Arrived late yesterday…luckily my hotel is very close to a few restaurants..sampled my first authentic Austin breakfast burrito and watched the original Ugly Betty (Betty la Fea) before going to bed very early. I’m speaking at a panel workshop on the use of blogs and wikis as conference communications tools this afternoon. I’m really looking forward to it.
I attended so many stimulating sessions and can say that after a second year of sitting in on one of Karen Fisher’s presentations, I realized that attending an ASIST conference means I can get to hear about her most recent research. This year I attended the “Information Grounds” session. Like many other people there, and like those of you following the conference virtually either through the blog or wiki, we have all been a part of an information ground. Fisher defined an information grounds as a “temporary environment created when people come together for a singular purpose [namely to engage in informal and formal info sharing]“. Fisher identified churches as the most popular settings for information grounds for people in the lower income bracket and the workplace for those in higher income brackets. Think, where else do you spend most of your time? There were several panelists and the results of the studies were reported from research that included baby story-time hours in a large public library system in Canada, a Polish community in Seattle, Hispanic farm workers and college students.
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Virtual reference for videos
and wading through government statistics
(Only 2 out of the 3 scheduled speakers were present…) Listening to contributed paper presentations is an excellent way to get a glimpse at innovations coming down the pike..Ron Brown, doctoral candidate from UNC-Chapel Hill described the GovStat Statistical Information Glossary (SIG) research project. The SIG project is a component of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded GovStat research effort out of the HCI labs at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Maryland. The project identifies users’ lack of statistical knowledge as a significant barrier finding and evaluating statistical information on the web. The goal of the SIG project is to help users become more familiar with statistical terms WITHOUT “pulling [them] away from their primary information task” ( a la the parent project’s motto: finding what they need and understanding what they find) . The study looked at the effectiveness of offering definitions/explanations of frequently used statistical terms in a variety of formats (text only, animation, and animation and text) to accomodate different learning styles. It also examined the impact (perceived and real) of three distinct levels of interactivity had on user learning rate and satisfaction.
VR for Videos
The video-based virtual reference IS a novel concept. Most of us (librarians and info specialists) are adept at guiding users to those elusive text-based objects (digital and print). With digitally born objects being made available on the web by the minute, it is only a matter of time before we will be asked to help users locate multimedia bits and clips stored in corporate or institutional repositories, major search engines or open access resources like the Open Video Project. Xiagming Mu and Lili Luo’s paper details the system design, testing and pilot user study of the VideoHelp tool. The VideoHelp tool is java based and employs chat, escorted navigation (basically co-browsing), the shared access and control over video files stored in a database.
Chat w/escorted navigation should be familiar from most 24/7 VR products currently available. Here is a jpeg¹ of the VideoHelp screen shot. (A = videoplayer, B= shared browser and C= live chat window). One worrisome note: the tool only searches video files via timestamp. There was a cursory mention of metadata, but it was not clear [to me] that there was other descriptive information attached or mapped to the timestamps. Would this only work for known video file searching? Expanding searching functionality and options should be explored. Mu suggested that a more extensive usability study would be conducted in the future. Interesting and potentially practical tool. Would it play nice with the developing Open Video Toolkit? I wonder if a product like Jybe will eventually have this capability or if a slick Ajax version is in the works.
¹image from 2005 ASIST Proceedings cd. Full papers available in the ASIST 2005 conference proceedings.
I meant to post this the second I saw it, but the final week of SLA’s free web conference begins today. This is sponsored by the Chemistry, Sci-Tech and Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) divisions of SLA. The line up of posters looks great: http://forum.lib.lsu.edu/slachem/. I plan to check out Christina Pika’s Information Power Tour, Building a Science Browsing Collection for Undergrads and Understanding the Research and Teaching Needs of Physics Faculty. This is an asynchronous discussion. You read and comment on the message board. The creators of the posters will be monitoring and responding all week.
