userslib.com

Who needs prehistoric attractions like pheromones when you can smell like an old book?

A new perfume called “In The Library” is described as:

English Novel taken from a Signed First Edition of one of my very favorite novels, Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish

[found via BB-blog]

Here you go, just in time for Black Friday - lots of gift ideas for you or the librarian in your life.

Library inspired book plates	kateblack’s Reading is Sexy badge
Library Card Journals (via Indie Fixx)	BiblioGifts (many lovely products)
AliciaBock’s “the Library”	Jillian Ditner’s “Out of Circulation” print series
Threadless T-shirt “November Was a Good Month”	Library Date Due Stamp T-Shirt
Elfrida’s Library Catalog print	Sarahkat’s Specs Moleskine Notebook

And even more by me!

Here’s a cool video of paper prototyping in action (minus the tedious bits). The device being tested is a PDA for meeting new people.

{ found via www.guuui.com }

The University of Michigan’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Society recently announced the winners of their Bad Designs on Campus Contest.

Since these folks are from the engineering department it’s no surprise that many of the submissions were for bad design on North Campus - specifically the Duderstadt Center and Pierpont Commons. I worked in the Duderstadt Center for 4 years so I can personally attest to how frustrating some of the entries really are. I don’t think I ever went to the library stacks area without having to help someone figure out how to move the compact shelving or made it to the bathroom without having the external doors open unnecessarily.

{ link to contest | found via Field Guide }

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]

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:

The podcast of last spring’s SXSW panel “The Future of the Book: Dead or Alive?” is now available online.

How will information survive? Will digital archiving keep our information and memories intact, or will we lose more bits than we save? What do books mean in the digital age? Will old time publishing survive? Who are the real bookmakers today? What does it mean today that anyone can be their own publisher?

Moderator: Peter Merholz President/Co-Founder, Adaptive Path
Brewster Kahle Internet Archive
Terri Ducay Vice President Design, Cheskin
Eileen Gittins CEO, Blurb
Peter Merholz President/Co-Founder, Adaptive Path

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?