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Hakia, now with librarian vetted content

Suzanne — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:54:22 +0000

Hakia is a health related semantic search engine that also verifies results and groups the types of resources (credible results, web, user generated, images, etc).

Hakia recently announced that they will now be soliciting help from librarians to make recommendations for credible web sites.
From hakia’s h CLUB page:

hakia is the first search engine to integrate librarians’ collective knowledge of credible Web sites into search results to guide searchers.

As the first commenter on the Mashable blog post points out, there is no evidence that they are paying for the librarian contributions. The commenter finds this “very condescending” because Librarians should be paid for their contributions.

Is hakia using savvy crowd sourcing methods or are they taking advantage of information professionals who are eager to help?

[BLT] Blog for Library Technology

Suzanne — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:53:00 +0000

Announcement from my department:

“[BLT] Blog for Library Technology” — http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/blt/ — is the new Library Information Technology blog from the University of Michigan Library. We’ll talk about technological innovations we’re developing in the U-M library. Want to learn about developments in the Google book-scanning project (MBooks) at U-M? Find out more about MTagger? Keep up with our MLibrary Labs experimental and test tools? This is the place to do it. And, of course, we welcome your comments on any and all of it.

Powerhouse Museum joins the Commons on Flickr

Suzanne — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:46:39 +0000

The Powerhouse Museum in Australia has just joined the Library of Congress to be the second member of the Commons on Flickr.

And BTW – Seb Chan’s Powerhouse blog Fresh + New(er) is one of my favorites and a fantastic source for interesting discussions about digital media, access systems, interface design, tagging and web2.0. I also love their opac/online collections site (really, it’s super cool, go play with it).

More info here:

2008 Horizon Report

Suzanne — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:35:21 +0000

I just finally got around to reading the Horizon Report.

In true 2.0 “practice what you preach” fashion – it’s available in a variety of formats!

What people are doing online

Suzanne — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:17:20 +0000

I just found this fantastic information graphic from Business Week that demonstrates what people are doing online and is broken down by age range. I particularly like the categories used: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, Inactives.

Looking at the Youth (18-21) column, social networking is the top activity for this group with 70% participating. I think this definitely supports the argument for “being where our patrons are.” At the very least, that we should be aware of where they are and think about how it informs their use of the web.

As an obsessive RSS & Delicious user, I find it somewhat difficult to believe that there’s relatively little activity going on in the “Collectors” category. Maybe these technologies just fit a niche need (the need to share links, need to have a central bookmark collection, the need to read way too many blogs).

Link to source of graphic | found via Smashing Magazine

MLibrary2.0 Gaming & Social Networking, A New Direction for Libraries (notes)

Suzanne — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 01:22:14 +0000

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.

MLibrary 2.0 Podcasts

Suzanne — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:47:05 +0000

I’ve just updated the MLibrary 2.0 website to include a link to a few podcasts (thanks to Dave!) from the “MLibrary 2.0: The Future is Now” event we had back in June. There are podcasts of the session introduction from our Associate University Librarian Brenda Johnson and presentations from Kristen Antelman from NCSU and Peter Morville. Here’s a link to the feed.

Facebook Users Prefer In-Person Librarian Interactions

Suzanne — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:43:53 +0000

As a result of this post, Eric Frierson, Donna Hayward and I bought a poll question on facebook to find out how facebook users prefer to contact their librarians.

Here’s how the poll question appeared in the News Feed of selected Facebook users in the Michigan network:

See the results below

The first thing that stands out is that only 1 out of 200 said they’d prefer to get research help from a librarian on facebook. I don’t suppose this is too surprising because I don’t think people quite yet consider social networking a research tool. I hope this isn’t disconcerting to librarians on facebook because I think there’s still potential here… What I do find really encouraging is that only 38 out of 200 said they weren’t at all interested in contacting a librarian – that’s pretty good! And it looks like in-person interactions are still tops. On a side note, I think it’s really unfortunate that the oldest age range option for the survey is 35-49. So there’s no one over 49 on facebook!?

Library Users Poll

Suzanne — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:07:39 +0000

I (with help from some others) am planning on polling University of Michigan Library users about what library resources they use, what web 2.0 resources they use (and how often), and their perception of the library’s online resources. Does anyone have any suggestions for questions they think would be interesting to include?

Poll of most hated internet words

Suzanne — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 01:03:21 +0000

A recent British Poll asked internet users about their most hated web terms. Unfortunately, the actual survey report is no where to be found but according to the Communication Overtones blog, the top 10 hated words are (in no order): Folksonomy, Blogosphere, Blog, Netiquette, Blook, Webinar, Vlog, Social Networking, Cookie, and Wiki.

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

Yahoo Article