prefix may not be. The Table Prefix is literally that: a prefix that is used inside the database in order to set your blog apart from other things inside the databasee. You can have multiple Wordpress blogs all within the same database by using different prefixes for each.

The name of the folder you put it in doesn’t matter, so if you want the address of your new blog to be http://www.library.example.edu/newbooks/, then you just need to create your /newbooks folder in the appropriate place, and put the files there. For my purposes, I’ll use the above example and upload all of the files. After the files have been uploaded, to install the software (which creates the appropriate tables and everything for you), you visit the /wp-admin/install.php file in your browser of choice, and follow the prompts.

SCREENCAST TWO: UPLOAD AND INSTALLATION (800×600)

And just that fast, you have a working blog!

Now for the installation of the plugins. Using Filezilla once more, we’ll upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder, and activate each of them. After activation, let’s look around the interface of Wordpress a bit, and get our bearings.

SCREENCAST THREE: PLUGIN ACTIVATION AND ADMIN TOUR (800×600)

Since we are going to use this blog for a specific purpose, there are a number of things that need to be customized, chief among them the categories structure. We’re going to use the categories as a shorthand way of identifying the areas and departments at the university that might be interested in each book that we enter. The bonus of using a blog system to do this is that by setting up our categories first, we can customize our RSS feeds and generate customized content for different departments by leveraging the categories. Here at UTC, we’ve decided to use the actual structure of the university deparments as our categories. Here’s a brief look at how to add categories, with a side trip on how to manipulate them after the fact if needed.

SCREENCAST FOUR: CATEGORIES, ADDING AND EDITTING (800×600)

Ok, so we’ve got a working blog, our categories set up, and our plugins installed and activated. Let’s take a look at the plugins and what they do for us.

Structured Blogging is a plugin that should warm the heart of any librarian…its sole purpose in life is to create meaningful metadata for entries. Since we are concerned about information relating to books, the “Review” function of the plugin is invaluable. It adds additional options to the “write” dialogue in Wordpress, and structures (hence the name) the data such that it makes it very easy for anyone to use, as well as makes the data itself more valuable to other systems. From my perspective the user-experience is the reason I find it valuable, and the metadata aspects are simply icing on the cake. Let’s see what it looks like, and do an entry for our first book.

SCREENCAST FIVE: STRUCTURED BLOGGING AND HOW TO ENTER A BOOK (800×600)

In entering a book, it is very easy to use Amazon to provide cover images, although any major online store could be used. It is my belief that said use qualifies under the Fair Use provisions of the US Copyright Law, however, including images is completely optional. If you felt more comfortable legally, you could certainly scan the book covers and host the images on your own servers.

If your PHP server is set up with the standard set of options, the “Lookup” function of Structured Blogging will automatically pull a cover image, ISBN, and other information from the Amazon database. For the more advance users, the PHP server must have the allow_url_fopen option turned on. Most server setups have this set by default, but some server administrators have this option off for security reasons.

SCREENCAST SIX: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER (800×600)

So once we have everything in place, we have an outreach engine on our hands. We can provide New Book selections via webpage or RSS at whatever level we desire, from all Fiction books to just books about Women’s Studies. We can leverage RSS to “push” these new books out to our patrons, and give them choices in what they want to see.

We can build an RSS feed group of links, and provide a built in method of getting the feeds people want directly from the sidebar of the blog, or we can simply provide people with the correct URL for the RSS feed of their choice upon request. Once we get more familiar with PHP, you can utilize the combination of Links and Pages to provide lists of feeds (or other resources).

SCREENCAST SEVEN: Exec-php and pages (800×600)

So we have now seen multiple ways of utilizing a Wordpress blog as an outreach tool, specifically one configured as a “new book” generator. This can function as both a standard web-based resource (with the advantage of being flexible enough to display the books at any level of organization you choose) and as an RSS generator, pushing the information to your patrons (again at any level of organization). The ability to use PHP within Wordpress Pages gives you the ability to leverage the Links functionality in order to create sets of resources for your patrons, and I didn’t even get to mention the benefits that can arise from having the ability for patrons to openly comment on the books you present. I believe this flexibility will serve nearly any library well, for low or no cost, and with the ability to distribute the work involved. There may come a time when this level of control and flexibility is available directly from an OPAC, but until then this system will work wonders for outreach.

