I have been looking for an opportunity to work with Damon Jaggars for several years now. Last October we caught up at the Library Assessment Conference (here is the paper I presented) and worked out a plan for me to be a guest editor for a special issue of The Journal of Library Administration. For me, blog posts and whitepapers are the perfect vehicles of expression; however, I do like to dip into the more formal side of publishing every so often.
Here is a taste of the framework:
Imagine academic libraries fifteen years from now or at some other inflection point. How do we define the academic library in this future? Where does the library begin and end relative to research and academic computing, and other campus and network services that will be available to faculty and students? How will higher education change and how will the academic library align with that change? What…
It’s an interesting visual showing how an extended slinky hovers in midair when dropped. The dramatic demonstration is followed by the scientific explanation. What’s cool about the video is that the researcher shows the raw model on the computer and talks about the experiment, but it’s the intro that grabs your attention. The demo is intriguing and compels you into wanted to learn more. It’s Matrix stuff!
Along with the video there is also a link to the pre-print of the paper providing everyone with open access to the scholarly material. It’s a great way to promote a paper.
The video has over one million views and over nine hundred comments. Granted most of the comments are silly, but the video was effective in getting people thinking and talking about…
We celebrated Open Access this week since we had Cameron Neylon (PLoS) on campus for a few days as part of our Distinguished Innovator in Residence program. I’ll have more to share about that later, but today I wanted to highlight an interesting component of our OA program: The Knowledge Drive.
Rebecca Miller developed the concept so I’ll let her tell the story:
Late last spring, I watched people line up to give blood at a Virginia Blood Services drive on campus. I thought about what made it to successful; VBS had advertised the need for blood, so there was awareness on campus. The drive was also convenient, since VBS took the blood drive to where potential donors were, rather than waiting for donors to come to them. Donors were also receiving items like T-shirts, flip flops, or stickers that let others know that they were contributing to a greater good.
I spent time in California interviewing graduate students about their work processes. Something that stood out to me was how science and engineering students typically looked for people (rather than subject headings) during the information gathering stage. The objective was to find researchers working in particular areas and then mine their websites for additional papers. That’s exactly the approach that Scholrly hopes to improve upon.
I first came across Scholrly about a year ago when a friend of a friend liked them on Facebook. I explored and this is what I found:
“Scholrly aims to give its users, from the garage inventor to the tenured professor, a single stop for finding research connections and insights faster than ever before.”
I spoke with co-founder Corbin Pon last August and followed their development. Over the past year they’ve worked with faculty at…
Wikipedia and several other web services are going dark tomorrow. They are shutting down– largely to make a political statement, but I can’t help but feel they are also trying to make a point about their cultural value. College students everywhere are lucky it’s not during prime paper-writing season or else they might be forced to actually use their library’s website.
Library Blackout
The blackout scenario is something that has playfully come up everywhere I’ve ever worked. The conversation (usually at dinner, in bar, or at the end of an outreach planning meeting late in the afternoon) goes something like this:
People (faculty) don’t appreciate the library. I bet if we turned off our proxy (access to all digital content) for a hour then we’d get their attention. Then they’d see just how important the library is to their research.
There is an interesting essay by Chris Colin in the current issue of Wired about the culture of online criticism. It opens with this:
You don’t have to read this essay to know whether you’ll like it. Just go online and assess how provocative it is by the number of comments at the bottom of the web version.
The piece touches on the growing ratings phenomenon. Perhaps Amazon played a big part in this by establishing a system in which every product can be rated and commented upon. When I was looking to purchase a new toaster, the user feedback factored into my selection. I wanted to see what others said about the “toast boost” capability. It’s not enough to just read the manufacturer’s list of features; I wanted data for real people.
My
post “File Sharers Swap Scholarly Materials
Too”
has been the most read item on this blog. People seem to really like that theme
so I’ll explore it a bit more. Often when we talk about Open Access,
Institutional Repositories, the Publishing Crisis, or similar topics it tends
to be very esoteric. There is a lot of rhetoric, debate, and models that honestly
I think only accountants and lawyers can get excited about. I’m not so sure
that the average faculty member really cares about the economics of the
publishing industry or a court’s interpretation of fair use. We’ll save that
for another day.
What
I’m really interested in is how all this stuff applies to the world outside of
libraries. I found it fascinating that The
Pirate Bay had some (expensive) academic materials and not just Jay-Z
tracks or episodes of LOST. So, what if there was a site designed to collect
academic…
In Post-Memorial Day recovery I submit the thoughts of a student. The post asks: What do you do with papers that other people wrote?
I decided to stay out this one, but fascinating to read — students chime in about bibliographic management systems. I am intrigued by the “what if you had something that was kind of iTunes-like, but for papers and slides and stuff, and you could sort and search and organize and have a central place to stash all of them?”
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Brian Mathews
is Associate Dean for Learning & Outreach at Virginia Tech. This blog is about designing better user experiences and the pursuit of use-sensitive libraries.
In his new book, Brian Mathews speaks directly to the academic library practitioner. The guiding principle, that marketing should focus on the lifestyle of the user, showcases how the library fits within the daily life of students.
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January 17, 2012, 6:59 pm
WHAT IF? The Library Blackout Scenario
By Brian Mathews
Library Blackout
The blackout scenario is something that has playfully come up everywhere I’ve ever worked. The conversation (usually at dinner, in bar, or at the end of an outreach planning meeting late in the afternoon) goes something like this:
Inferiority complex, maybe…
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