State of America’s Libraries 2008

from iLibrarian by Ellyssa

The ALA has published the 2008 State of America’s Libraries report. Here are their key findings:

• Americans check out over 2 billion items annually from public libraries.
• The average user checks out over 7 books/year.
• The average taxpayer bill for public library services - $31/year.
• Public libraries are engines of economic growth, contributing to local development through programming in early literacy, employment services and small-business development.
• Libraries provide excellent ROI, positively impact the local economy, and contribute to neighborhood quality of life.
• School library media centers help students learn more and score higher on standardized tests, but their funding continues to lag.
• Teens are regular users of public library services.
• Almost all of the nation’s public libraries offer YA programs & over half employ at least one full-time staff equivalent in this area.
• Computer and on-line games have become part of the mix at many public libraries, and some use gaming to attract new patrons.
• Spanish is the top-priority language to which libraries devote non-English language services and programs.
• Most libraries serving non-English speakers are in communities with fewer than 100,000 residents.
• Ebooks continued to emerge as a regular feature of libraries of all types.
• Library supporters won an important victory in 2007 when the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to re-open many of the libraries it had closed in the past year.
• College and research libraries continue to find innovative new ways to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the academy.
• Libraries and librarians of all stripes continue to stand up for the First Amendment rights of all Americans, responding in public discourse and in court to unconstitutional snooping and aspiring book-banners. The right to read — freely and in private — remains a core value of the profession.

Libraries as Architects of Collaboration

from iLibrarian by Ellyssa

The latest issue of Educause Review has an article by Peter Brantley entitled Architectures for Collaboration: Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries in which he discusses the need for change within today’s libraries. In the article he asserts a set of “library mantras” which he feels are key to this change, including:

• Libraries Must Be Available Everywhere.
• Libraries Must Be Designed to Get Better through Use.
• Libraries Must Be Portable.
• Libraries Must Know Where They Are.
• Libraries Must Tell Stories.
• Libraries Must Help People Learn.
• Libraries Must Be Tools of Change.
• Libraries Must Offer Paths for Exploration.
• Libraries Must Help Forge Memory.
• Libraries Must Speak for People.
• Libraries Must Study the Art of War.

“The success of libraries is not to be counted by the number of books, either digital or paper, held by libraries or the number of pretty pictures that libraries can put online. Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. Libraries are successful when they offer new services and when they help others discover services provided by others. By building bridges among these various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation. They will become the architects of collaboration.”

Why do people participate in social applications?

from iLibrarian by Ellyssa

The Forrester analysts at Groundswell discuss the top reasons that people take part in social activity online. These motivations are important to keep in mind when designing your own online social environment. Here are their top motives:

• Keeping up friendships
• Making new friends
• Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends
• Paying it forward
• The altruistic impulse
• The prurient impulse
• The creative impulse
• The validation impulse
• The affinity impulse

CIL2008 Presentations

from iLibrarian by Ellyssa

This year’s conference was jam-packed with informative and entertaining sessions. Here are a few links to presentation slides, but be sure and keep an eye on Slideshare for more:

Libraries Solve Problems (Keynote) - Lee Rainie

Online Outreach for Libraries: Successful Digital Marketing - Sarah Houghton-Jan

Transparency, Planning & Change: See-Through Libraries - Michael Stephens and Michael Casey

Pecha Kucha 2.0 Podcasting Edition - Greg Schwartz

Technology Training for Library Staff: Creativity Works! - Sarah Houghton-Jan

Podcasting & Videocasting Bootcamp - David Lee King and David Free

Innovation Starts with “I” - Helene Blowers and Tony Tallent

From Avatars to Advocacy: Innovation through Un-marketing - Helene Blowers and Michael Porter

Harnessing New Data Visualization Tools - Darlene Fichter

Mashups for Non-Techies: Yahoo! Pipes - Jody Fagan

and the InfoTubey award winners

The Open Source ILS

from Blogging Section of SLA-IT by Nicole Engard

I know that we're all (or mostly all) special librarians here, but I attended an academic library event that I think translates into our environment as well. Last week, I attended the Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium and hosted by VALE (Virtual Academic Library Environment of New Jersey). I wrote up summaries of the presentations for one of my other blogs and wanted to share the links with you all:

• From Open Stacks to Open Source
• Evergreen Open Source Library System
• Koha Open Source Library System
• Q&A
• WALDO & the Koha Open Source ILS
• PINES & the Evergreen Open Source ILS

New tagging tool at U. Michigan Library...very cool!

I'd like to talk about a tagging project we just launched at my workplace. MTagger is a social bookmarking tool that we've integrated into several University of Michigan library resources. A tag cloud now appears:

• On almost all library web pages
• On item pages in Mirlyn, our library catalog
• On image display pages in our digital image collections
• On most of the electronic journals published by the library's Scholarly Publishing Office

Like del.icio.us and many other social bookmarking tools available on the Internet, MTagger allows users to bookmark and tag web pages using language that makes sense to them. Anyone can see tag clouds on pages and search MTagger; only users with valid U-M network logins can apply tags. (Individuals can, of course, opt out of sharing their tags with others if they choose.)

Unlike these other tools, MTagger offers the concept of "Collections" -- letting users restrict their searches for similarly tagged items to a specific collection (library catalog records, images, web pages, etc.). While tags themselves would allow people to serendipitously find items in other collections, the "Collections" metaphor will, we expect, help drive home that the library offers more than books, electronic journals, and databases.

More important than the tagging functionality itself is what MTagger will allow our faculty, staff, and students to do. MTagger brings a social component to research that we have not previously had. It will allow users to share knowledge about library resources with each other, to enable quick-and-dirty subject guides to be produced, and -- we hope -- to bring researchers together via their individual tag clouds. As research moves online, chance meetings in the stacks of researchers with overlapping interests become even more rare. Through tagging, we hope to be able to recreate some of those synergistic interactions as one researcher finds a tag of interest, and through that, the other researcher.

Oh, and just to keep this in the realm of libraries and RSS, anything that can be searched within MTagger can be accessed via an RSS feed.

http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/02/new_tagging_tool_at_university.html

create your own booklets--FREE!

BookletCreator - is a free online tool that allows to create a booklet from a PDF document. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book. Here is how it goes:

"The original document should be in PDF format with "Portrait" paper orientation. If you have a document in the format other than PDF, you should at first convert it to PDF. You can use some free PDF creation tool. For example PrimoPDF. You upload your document to the BookletCreator website and download the result.