Tags: blogging, structured_blogging, library, libraries, higheredblogcon

Open Access for Teachers
Dorothea Salo
George Mason University

Web 2.0 and the Small College Library: How to take over the World
David Eubanks
Coker College

Many of the current issues facing libraries revolve around the central theme of technology. Technology affects what we do, how we do things, and what our users expect from us as gateways to information. Two labels that arise in this discussion are Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. Though the exact definition of these two concepts are still being discussed, one thing is clear: these concepts will forever change what libraries can do for their users. The basic concept of Library 2.0 involves the idea that content/information can not only be read, but rewritten and changed, personalized and modified, by anyone. The applications for this read/write web involve many different kinds of social networking tools, many of them open source and freely available. Open source and open access, of ideas, programs, and information has created many heated debates in academia over the nature of copyright, fair use, and who has the right to do what.

Dorothea Salo, Digital Repository Services Librarian at George Mason University, spends her time working on technology development, maintenance, policy, metadata, and outreach for the Mason Archival Repository Service. She will be discussing how open access has enhanced the distance learning experience, how the backlash from the Association of American Publishers is threatening this new paradigm, and what individual teachers can do to protect open access for education.

Paul Miller works at Talis researching the possibilities of what modern library services could be now and in the future. He will be presenting on Library 2.0 and what it means for libraries. More specifically, Paul will be discussing the creation of a “platform” that would include many capabilities, be able to port from one upgrade to another, and have the ability to integrate into many existing library systems.

David Eubanks, currently the Director of Planning, Assessment, and Information Services, has been working in higher education at Coker College since 1991. David takes a different approach to technology on small colleges and presents different ways that librarians can use their knowledge of information structure and technology to help build applications that raise the profile of their library on their campuses and in the eyes of their college administration.

Here are links to the topics from earlier this week:

April 10: Blogging In Libraries
April 11: Podcasting in Libraries
April 12: Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies

Tags: library, libraries, higheredblogcon

In illustrating the potential for Library 2.0, commentators tend to point to the exemplary work of a small number of individuals; John Blyberg, Ed Vielmetti, Casey Bisson, Dave Pattern, to name but four. Their work is undeniably impressive, and has done much to illustrate possibilities for working with and extending the current generation of library systems.

However, much that they do requires the full weight of their hard-won knowledge of the internal workings of their particular library system, and of their unique local situation. Replicating their achievements elsewhere is often far harder than it should be – through no fault of theirs – and it remains difficult for the library sector as a whole to realise the potential of transforming their services.

In a recent white paper, Library 2.0: the challenge of disruptive innovation, we explored some of the ways by which Library 2.0’s promise will be realised in mainstream libraries as well as at the leading edge. We suggested that a common Platform of data and of ‘functions’ would allow both libraries and third parties to construct a new generation of applications, in which library services might appear alongside those from other libraries, or relevant organisations beyond the library sector.

This common platform lowers barriers to participation, and removes much of the need to know – or care – about which library system is being queried, or how it needs a search to be formulated. The platform deals with this complexity, and its open nature ensures that the community benefiting most from its capabilities has the interest and ability to maintain and extend the information at its heart.

Working with vendors, libraries and others to build, maintain and deploy such a technology platform is only part of the solution. Equally important is nurturing the expertise that already exists in the community, encouraging current and future developers to share their ideas and experiences, and to learn from one another. Through the TDN we offer a space in which this community can grow and share innovation.

Through the opportunity offered by HigherEd BlogCon, we would welcome the opportunity to explore ways in which a community space such as the TDN might best be shaped to meet the needs of the whole community, regardless of the library system with which they currently work.

Tags: library2.0, library, libraries, higheredblogcon, OPAC

The movement for open access to the scholarly and research literature emerged as a response to the enormous, unsustainable increases in the price of journals and journal bundles for academic libraries. When the internet made possible the dissemination of information for near-zero marginal cost (over the cost to package the information in the first place), both researchers and librarians began questioning the necessity of cost barriers to access.

Educators who are not themselves researchers or librarians have not been active in the open-access movement or the debates surrounding it as yet. Third-world access to research, higher impact factors, faster research dissemination, relieving overstrained library budgets while restoring selection decisions to librarians—all these concern researchers and the research libraries they use. Institutions whose primary focus is teaching can expect little change one way or the other.

Or can they?

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Read this presentation (PDF).

