I am very thankful for such a productive year and such a year of travel! I never dreamed I’d visit so many incredible places in 2012 to speak and share with library folk. To colleagues and friends of TTW everywhere – Happy Holidays! Thanks to all for the inspirations and all the wonderful opportunities to learn. We’ll see you in the new year.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
18 posts
Since beginning SLIS classes, I’ve become curious about the labels librarians use for people who use the library or its services. When the issue came up again this semester, I set up an informal poll to get some feedback. I appreciate everyone who shared it, voted and left comments! You may view it online, but here is a summary of the results. It would have been ideal to ask people using libraries as @infointuitive suggested, rather than library students and professionals, but I didn’t have access to that kind of audience. So I decided to include background information in the poll to get an idea […]
I wrote about working on re-evaluating our core classes at “Office Hours” last month. Robert Boyd, one of our faculty, continues the discussion at our CIRI Blog: http://ischoolapps.sjsu.edu/blogs/wp/ciri/2012/12/17/a-reimagined-core/ I am also using some new-found time between semesters to read and reflect on two noted thinkers/practitioners, one old and one new. The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman was originally published in 1852 where Newman proposed the theoretical underpinnings of what would become University College, Dublin. At core, Newman argued “the general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, […]
A Brief Synopsis The book, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, is based on the findings of a large-scale collective of ethnographic studies conducted by y over 20 researchers at MIT from the Digital Youth Project on youth and their social/friendship-driven and interest-driven practices producing, consuming, and sharing media and technology. The case studies offer pretty fascinating insights into youth culture and voices. The authors of the studies concluded that youth often engage in three genres of participation with tech/media: hanging out, messing around and geeking out. It is a participatory cultural progression […]
Peter Morville writes: In fact, the LMS is ground zero for the future of the academic library. If these libraries hope to remain relevant, they must provide information and services at the point of need. Embedding librarians and LibGuides is a good start, but what’s most critical is an embeddable search widget. Students must have a quick, easy way to search the literature that’s relevant to their subject. So far, libraries have failed to meet this challenge. Discovery tools such as Summon and EDS come close, but coverage is spotty, and they lack support for local customization. Getting this right is not just important for libraries. A universal […]
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aaronstanton/the-game-of-books-a-discovery-game-for-libraries-a There are three days to go – please consider a contribution!
Dr. Troy Swanson’s post this morning has resonated with me. I have an assignment in the Hyperlinked Library course on creating a emerging technology plan or social media guidelines statement. Troy’s ideas fit well but also make me realize that so much is tied up in organizational mindset. Things move and change according to the climate at hand. Maybe part of the assignment should focus on less-tangible, less-predictible things. How can we plan for what we do not know to plan for? This passage is the heart of Troy’s well-reasoned argument: This isn’t to say that effective use of social […]
Failure to Innovate, a photo by mstephens7 on Flickr. In honor of Dr. Troy Swanson’s post: https://tametheweb.com/2012/12/11/your-library-does-not-need-a-social-media-plan/
Last month, someone contacted me about creating social media plans in libraries. From our email exchange, I think she was a bit surprised when I said that I think social media plans often get in the way and are a waste of resources. I told her that I could not send her a sample social media plan or a list of best practices for writing a social media plan. I told her that my suggested best practice was to not write a plan at all. When I think about a “plan”, I mean a systematized set of steps that guide […]