Use of information resources

Yesterday our level 1 BSc Information Management students presented posters from the projects they do in the Inquiry in Information Mangement module. All of them were interesting , but a prize was awarded for the best poster and it went to the poster on How do students use information resources to support their research during academic study: a comparison between levels of study. The photo shows Nina Jaswal, Natalie Chung and Lauren Cotton by their poster with Sheila Corrall (our Head of Department).

The sample was too small to generalise (20 students each from 1st, 2nd and 3rd years, mixture of Departments), nevertheless it may be indicative. For example, 20% of 1st years used library resources daily compared to 50% of 2nd years and 40% of3rd years. Similarly 60% of 1st years used search engines to search for academic material, whilst 30% of 3rd years did. I have put up the 6 posters on our Second Life island (Infolit iSchool), so if you have a SL avatar you can teleport up to the sky platform and see them.

Babe feature

There was a supplement Libraries Unleashed in yesterday's Guardian. There are articles on innovative buildings, issues to do with digital information, changing careers etc. I'm afraid my ability to critique it sensibly was compromised by my excitement in being quoted in the front-page article (which talks about students' use of information, focused around the "Google generation" report). In particular I (as my avatar in Second Life, Sheila Yoshikawa, seen right) am referred to as a "blue haired babe": probably the only time I'll ever get referred to as a babe in a national newspaper so I am savouring the moment. The whole supplement is available online at http://education.guardian.co.uk/librariesunleashed/0,,2274706,00.html and the lead article is here: Brian Kelly wrote an interesting piece on it here.

Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums

At the weekend I attended the Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums conference in Second Life (SL: the virtual world). I have blogged the conference on my Sheila Yoshikawa blog (that's my SL name) at:
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/
2008/03/
libraries-education-museums-conference.html
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2008/03
/virtual-worlds-libraries-education.html
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2008/
03/virtual-worlds-libraries-education_09.html
and finally
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2008/03/
virtual-worlds-libraries-education_3273.html

One thing which I started thinking about was why I am more likely to blog a Second Life (SL) event than a Real Life one. I think the answer is that:

1) in SL I can start the blogging while the conference is on: taking notes on the computer whilst I'm at the conference. The conferences I attend in Real Life don't tend to have facilities for delegates to be connected whilst in the audience; also my laptop has a short battery life so would give out after about one session.

2) Once the conference is over, I'm there at the computer, ready to write up notes on the spot.

Library Arcade

On ilibrarian
(http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/
2008/gaming-to-develop-research-skills/) I
saw a post about games-based tools for information literacy skills: the
Carnegie Mellon University Libraries’ Library Arcade. "They have two games so
far - “I’ll Get It” in which players must help fellow students find library
resources, and “Within Range”, a library re-shelving game using the LC
classification system." Go to
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/etc/index.html
I found Within Range curiously addictive, although it didn't seem to always
realise what were the correct places for the books (either that or I was making
mistakes, surely not. Actually MOST fun was putting the books in the wrong
place and getting the booper noise)

e-content collections - opinion wanted!

Today, here's a guest post from Chris Armstrong (Information Automation Limited, http://www.i-a-l.co.uk/
"Since OCLC declared about 3 or 4 years ago that ‘users are format agnostic’ and NetLibrary began adding forms of content other than e-books to its aggregation, there has been a growing trend towards ‘eContent’ and e-book aggregators have begun adding anything from journal articles (apparently randomly selected) to video into their
collections. Now (quoted in an article in Research Information by Siân Harris -
http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=126# ) “Springer’s eBooks are integrated on SpringerLink, as Ernst explained, ‘Researchers care if information is relevant and trustworthy, not whether it is in a book or a journal.’ Similarly, Wiley’s science and technology books are part of Wiley InterScience and Elsevier’s science and technology books are part of its ScienceDirect platform. ‘If researchers are looking for a specific topic on ScienceDirect they will be given results in journals and books, both the latest news in journals and the substantial body of reference in books,’ said Ellen de Groot, senior product manager for ScienceDirect at Elsevier”. Dave Nicholas (UCL) talks of ‘walled gardens’ of secure, high quality resources, each from a single trusted source.

"I have been fighting a rear-guard action against this reductionism with little effect. I feel that scholars do not search so vaguely, and are not helped by being presented with such an odd admixture of resources. I do recognise that it may be nice to have everything in one place, but since, for example, the journal articles in the mix do not represent a comprehensive or even near-comprehensive subject collection, this is not really much of an argument. I do not think that it is really helpful to libraries either.

"My reason for this posting on this blog is to try and collect some feelings from practitioners about whether vague collections of eContent are a ‘Good Thing’ or whether e-book aggregators should stick to e-books. In Information Literacy terms are users, scholars and readers being helped or disadvantaged by such supra-aggregation?"

If you have views, please do comment here!

Librarians and Second Life

The latest discussion in Second Life, the virtual world, was What is important for librarians to learn about Second Life and what role should they be taking? This discussion was led by Maggie Kohime (Lyn Parker in real life) yesterday in the Centre for Information Literacy Research, Eduserv Island. We had some people from the UK and some from North America. The log of our discussion is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=152 Lyn posed some questions for us, although we did not keep to these strictly:
1. Librarians need to be able to operate in SL in order to see the possibilities. What functions therefore do you consider to be most important and where should newbies concentrate their efforts first?
2. What things are librarians doing in Second Life? Are they different to RL activities? What scope does the environment give us to enable us to do things differently?3. What are the issues within Second Life that librarians with their various skills can help resolve?
Lyn also provided some references.