Tags: Tags:, Library, 2.0, open_access, OA, openaccess, library, libraries, higheredblogcon

-1- Introduction

I’m an accidental librarian. I say this by way of a disclaimer in case you might otherwise misjudge my credentials. In fact, I started out teaching math and computer science at Coker College in 1991 and, after a series of fortunate events, ended up as administrator of a newly minted “Information Services,” (IS) combining all the great minds on campus: information technology (IT), institutional research (IR), and the library. This chimera (you might reference Mary Shelley if you’re less charitable) was to be housed in a new building designed for the purpose, which is a tale for another time.

IS turns out to be an interesting mix of services and commensurate personalities. For one thing, no one ever calls the help desk to say:

“Sandy, I just downloaded six videos off of Google, and I’ve never seen the network this fast! You guys in IT are doing a great job!”

No, IT is all about handling the complaints you had yesterday and today and, if you have a moment, trying to figure out how to get fewer tomorrow. They’re kind of like the Marine Corps without the buzz cuts.

Librarians, on the surface, are normal people. I soon discovered though, that like Clark Kent, they have a few hidden surprises. My first clue was when the person who keeps the financial records straight in the library told me that the business office hated her. Why? Because she was catching all their mistakes—a few cents’ discrepancy on the phone bill would not by any means be left unresolved. Librarians are like the Air Force without the bombs.

The Institutional Research component was much smaller. In order to create a military “taking over the world” metaphor, I’ll have to stretch. In our case, IR was like the unknown border guard who could have prevented the war if he hadn’t been scribbling equations on the wall instead of watching what was going on.

It’s because of IR, you see, that the whole organization got thrown into the middle of organizing the College’s reaccreditation. And hence the long march to Mordor began, with the Library and IT in the baggage train.

-2- Confronting the Enemy

If you’ve never put together an accreditation report, I congratulate you on your good fortune. I went to the conferences and to the Orientation, which scared the life out of me, as I’m sure it was designed to. One thing became clear—we needed to be able to organize information. LOTS of it.

Here’s a picture of my whiteboard as we approached Mt. Doom.

The accreditation compliance certification, or as my daughter came to call it, the Big Stupid Report (BSR) needed to reference all kinds of documents: meeting minutes, the college charter, plans, syllabi, catalogs, resumes, and a maintenance log for the kitchen sink.

Document management systems are expensive. Worse, the ones I saw were overly complicated. I imagined trying to explain to the Physical Education department how to archive their meeting minutes and broke out into a cold sweat.

My epiphany came as I was signing a budget form:

“Hey! If the librarians are so good at keeping financial records straight, maybe they would be useful for keeping track of a large disparate collection of documents!”

I mulled this idea over while wandering through the stacks, and concluded that it might just work. Between IT and the library, we could build our own institutional repository. The “not costing much” angle was certainly attractive. I had seen money once in a budget meeting (cruelly called ‘zero-based budgeting’), but it had been quickly whisked away by our Vice President for Business Operations.

-3- First Actions

To get things started, we designed a logo. So was born SQUID: Strategic QUality Improvement Documentation. I couldn’t find a good squid on Google, though, so the logo is an octopus.

Between the library and IT we figured out a simple design. It’s just a rule of the universe that people do stupid things, so if you minimize the number of things they can do you’ll have less work. A repository has to be good at doing CRUD. CRUD being “Create”, “Read”, “Update”, and “Delete.”

The expertise of the librarians was essential to create a good design. There’s this thing called “meta-data”, which catalogers know all about. Any document that you plan on locating later should have some bits of information stored along with it:

• What is it? (e.g. electronic document, hyperlink)
• What’s its title?
• Who created it?
• When was it created/updated?
• Who can access it?
• What group does it belong to? (e.g. Earthquake Prevention Committee)
• What type of document is it? (e.g. Minutes, Plans, Syllabus)
• What academic year does it belong to?
• How would you describe it, including keywords?
• Has it been deleted? (I sneakily don’t really delete documents, just hide them. Why? Refer to the rule of the universe cited above.)

Images (jpg)

SQUID: Enter a document
SQUID: Search for a document
SQUID: Search results

We built the archival cephalopod in the summer of 2001, and the librarians then helped populate SQUID with extant documents. The paper documents were a mess. The Holy Box of Curriculum Committee Minutes had been passed from chair to chair for years, but had somehow become misplaced just when we needed it most. In another case, the College charter was eventually found, but didn’t say what we thought it did.

