userslib.com

Our web team and I recently did a survey to better understand our University of Michigan library patrons – their web use, their library use, and their perceptions of the library. It was mostly successful in that now we have more information about our users than we did before. As with all usability/survey studies, the results merely provide a window into understanding our users. The things we learned in this survey can now be used in conjunction with other studies and log analysis to form a more complete picture. This is just a preliminary report… A full analysis will be put online at some point in the near future. We also plan to do a version of this survey annually – so we will also be assessing the survey itself to determine what worked or didn’t.

[Library Web Survey Fall 2007 Results & Preliminary Analysis]

update: link updated

Paul Courant, economics professor, former provost, and currently the University Librarian at the University of Michigan has just started a new blog Au Courant. His first post is about the UM’s relationship with Google and addresses some of the project’s recent criticisms. Welcome Paul!

All of Amazon’s Search Inside!™ books now show stats about the content of the book: the book’s 100 most frequently used words, number of words, words per sentence, “readability” (difficulty), etc.

find stats by hovering over the cover of a book that has “Search Inside!™” and choose “Concordance” or “Text Stats” | link to example

[via information aesthetics]

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.”