Future of reference - Stephen Abram's scenarios

Stephen Abram has created a list of possible scenarios for the future of reference services. I found it a worthwhile addition to our ongoing discussion about this topic.

article here

Libraries and e-Learning Master Class

This was a great seminar presented by Robyn Tweedale from USQ, who has experience in implementing elearning projects. Although this covered no new territory for us at Utas it pulled together many ideas and gave the tools to plan and think about our elearning intiatives.

Main Points

• Importance of stakeholder buy in from the beginning of any project, particularly from academics. Students won’t use eLearning unless compelled to, or recommended to
• Spend time determining the scope of eLearning intiatives, what is appropriate for your users, what can you achieve in terms of time and budget
• Don’t reinvent the wheel (we certainly know about this point!), use collaboration and piggy backing wherever possible
• eLearning is learning, that is it should follow sound pedagogical principles
• eLearning should be a balance of technological innovation and pedagogical innovation
• eLearning is most effective at point of need or integrated into curriculum

To elaborate on “don’t reinvent the wheel” – Robyn stressed the value of looking for opportunities to share and borrow and emphasised the value of quick wins. USQ has adapted the original QUT Pilot tutorial ( which is freely available), added some content from University of Washington Library’s Research 101 tutorial. Robyn’s team is still working on adapting this and asked the group if any team would be interested collaborating to make Pilots better. Could this be an opportunity for Utas?

Robyn made clear that she did not see the tutorial being used in its entirety by students, but rather something that could be used to create learning objects, saved in Equella, that could then be adapted quickly and easily for specific courses and units, be placed in MyLo etc.

There are many examples of eLearning used in libraries currently listed on the Wiki for the course

http://libwiki.usq.edu.au/bin/login/ELearning/WebHome

If you want to look at these I can give you the user name and password.

Much of the day was spent looking at our gaps in services, our strengths and weaknesses and how to plan an eLearning intiative. Materials to assist with this are also on the Wiki. I feel that we have lots of expertise in the content of elearning but at the moment no clear direction in which to head. There is also a lot of expertise in the Uni to draw on, CALT and flexible learning units in the Faculties.

I think our next eLearning project should be small in scope, tailored very specifically to a course and lets have a quick win we can build from!

Other useful tips from the day:

• Robyn preferred to use Adobe Captivate over Camtasia as she said it was easier to make changes when you need to update material.

• Don’t give your elearning products fancy names. After using focus groups USQ decided to call their product “Finding Information Tutorial”, and their multiple database search product is called “multiple database search”.

ABS Blog

I've just come across Statistically Speaking which is the ABS blog. It contains information about new releases from the ABS as well as highlighting things we might be unfamiliar with. The blog is primarily targeted at librarians.

Found via Libraries Interact.

CRIG Report August 15 2008 -Roger Carter

I attended a CAVAL Reference Interest Group Forum on the Reference Collection: print, electronic or the dumpster? August 15 2008.RMIT University Swanston Library.

The Forum took the form of two formal papers, a case study Reference collection rationalization at Swinburne Hawthorn Campus (Emilie Johnson); and a discussion of the development of a Ref collection policy to go with the larger Collection Development policy. (Annette Sullivan, RMIT).

This was followed by four short (5 min.) talks from people from different institutions.

The day was concluded with a short “sharing” of favourite reference resources and closing comments.

Em Johnson- Swinburne

Emilie was charged with radically reducing the Reference collection. Her approached recommended retaining a “classic” print reference collection and discarding or relocating the rest. The result was 31% retained in Ref (1007 titles); 33% relocated to stack (1058 titles) and 36% discarded (1154 titles). She made a good point: We need to be able to answer the question, “What is a Ref Collection?” (& why do we need it etc). PS: They have NO store of any kind.

Annette Sullivan-RMIT

RMIT had a large print Ref collection – 16000 items in 6 branches. (Most of these at their main Swanston Library. They also have “lots” of etitles. The stats show the etitles are being used. The selection and weeding decision making is done via committee like our CMCG. The Policy is a “work in progress” and not complete yet.

The policy sounded like a good idea but the description of the process made it sound like a lot of work. A suggestion that came up here and elsewhere on the day: --You can relocate to stack and still make items “not for loan”. (We are already doing this quite extensively – at least in MML.)

Here are some points from the 5 minute talks:

Jane Miller –Victoria Uni.

• VU reduced the Ref Coll by 75%.
• She asserts that relocating to the general shelves has increased the use of the former reference resources.
• She says “To the client they are all just books!”
• VU cancelled Britannica Online because of low use
• “Ready reference” may be the only really useful reference collection
• Our LMS’s and interfaces are lacking and reference resource discovery is difficult

Colin Bates- Deakin

• Deakin favours a small “ready reference” collection of “core titles”
• Small footprint, low-rise shelves
• No reference desk
• Increasing etitles, but
• LIMIT the number to 6 most relevant resources in each topic area (this was an interesting approach)
• Oxford Reference Online Premium is useful in providing quality scholarly ereference titles for this purpose (See Deakin’s eReference page)
• Lack of a good federated search system for diverse reference tools is a major problem –I also think this is a key issue

Roy Kennaugh –Uni of Melbourne, Engineering Library

• They have put their entire research collection into store because of a central planning direction to move to a smaller space
• It has had little use since then
• They are left with an undergraduate collection
• They have all the major eReference tools

A PDF of the Powerpoint for Annette’s talk can be downloaded from http://www.caval.edu.au/past-activities-2008.html#Aug08

Other presentations may appear at this site later.

The seminar was followed by a tour of the Swanston Library. They have lots of “jellybean” furniture and seem to like them generally, though they have a different leg system to ours which probably makes them better. A notable feature was a floor with three different level of “quiet”. There was a total-silence area completely enclosed in a glass wall!

The day was informative and indicated that we are pretty much in line with thinking of other CAVAL libraries and have most of the same problems of relentless pressure to rationalize flor space, difficulty in evaluating print reference resources and deciding what we really want to do with reference.

LibGuides and fiction books at UTAS

Today I spent some time investigating LibGuides. While looking at some sites from other universities I came across a LibGuide produced by Drury University in Missouri.

Its purpose is to publicise the Library's quest to encourage students and faculty to read.

The Read campaign asks students and staff to identify their favourite book and talk about how it changed their life.

We could do something similar and tie it in to our existing fiction collection.

FYI, there is now a report on the web with recommendations for the establishment at UTAS of a new Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS).

This is extremely likely to eventuate and will have significant impacts upon our schools and even the Faculty of SET as it will sit outside SET and be in partnership with the State Government. TAFI will be devolved as will the ACE (CRC).

It is intended that IMAS will include all teaching and research in the marine and Antarctic areas so will have implications for the way we offer IL, our collections, and it may affect services we provide, particularly as collaborations with external organisations are central to its structure.

How much times does web 2.0 take?

This article might be interesting

Liaison Day Blog presentation

My presentation on blogs can be found here if anyone is interested in reading more.

Librarian Too

Apologies if you have come across this one before but have a look at this workshop run in Brisbane late last year, looking at some of the web 2.0 technologies that were discussed at yesterday's meeting.

http://www.quloc.org.au/

Under 'Meetings and Events', select Social Software and Libraries - Seminar blog and presentations.

Wendy

Google launches Wikipedia rival

This ITworld article  is pretty interesting.
Google has launched Knol, its user-generated online encyclopedia, which it announced in December but had kept under wraps in private testing.
They will be encourage authors/editors names to be public, (like Citizendium).
Is this the real beginning of the free-encyclopedia wars?