Grassian, E. and Trueman, R. B. (2007) "Stumbling, bumbling, teleporting and flying … librarian avatars in Second Life." Reference Services Review, 35 (1), 84 - 89.

Greenhill, Kathryn (2007) "Flying Librarians of Oz: Whats all the fuss about second life and whats it got to do with libraries." Presentation to the National Library of Australia on 14 February 2007. http://www.slideshare.net/sirexkat/
flying-librarians-of-oz-whats-all-the-fuss-
about-second-life-and-whats-it-got-to-
do-with-libraries

Hurst-Wahl, Jill (2007) "Librarians and Second Life: it's a source of information, a platform for networking, an opportunity to try out new approaches before you take them to the real world." Information Outlook, June. http://findarticles.com/p/
articles/mi_m0FWE/is_6_11/ai_n19311772/pg_1

The first picture shows discussion underway, and the second is of a meeting later that evening with North Lamar (Joe Sanchez in real life), a North American teacher and researcher, in the water garden I created on our island, Infolit iSchool.

Discussion on librarians' image

On September 4th there was a discussion How should Librarians present themselves in Second Life, Facebook, My Space etc? in the office of the Centre for Information Literacy Research in Second Life (SL), the virtual world. Lyn Parker of Sheffield University Library (Maggie Kohime in SL) led the discussion and 10 people were present (plus a few lurkers looking over shoulders in Real Life apparently ;-) The transcript of the session is in two parts at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=124 and http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=125

Maggie is on the far left of the photo summing up discussion. There is a fuller description at http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/
2007/09/librarians-in-sl.html

German book on "teaching library"

From Thomas Hapke's blog (link on the right) I see that there has been a new book published about the "teaching library", in German, namely:
Krauß-Leichert, U. (Ed.) Teaching Library: eine Kernaufgabe für Bibliotheken. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007. I'll translate the title as Teaching Library: a key responsibility for libraries.
The book contains chapters on: introducing the concept; identifying current developments; looking at the library's role in an e-learning context (this chapter is by Thomas himself); standards and models of information literacy; planning for teaching and incorprating library instruction in the curriculum; learning to teach; IL at the university of Konstanz; thoughts about pedagogy. (NB as I said, this is German-language: If you want to order it I recommend ww.amazon.de)

Photo by Sheila Webber: Spanish sandals in the sun in Sheffield, Aug 2007.

LASSIE literature review

ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) has published on its website, http://www.alissnet.org.uk/:
Secker, J. (2007) LASSIE: Libraries and Social Software in Education: Social Software, Libraries and distance learners: literature review: Draft version for comment. London: London School of Economics and Political Science.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Flowers (alstromeria) in my vase, today.

Social software

The newly published article in the IFLA Academic and Research Libraries newsletter asks "Social Software – is enough, enough?" I'm not sure whether Stephen Marvin really answers his own question, but it's a useful article. He starts by summarising Steve Abram's view of "generation we", goes on to review more sceptical reaction (e.g. from Andrew Keen author of recently-published The Cult of the Amateur**), and then provides brief descriptions of some key web 2.0 products like youtube, livejournal, Second Life, including some useful links & references.

Marvin, S. (2007) "Social Software – is enough, enough?" Academic and Research Libraries newsletter, (39) 11-16. http://www.ifla.org/VII/s2/pub/s2-newsletter-July07.pdf (this is the web address for the whole issue)

**You can find an extract of Andrew Keen's book via his blog http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Tour de France, which I saw going past on Sunday,near Charlton (South London).

Digital Outreach

One of the sessions I would have liked to get to at Umbrella a week or so ago (but I was getting to grips with my poster) was organised CoFHE/UCR and featured Lisa Hincliffe (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Lisa Sloniowski (York University, Toronto). They talked about Digital Outreach and Social Engagement: connecting with users. They have a Library Outreach Wiki at http://libraryoutreach.pbwiki.com/ which I think they mentioned. If the sidebar isn't already displayed click sidebar on the right of the home page to see the list of active pages in the wiki: these are Enagement Techniques, Face to Face, Workshop Hints, Digital Outreach and Bibliography.
Photo by Sheila webber: More hollyhocks.

Gateways to learning

Today at the LILAC conference (pic. of poster gallery on the right - with trademark LILAC balloons) I attended a session on the Gateways to learning project. This is part-funded by the European Social Fund, and involves 5 public libraries and 3 academic libraries in South East Wales. They aim to widen participation in learning through informal learning, which can be a bridge to formal learning. They target any one 16+ years old who is economically inactive e.g. unemployed. There had been a lote of redundancies in that part of Wales (e.g. from the Corus steel plant) and following on from this one of the things that was investigated by th eWelsh Executive was reasons for not participating in learning. This included reasons like lack of confidence and feeling intimidated by formal educational establishments, so libraries' role came to the fore in proposals.

There are people employed by the project who work one-to-one with learners (there have been 1500 of these information literacy taster sessions) and encourage the learners to work through little workbooks that enable them to compile evidence of acheivement in finding and using information to meet a real information need. If the learner completes it all successfully, they can then gain an Open College Network qualification. About 300 people have gone on to do this, sometimes going for the next level of qualification too, and/or investigating more formal learning options. Some of these people have previously had no educational qualifications.

One issue is that the project ends later this year, so that regular library staff are having to plan how they will continue this work, which is obviously meeting a need. I was very interested to hear about this project, as I get asked about public/academic library cooperation (the academic libraries focus on access students in particular, I was told, by the way). Iheard about it (and might have blogged too) when it started up, but hadn't followed its progress. The website is at http://www.gatewaystolearning.com/