The system, built on Linux with Perl and an Access database, worked wonderfully. We had to scan a lot of documents that were not in electronic format. The Big Stupid Report was itself a mass of web pages, so we were able to dynamically generate links between document references and the SQUID documents. It was very cool. By the time the report went out, we had thousands of electronic documents in SQUID, and hence available to the off-site reviewers of the Big Stupid Report.

Images (jpg)

Detail from the report showing a link to a SQUID document
Detail showing dynamically-created document references

Librarians’ expertise was critical in avoiding really bad design choices. For example, they provided the idea that each document ought to have a simple identification, like a call number. When I went to the conferences I saw some attempts to use (shudder) the name of the electronic file as its identification. The users of this method seemed to be having trouble keeping their links working, and no wonder. Would you rather code a reference to “Bd of trustee mnts on 3/14.doc” or to “1234.doc”?

Our college now has a new cultural element. Most civilized staff and faculty now use SQUID routinely to keep track of their important documents. In fact, the word has become a verb:
squid, (v/t) The act of archiving a document. Ralph, have you squidded the report yet?

More subtle perhaps, is a shift in the perception of the role of the library in college affairs. The library continues to be essential for cleaning up lousy data in SQUID. People still do stupid things, and other people still have to find them and fix them.

-4- The Umpires Write Back

Inevitably, there were follow-up reports. The Big Stupid Report had struck deep into the gall bladder of the enemy, but the war wasn’t over yet. No creature born of bureaucracy retreats without leaving a litter of reportlets in its wake. And so we found ourselves responding to a number of items that needed clarification. The most significant was a question about the organization of our Institutional Effectiveness materials.

In case you don’t know what Institutional Effectiveness (IE) is, let me congratulate you on your good fortune. IE is a management process that:

1. identifies goals,
2. assesses whether they are being achieved, and
3. takes action accordingly.

This is all very reasonable. The problems begin when you try to get every unit leader at the institution to actually document that his or her unit is doing the 1-2-3 hokey-pokey. I stupidly assumed that we had already solved this problem now that we had SQUID. My reasoning went like this (feel free to laugh):

1. We have a system that allows people to organize their reports, and
2. They will use it.

Don’t get me wrong—they were perfectly willing to do Institutional Effectiveness reporting it, and some even saw a lot of value in it. But it was just too much work and there were too many degrees of freedom.

The result of that first attempt to collect this information was a horrid miss-mash of formats, like Frankenstein’s tax return. Reading through them was an invitation to a migraine. What we needed was a simple interface to enter the data instead of expecting to get perfectly-formatted documents to SQUID.

-5- RIA Grande

It was back to the drawing board for IS, this time with the experience of building SQUID behind us. This job was harder, though. The goal was still to get Institutional Effectiveness CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) going, but the meta-data was more complex. The President had to be linked to the Vice-Presidents, who had to be linked to their underlings, and so on. Navigating this hierarchy with “click and refresh” web pages would not be a pleasant experience.

So we took the leap into Rich Internet Applications, a component of what’s being billed now as Web 2.0. We used Macromedia Flash to build the interface and leveraged the data we already had in SQUID to create a tree-like navigation system for IE CRUD. Transactions are nearly instantaneous on the local network, and there are no web page refreshes to slow things down.

Images (jpg)

IE CRUD Navigation Panel
Editing an Objective

This solves the formatting problem—everyone is forced to use the same one. Moreover, we can ‘roll over’ goals and objectives from one year to the next, minimizing the busy work in setting up annual plans.The library still provides operational assistance in keep the IE CRUD running, for example, when the president asked me to get the strategic plan goals and objectives entered (hundreds of them), I thought of a cataloger who was looking for a project. In a broader perspective, I depend on them to help me keep the meta-data straight and organized. It’s just another catalog, after all.

-6- Mopping up

The combination of information technology and library skills is a good one, if the cultural divide can be navigated. We’ve benefited from this union (we actually had a ‘wedding’ ceremony with champagne and everything) with some useful progeny, which have raised the visibility of the whole organization. The impact on the culture and operations of the College are significant.

When I talk to other library directors, I often hear that they have an almost adversarial relationship to IT. One director was trying to do assessment, but was unable to obtain access to database information he needed to proceed. That’s unfortunate, because the library has good data to share too. We recently compared our Faculty Assessment of Core Skills to the number of items a student circulated.