I was really looking forward to the annual NELIG conference this morning. This year’s theme is “Making Learning Meaningful: Getting to the Heart of the Student”. If you’re there, I’d love to read your notes. Apologies for the upcoming graphic nature of this post: After a tire malfunction that kept me from getting to Portland (ME) last evening, I had the misfortune of getting the tip of my ring finger chewed up pretty nicely by the garage door at 6am this morning. According to the ER doctor (who btw bore a striking resemblence to comedian Steven Wright), it’s pretty “macerated” (thus, impossible to suture). I’ve only previously heard that used in relation to cooking with fruit, so that’s all kinds of gross. Luckily, the chunk of my finger missing is all skin, so it will grow back beautifully (according to Dr. Steven Wright) in time. (more…)
[Long post] That was my “away” message on AIM Wednesday while I was attending an XSLT workshop. It felt a little serendipitous b/c I registered prior to hearing Roy Tennant talk about using XSLT to dynamically deliver library content via local skins. The first time I took an XML/XSLT workshop I was sufficiently impressed with my new knowledge, but didn’t really know what I ‘d do with it. Tennant also made mention of slicing content… “Challenges [are just] opportunities from below…” is how Tennant began his Google and Academic Libraries talk at ACRL NEC last Friday. Tennant looked at Google and other commercial products and compared them to library services now as well as some futurey stuff percolating around the country. All of the speakers promised to make their presentations available to the ACRL NEC folks, so check their website for updates. I will also keep an eye out and let you know when they’re up. Highlights [with comments] of Tennant’s talk:
Google Challenge [what Google offers that most catalogs don't]
- Fast effective searching
- Astute ranking tailored to material being searched
- Millions of results handled by sorting best to top
- How presented is more important than number
- Full-text searching triumph over metadata
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I am heading to the ACRL NEC Spring Conference being held at Rivier College in Nashua, NH. That’s about 2 hours north of Providence. The theme is The Future of Academic Libraries and features talks by Frances Maloy, the Nat’l President of ACRL, Brinley Franklin, VProvost for Libraries at UCONN, and Monsieur Roy Tennant, of the California Digital Library, the XML in Libraries book and Web4Lib. The title of Mr. Tennant’s talk is: “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades: Academic Libraries in a Google World”. Nice title and it sounds like someone’s a Timbuk 3 fan…There are also 3 breakout sessions in the afternoon, and I’m going to the one on interactive tutorials and streaming video.
The NEASIST podcasts are almost ready, but in the meantime, for a full account, check out his Top 12 list from his NEASISTpresentation, but here are a few things that jumped out at me. I’ll be looking at this very closely because of some service changes that will be happening here over the summer..More on that in a bit. And, YES, unplug now and again. My current form of unplugging is fencing with RIFAC.
#1 Control your technolust…
Techno-divorce
Knowing when to quit…
Do a pilot project.
#2. Plan for your Users – make this a top priority – user centered info services
a. Telling STORIES – how do we tell uses what we can do for them
Article: “How Libraries and Librarians help”….Joan Dorrantz.
b. Case studies – start small/off the cuff
#3 – Do Your Research
– Evidence-based decision making
– Resources abound
– talk to other librarians
– field trip, anyone..?
Why blog at your library?
- it works/fast easy & cheap/internal: communication for staff/external: selling your message/Gorman?Cronin?
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Spam for instant messaging…Megan’s talking about schools using SMS to communicate to its faculty and students….
This is the sign I used to pick up Jenny Levine & Michael Stephens at the airport in Providence last night. It was warmly received. They are r&ring before tomorrow’s NEASIST program here at Providence College. Rumour has it (okay Michael tipped me off when he inquired about the possibility of travelling to Fall River MA and Newport RI in one day) that they’ll be visiting the Lizzie Borden house…Have you seen the new NEASIST events blog? If you can’t make it down to the program, you’ll want to subscribe NEASIST’s feed for news on the program, bibliographies, powerpoints, podcasts (YES PODCASTS), a bit of flickr action (click on the image to see my fledgling flickr account), etc.. I have a few days worth of blogging to catch up on. Last week was crazy and I’m a bit grumbled that I didn’t get to work in seeing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Rickman, Def and Martin Freeman (Tim from the only Office that matters) in one movie…
It’s been one of those fast-moving weeks, my apologies for the delay on my thoughts on Gorman’s talk on April 8. To be fair, Gorman’s talk came at the very end of a really long evening of awards and acceptance speeches, so his talk seemed more reserved (even with the anti-tech zingers that peppered the talk) than I had anticipated. Suggestion for organizers of award-slash-guest-speaker events, please try to keep on schedule. Sometimes, award winning graduate students should be seen and not heard. Back to Gorman’s talk on libraries of today and tomorrow…
“Libraries As Place” on the Endangered List…
On the surface, Gorman said some things that most people would agree with: “the pressure on libraries is tremendous”, referring both to cuts being felt by most public libraries across the country and the increased demand for library services in urban communities. Gorman clearly seems to be passionate about need for library services and parity in funding within inner cities. (more…)
Just trying out the new NEASIST Flickr account. I’m heading to a meeting being held in the location of our May event. I’m going to attempt to send some pics.
Megan Fox uploaded this to the NEASIST Flickr page. Greenwood Press was giving away a Jane Austen Bobble head doll at ACRL last week. Move over Librarian Action Figure…
Why does nearly everything written in French have instant sex appeal? I was searching around for “blog people” references in French and I came across this: Les Blogs, Blogs and Social Software, a one-day conference happening in Paris next month. It sounds like a BloggerCon for the EU and it looks like some notable social software & networking names from the US will be represented (Flickr, Blogger, SocialText, PubSub, etc.) There’s also an entertainment factor happening that’s pretty cool. Reminded me of the lively MC antics of D. Scott Brandt at the Dead & Emerging Technologies session during CIL. The Gaping Void cartoonist and blogger will be drawing cartoons of the day’s discussion live. I like this one.
Get the CIL 2005 ppts here:
http://www.infotoday.com/cil2005/Presentations/
Refresh the link periodically, there will be more uploaded over the coming weeks.
