Tuesday 21 July 2009

Information literacy in the age of Youtube

This is an interesting little slide show that looks at image literacy, particularly the need to evaluate images as information. Also that visual culture is in its infancy compared to book culture.

http://www.slideshare.net/mjdelia/information-literacy-in-the-age-of-youtube

Friday 17 July 2009

Memex (sounds futuristic)

I just stumbled across this rather interesting little ICT history lesson while doing some reading on ebooks...

"In 1945, Vannevar Bush's concept of Memex (or memory extender) was described as a computer device linked to a library archive able to display books (and multimedia) and enabled users to link to other works or ideas as they went through materials.

His ideas greatly influenced generations of technologists in the development of both hypertext for linking terms and ideas, as well as developing tools to augment or enhance human intelligence and memory. For its time, memex was a revolutionary concept for using technology to enhance human performance and experience using computer devices."

Here is the full article:
The Ebook Reader Is Not the Future of Ebooks

Monday 6 July 2009

Best library practice wiki

Having trouble keeping up with all the library blogs you subscribe to?

Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki may be the answer because it aims to bring together all the best ideas on managing libraries in one place. Lots of information!

Another potentially interesting thing I came across are Instant Instruction Feedback Forms. I haven't had a tinker with them yet but I thought they may turn out to be an alternative to Survey Monkey as an online feedback tool.

According to the site blurb they are ' web-based surveys that are designed to offer librarians a simple way to evaluate their information literacy/bibliographic instruction sessions. The best thing about them is that they're open source, which means that everytime someone downloads them Bill Gates gets a chill through his bones.'

Library champions

Here's Xiaoguang Yang, director of Beihang university library, Beijing, on advocacy as quoted in the latest Australian Library News...

'Two strategies key to successful lobbying for academic library funding are: communicating
clearly with the library’s funding body, and deploying library champions. Our practice is to make the key professor of each discipline responsible for helping spread the good word, university-wide, about the library.’

While liaison librarians don't communicate directly with the library's funding body, almost everything we do in the liaison role has an impact on how the library is perceived and hence the support we receive from the schools and wider university community. The subscription cancellation project is an example directly related to funding that hopefully will have a' trickle up' effect in that the message will travel upwards to those who make funding decisions not just from the library but also from schools.

Our school based library champions could be our LOs, but this is not always the case. While I'm not really a fan of military style verbs like 'deploy' the term 'library champion' is kind of catchy and fits in with the terminology currently in use in schools eg Criterion referenced assessment champions

Thanks to Karmen for helping us keep up to date with what's happening in libraries across Australia with Australian Library News