Image (jpg)
Writing Skills versus Circulation Activity

I assume that librarians have long been a treasure waiting to be discovered by some administrator with a project. The difference now may be the capabilities of the World Wide Web when tied to databases. People with good organizational skills and a clue about meta-data are to be valued. The slick interfaces that Web 2.0 AJAX-type technology makes possible add greatly to the appeal. One thing is for sure: with institutional repositories, student portfolio systems, and institutional effectiveness systems, colleges and universities need to be prepared to organize a LOT of information.

It’s not possible or desirable for every IT unit and library to engage in holy matrimony, but here are some other things you can do:

• Create a liaison with IT (a person, not an event),
• Look out for projects like accreditation, where librarians can have an immediate beneficial impact,
• Nominate or appoint librarians who have an awareness of these opportunities to committees to sell the message,
• Try to get a seat at the table when the discussions of core informational systems take place—things like an institutional repository. Even if the institution outsources the project, it will still need to be customized by people who know the place.
• Libraries have a great professional product to offer—one that can be of use to a whole institution. Of course, once the institution’s leaders learn the value of library expertise, you may find yourself in charge of an accreditation or two. But taking over the world isn’t supposed to be easy, is it?

Resources: For more information about the IE CRUD, download the manual at http://www.coker.edu/assessment. The whole project will soon be released as open-source code. If you’re interested, check my blog http://highered.blogspot.com for updates.

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Tags: Library 2.0, library, libraries, higheredblogcon

Tags: higheredblogcon, library, libraries, institutional_repositories, IR

An Online Research Toolkit - Exploring Web 2.0 for Library Research
Rebecca Hedreen
Southern Connecticut State University

Using RSS to Increase User Awareness of E-resources in Academic Libraries
Jay Bhatt
Drexel University

Web 2.0 was a big buzzword this year and librarians certainly were listening to the buzz. One big idea espoused by Web 2.0 proponents is the idea of the Web as platform, and the notion that Web applications will take the place of desktop software. This can be seen in the increasing availability of applications that allow individuals to organize their research, write, and develop presentations online. In Web 2.0, the user experience online should be seamless, and content portability is a big part of that. RSS achieves this by allowing people to syndicate content onto any Web page. Social software is also a big part of Web 2.0. Social software can be used by institutions to disseminate information, educate students and build a sense of community online. Essentially, proponents of Web 2.0 envision a seamless, transparent, user-centered, interactive online universe.

The three librarians presenting today have all harnessed Web 2.0 technologies in order to provide better services to their patrons. Chad Boeninger is the Business Librarian at Ohio University. In order to better communicate with patrons, Chad has developed a Business Blog, a Biz Wiki, and has made himself available for reference questions via instant messaging. Subject librarians will learn a great deal from Chad’s experiences using social software to serve his patrons.

Jay Bhatt is the Information Services Librarian for Engineering at Drexel University. Jay will be discussing how librarians can make use of RSS to help their patrons keep up with developments in their field and how he has used the Engineering Resources Blog to disseminate information and useful resources to engineering students at Drexel.

Rebecca Hedreen is the Distance Education Librarian at Southern Connecticut State University and is the author of Frequently Asked Questions, a blog that highlights valuable online resources. In the course of her work to assist distance learners, Rebecca has come across many Web 2.0 applications that are useful for conducting online research and she describes them in her presentation on building an Online Research Toolkit.

Here are links to the topics from earlier this week:

April 10: Blogging In Libraries
April 11: Podcasting in Libraries

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Tags: Web 2.0, social software, RSS, library, libraries, higheredblogcon

Tags: Web, 2.0, social, software, RSS, library, libraries, higheredblogcon

Have you ever needed the website you found last week, except that you’re out of your office and the website is bookmarked on your desk computer? Have you wanted to use an article you found last semester, except that sorting through the piles of photocopies is more difficult than redoing the search and finding something similar? Do you need to write up a paper or presentation, but the computer you have available doesn’t have the same office applications that you have at work? Can you imagine doing everything you need for academic, library research and paper writing on any computer from anywhere with an Internet connection, without worrying about downloads and applications?

You can do most of that today. Many Web 2.0 applications are designed to allow people to use and manipulate information–whether that is by simple web publishing or forming networks of people with similar interests, to give two examples. Another hallmark is mobility, being able to do complex tasks with lightweight applications by taking advantage of web server processing. The Online Research Toolkit is a site for brief reviews of Web 2.0 applications and how they can be used for library research. This presentation will give the background to the toolkit, highlight some of the tools available right now, and speculate on what the future will bring for online research tools.

Visit Rebecca’s full presentation here.

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Tags: RSS, library, libraries, higheredblogcon