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The UM Hatcher Graduate Library recently converted a staff space into an exhibit & class room space to take advantage of the room’s prime real estate. This is now one of the few public spaces in the building that has super comfortable chairs, lots of windows and light, and quite!

The first exhibit is about former U Michigan Coach Bo Schemblecher. Congrats to the planning committee because it looks great. I was asked to take some photos of the exhibit and they’re now available on flickr:

I am a complete RSS addict. I’ve gotten to the point where if I happen to find a new website that has good, regularly updated content but no RSS feed, I don’t even bother bookmarking it. If I can’t subscribe, I know I probably won’t be back.

RSS feeds can be extremely useful to libraries - for one, they can deliver library-created content to the patrons (library news and events blogs, subject research blogs, etc.). But RSS can also be fantastic way to help your faculty and researchers keep up-to-date in their area AND promote all the databases and indices that the library subscribes to. Lately I’ve been seeing lots of RSS listings, directories, and aggregators popping up all over the place.

Here are a few creative uses for RSS in the library:

• News from ticTOCs - Table of Contents (TOCs) of academic journals. These are feeds created by publishers to promote their publications, so unfortunately they don’t include direct links to full-text for those who have access via their library. (found via A Feed is Born)
• College and University Feed Directory - Lists of feeds from different academic institutions and arranged by topic (Events, Sports, Libraries, etc.). (found via RSS4LIB)
• University of Saskatchewan’s Electronic Journals with RSS Feeds - Example of a library who has a separate listing of electronic journals that specifically offer RSS. And whenever RSS is available, it’s linked to from the journal’s about page AND shows the most current feeds from that journal!
• Georgia State University Library’s Library News and Subject Blogs directory - lists library sponsored blogs but also aggregates them all on the page, offers an RSS feed for individual blogs or everything, and lets you search all blogs.
• Bentley Library’s guide to Search Alerts and RSS Feeds - lists which databases allow RSS based on search criteria that you can set. I do this with Scopus and found it really useful - every week or so I get a short list of articles pertaining to research about libraries and usability.
• RSS aggregators, like LibWorm - gather blogs and resources on specific topics and allow searching or subscribing to the whole collection via RSS.

This last example is one I think has great potential… I looked to see if I could find libraries who have made their own subject specific aggregators but couldn’t find any. I really think there is a market for this type of service from the library. If you were a researcher wouldn’t you be interested in the delivery of content from selected blogs, journals, and databases right to your feed reader with one click?

Congrats to the folks at the University of Michigan Hatcher Graduate Library for putting together an awesome photo set of librarians reading their favorite banned books. I helped a little with this project and not only was it fun to do, it’s great seeing photos of all these people I don’t really get to see much (even though I work in the same building).

Check it out: Celebrate Banned Books Week Flickr set

Even our University Librarian Paul Courant participated!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

From the news item:

Subversive. Objectionable. Offensive. Inappropriate. These are just a few of the terms used to describe many of the books that are challenged by society every year.

To participate in national Banned Books Week (Sept 29 - Oct 6, 2007), we invited our staff to highlight some of their favorite banned books in our library collections. Now these highlighted books and the wonderful people who select, acquire, organize, preserve and manage our collections are featured in Flickr, a photo-sharing web site!

The freedom to make your own decisions about what you want to read, and to have access to these items, are rights that libraries fully support. The University of Michigan’s library collection reflects these principles in its diversity. We invite you to get acquainted with our staff and our collections through our Celebrate Banned Books Week Flickr photo set.

For more information on intellectual freedom, censorship, and to view some banned book lists, see:

• Banned Books Week
• 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books
• OCLC Banned Book List
• ACLU FreedomWire

Over at the Information Wants To Be Free blog, Meredith Farkas has compiled the results from her 2nd survey about librarians and their blogging habits.

She’ll be releasing it in chunks, the first being the results of the demographic section:
[link]

Here are the bits I found most interesting:
Of those who responded to the survey…

• The largest demographic group for age is 31-40
• The largest demographic group for job type is reference
• The largest demographic group for type of institution is large academic libraries (with large public libraries a close second)
• The largest demographic group for gender is women, but according to Meredith
  

  Women are definitely better represented in the blogopshere than they were last time, but men still are more likely to blog in proportion to their representation in the general population of librarians.

Congrats to SPO for their release of the Ithaka report (”University Publishing in a Digital Age”).

It uses CommentPress from the Institute for the Future of the Book - so readers can comment on each page and each paragraph.

