But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

via How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write – WSJ.com.

I understand that the printing press revolutionized the way people thought and learned and I’m as tech-enamored as anyone. However, I just can’t help but think that some capacity for deep reflection and concentration is getting lost? Sorry if I sound like the Annoyed Librarian; am I just crazy?

As we plan to vacate our building, we were hoping to find each of the liaison librarians an office in the departments they work with. However, space is so tight on our campus that we were only able to achieve this goal with one librarian.

This post at ACRLog provides insight from librarians around the country who have tried holding office hours in their departments and I will be sending around this post because we are thinking about doing this as a compromise solution. http://acrlog.org/2008/05/31/office-hours/ According to the post and the comments, the librarians in question actually had very few official appointments during their posted office hours, but they felt that the informal contact they had with the students and faculty from their departments was a distinct advantage.

In addition to holding physical office hours, what online solutions come to mind to simulate office hours? Has anyone tried IM or chat with their departments, for example?

Rhonda

As we contemplate our upcoming relocation and remodel, we are attempting to find spaces around campus for our faculty and staff. One obvious solution has been that the subject liaisons could have offices in the building where their faculty and student constituents are located. I was interested to read this post on the ACRLog about an experience with this. It seems there could be some benefit to this arrangement.

http://acrlog.org/2008/05/31/office-hours/

Hoping we can avoid janitor’s closets -

Rhonda

For those of you that attended Brian Rosenblum’s presentation on Libraries as Publishers at last week’s CALC Summit, you might be interested to know that your colleagues in Europe got to enjoy his presentation as well!

Patrick Danowski, a librarian from Berlin, posted a comment to his blog, Bibliothek 2.0 und mehr (Library 2.0 and more) earlier this week about a Library 2.0 conference he had attended in the Czech Replublic. In it, he blogged on Brian’s presentation. Congratulations Brian!

What a small world!

CASLIN: Libraries as publishers « Bibliothek 2.0 und mehr …
CASLIN: Libraries as publishers
Abgelegt unter: CASLIN2007, Open Access — patrickd @ 10:32

Der erste Vortragende ist Brian Rosenblum von der University of Kansas. Der Hauptfokus des Vortrags liegt auf “Electronic Publishing Services”. Er starte mit der Motivation wieso Bibliotheken Verlage werden sollen:

Incidentally, I ran across PatrickD’s blog at Library20.ning.com. If you haven’t visited this site, you definitely should. It’s like MySpace for academic librarians. Very nice venue for communicating and networking with other librarians around the world who share your interests!

Here’s a new white paper published by Educause that is right on the money in describing students’ habits and attitudes and the need for information literacy. I haven’t had time to read the entire paper yet, but just the quote below looks highly promising. Thanks Diana Oblinger! Sorry you couldn’t make it to our CALC Summit in May!

EDUCAUSE Quarterly | Volume 30 Number 1 2007
Constantly connected to information and each other, students don’t just consume information. They create—and re-create—it. With a do-it-yourself, open source approach to material, students often take existing material, add their own touches, and republish it. Bypassing traditional authority channels, self-publishing—in print, image, video, or audio—is common. Access and exchange of information is nearly instantaneous.

This is the video of the week! Everyone is talking about this video, which was created by Professor Michael Wesch and his class of Digital Ethnography students at Kansas State University.

Some of the important statements he makes in this video are:

• XML allows us to separate content from form. This is important because content can then be moved around, reformatted, repackaged, reused. How does that impact our understanding of authorship, copyright, etc? How much does context effect meaning?
• We are the Web. The social nature of Web 2.0 technologies means that information we view is not static. It can constantly be rewritten. How does that impact our understanding of authorship, copyright, and truth?
• Text is no longer the medium of choice. Video and audio are now prevalent means of communication. How does this change our experience and understanding of information? Of ourselves?
• He says, “We are teaching the machine. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea.” When read in the context of the last video I posted on regarding Google’s use of personal information, what does this mean for us in terms of privacy and identity? Who is writing the code that allows the “machine” to learn?
• “The Web is no longer linking information, it is linking people.” In the end, will we no longer recognize any authority? How will we identify authority?

I read about this on Laura Cohen’s blog, Library 2.0 – An Academic’s Perspective. http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/2007/01/blogs_for_current_events.html.

What a great idea!!! The Institute for the Future of the Book has created this blog version of the Iraq Study Group Report. Reviewers are contributors to the blog and can add their comments to each section of the report. In this way, an annotated version is created. Click here to look at it. The Iraq Study Group Report

She goes on to suggest a couple of ways to implement this in the library. My mind is already spinning. We could use this for our Coffee With the Times program and invite faculty and students to comment on current articles in the Times. Imagine a blog edition of a faculty member’s latest lecture. The possibilities are endless.

The second annual National Freshmen Attitudes report, linked below, reports that, “Only half of entering students enjoy reading and bring strong study habits. Although their desire to attend college was strong, only about half of respondents indicated enthusiasm for reading and appeared to have strong study habits, as shown below.”
07FRESHMANATTITUDES_report.pdf (application/pdf Object)

I am not surprised by this report. We all know that in today’s media rich world, one can often find the quick information needed without having to sift through lots of text. In addition, there are many forms of entertainment that overshadow simple reading for pleasure. At the same time, academics regularly bemoan students’ lack of critical thinking skills. I think this is an angle that academic librarians can incorporate in Information Literacy training. Communicate the simple idea to students that they must learn to READ complete articles; that they do themselves a disservice by relying on abstracts or quotes. They cannot fully participate in the academic discourse of their disciplines without carefully analyzing arguments. It seems like a simple idea, but maybe no one has thought to mention it to today’s freshmen.

This article by Tyler O. Walters of Georgia Institute of Technology appears in the October D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/). I wanted to share it with our faculty and staff because it discusses an important shift in scholarly communication. Scholarly dialogue no longer takes place only in formal publications; the academy is beginning to recognize that important communication also occurs in informal ways. We are poised to be able to harness that intellectual capital and manage it ourselves in ways that adds to its legitimacy. The time has finally come when the balance of power is tipping away from publishers and towards owners of intellectual property. For those of us in small academic institutions, this represents a very positive trend that will eventually allow us to be able to provide our communities with access to information that was previously only available to the elite.

Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications
The definition identifies two broad categories of scholarly communication, formal and informal. Historically, librarians have been most concerned with the formal (i.e., journals, technical papers, conference proceedings, white papers, research reports). However, a growing body of informal modes, such as blogs, wikis, listservs, and other social software content, are being utilized by scholars and their students. Increasingly, new knowledge is exchanged through both formal and informal means.

Exactly my point! http://www.travelinlibrarian.info/2006/10/on-google-purchase-of-youtube.html

From the TravelinLibrarian.info