I was excited when CommentPress was released and thrilled to see it being used by our friends at SPO.

Google just released a new feature for Google Maps that lets you easily add a map to your blog or website.

Below I’ve embedded the awesome map that David Fulmer made of all of the University of Michigan Libraries (it also uses images of the different libraries via flickr). Every library website’s contact page should use this!

View Larger Map

Library student extraordinaire Alexis Zirpoli made a great flickr set to show what books have to go through before they make it to the shelves.

I’d love to see this in other departments and other libraries.

Flickr set: Pre-Shelf Life of Library Materials

“Library materials waiting their turn to be sorted, unpacked, and processed.”

Sorry for the delay - here are some of my notes from last Tuesday’s MLibrary2.0 Gaming session.

Eli Neiburger: Gaming in the Library?

Eli is from the Ann Arbor District Library and you can find his presentation here.

Eli did an excellent job of describing and putting gamers in context. I think it’s an interesting area that is often overlooked when we think about what activities our patrons (and future patrons) are interested in and how we might use those interests to promote the library.

“Email is how you talk to old people” - AADL gamer

According the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the second most popular activity of those polled (ages 12-17) was gaming at 81%. [I also just came across this Trendspotting blog entry: 1 out of 4 online users are online game players: facts you should know so I think its quite clear that this is an area we ought to pay more attention to.]

• Gamers are very accustomed to dealing with complex interfaces like those used in online role playing games like World of Warcraft. They expect ubiquity. They expect everything to do everything - from water fountains to websites and wifi.
• Content from peers has a higher value than anything else. “Authority” has spent their authoritative capital.
• There are games that some faculty are starting to take an interest in as tools for learning. For example, SimCity and Civilization can be used to teach history, economics, city planning, etc.
• In a study by OCLC: College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, Libraries were rated more trustworthy and accurate than search engines but search engines were rated much higher than Libraries as being more convienient, easy to use, cost effective, reliable and fast. [oh my!]
• Establishing the Library as Third Place. Eric Frierson goes into some detail on this as well as the event in general.
• The Ann Arbor District Library has a blog on it’s front page to share info from the Director, about events, programs, and the collection. Eli said one of the great things about this is that it acts as a sort of focus group because they can get immediate feedback about what’s going on via patron comments.

Jane Blumenthol - Second Life

Jane is the Director of the University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries where they are working on extensive plans to use Second Life in conjunction with the Medical School. They are planning a whole campus for medical school related events. There will be 3-D models that can be explored and simulations of patient consultations so med school students will have an additional way to practice their bedside mannor.

Her presentation isn’t available online yet, but see her del.icio.us account for many Second Life related links.

Lisa Hinchliffe

Lisa Head of the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Library and spoke about Library 2.0 initiatives. I found this to be an especially inspirational talk because she talked about the technology and being brave, passionate, decisive (just do it!), willing to change your mind, attaining a state of continuous evolution, funding the future, and saying “yes.”
UIUL developed a browser search bar for their catalog, website, and google. They were the first to develop a Facebook app for searching their opac, and they feed their twitter and various blogs into the library’s home page. They circulate games and hold tournaments.

Lisa also gave some great advice for when dealing with innovation: be careful not to put too much importance measuring success. It doesn’t operate like it might with circ & reference stats. Sometimes just trying something new is successful.

This morning was the Gaming & Social Networking, A New Direction for Libraries session, a presentation that was part of the MLibrary 2.0 event series.

The speakers were Eli Neiburger from the Ann Arbor District Library, Jane Blumenthal the Director of Health Sciences Libraries here at UM, and Lisa Hinchliffe, Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brian Mathews (Information Services Librarian & Distance Learning Services Coordinator, The Georgia Institute of Technology & the Ubiquitous Librarian Blog) was also supposed to speak but couldn’t make it due to flight cancelations.

All the presentations were excellent and I’ll write more about them soon.

For now, I’ve just uploaded some pics of Librarians in action - trying out a few gaming options offered at the AADL. Photos for this event and other MLibrary 2.0 events can be found on the Flickr MLibrary2.0 group page.

Just released yesterday, The Internet Archive’s Open Library project now has an extensive wiki-ish book site. Their goal is for users (anyone) to populate it with every book. Some books already have some full-text and some link to the scanned images via their old pageturner. I think this will be interesting to follow since most of the content is user-generated and I’m wondering how well this will take off. Lots of people already use LibraryThing, but thats more about making your own collection - so there’s (maybe) more incentive to tag and comment. The Open Library is about making one big collection.
Link To Open Library Beta