Understanding Statistics!

I found this new ABS publication very useful, it gives concise, well written explanations (and diagrams) of terms like median, mode, time series etc.
For those of us who are mathematically challenged (like me) it provides a good introduction to statistical terms, and if we are going to be helping students with ABS data at the reference desk, it will come in handy.

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/1332.0.55.002?OpenDocument

Quick Guides

I have recently found this Quick Reference Guide page. It contains two page summaries of Microsoft applications plus Adobe and Firefox. I like the Firefox Guide because it lists all the keyboard shortcuts.

Google Sites

In case you have not seen it... Google Sites allows you to create web sites on the fly. Nothing special in that, but the examples they give show promising applications in areas like Project Management. Like their blogger application, (used for this blog) GS web sites are rediculously easy to set up and maintain, are free, and have several levels of "openness", that is, you can have a completely public website, a completely private one that no one else can see, or several options in-between. These include an intranet type page or a page just for a selected project group.
Could this have a use in managing our small projects? Perhaps it could even work under the PRINCE2 system ??
Here's an example of a PM website created by GS.

The Library in the New Age

I have just read an interesting article by Robert Darnton published recently in the New York Review of Books.

The first half outlines the rise of information and how it has been recorded and distributed to society throughout history.

The second part of the article analyses the Google Book Project and discusses how this Project may or may not impact on the role of the research library. I quite enjoyed reading the article as many of the author's points reflect my opinions of Google's project to digitise the worlds' book collection.

You can find the article here

Information Futures - Unimelb

This page makes interesting reading, especially the submissions by researchers from each discipline during the consultation phase.
http://www.informationfutures.unimelb.edu.au/submissions.html

Researcher's use of academic libraries and their services

I read this report last year (you all probably did too), and I found it fascinating. The broad aim of the project was to develop a better understanding of the way in which researchers in the UK use academic library services.


Researcher's use of academic libraries and their services [electronic resource] : a report commissioned by the Research Information Network and the Consortium of Research Libraries.
[London] : Research Information Network, 2007.
Description:
70 p.

Title from title screen (viewed 21 May 2007)
In two parts: Report, and Appendix.
Available via: WWW
report: http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/libraries-report-2007.pdf

appendix http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/Appendix_0.pdf

Future of Academic Libraries

I came across an interesting article about the future of academic libraries the other day, and reading over it a few times I thought it might be worth sharing, to get other peoples opinions on it, and hear what their feelings about the trends they think are important for us as a profession.

The article is written by David Lewis, Dean of the IUPUI Library and it was presented at a conference called “visions of change”, you can get a copy here: https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/665

As someone starting out in this profession the direction of academic libraries over the next 25 years are obviously of more than passing interest, but I have found a lot of future predictions for libraries are either mired down in specific technology which has just appeared and seem to be the new big thing or are so broad as to be merely tautologies. Lewis gives us broad trends, gives us background to them and discusses them in detail, outlining 5 parts of the model for academic libraries:

1.) Complete the migration from print to electronic collections

2.) Retire legacy print collections

3.) Redevelop the library space

4.) Reposition library and information tools, resources, and expertise

5.) Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content.

I think the most interesting thing about these predictions is that we can see that we are already moving in these directions, the future is now, and I think he manages to give a good account of how we will need to face the challenges that pursuing these directions further will give us. His appraisal of the challenges is balanced and he seems to have a great deal of common sense and genuine concern for academic libraries and their future within institutions. Please have a read and share your thoughts.

EBSCOHost 2.0 coming

Several LLs from Morris Miller attended a live webinar on the new Ebsco interface this morning. Because of "technical issues" we could only have a one way telephone link and see the presenter's slides and commentary. (The beta should be available on 9 June and the final release in July).
Here a few points of interest.

• The new interface is more visual with bigger icons, embedded images and very visual clustering and limiting tools.
• Addition of "Visual search" which allows you physically move and rearrange search elements
  
• "Smart text" searching allows you to paste a whole block of text (usually from another highly relevant article) and the software will interpret it, create a strategy and perform a search to find similar articles. (I thought this was quite clever).
• the "cite" feature gives clear guidelines on how to reference the results you find in a number of styles like APA, Chicago, Vancouver etc. There was some indication that we may be able to add our Harvard style as well.
• All articles have persistent links and our EzProxy wrappers can be added if we request it. These persistent links will be relocated from the body of the record to the browser URL bar for easier bookmarking. Lecturers can easily embed these in MyLO.
• Users can register and log into their own portal. They can save item to their own portal and access them from home or elsewhere.
  

Most of the features presented are available for you to view via the EbscoHost 2.0 link on the Ebsco Support centre, and most of the new feature are neatly summarized on this page in the Support site.
Our concensus was that not a lot was changed, but it is presented in a more user friendly way.
Viewing the tutorial is highly recommended (only 6minutes)
(Thanks to Juliet for organizing the demo).

CHOICE as a new publications alerting tool

We used to have a subscription to Choice (Academic reviews) and circulated it as a selection tool. The advantage of Choice is that it only includes selected quality academic publications (and web resources by the way!).
A few years ago it was cancelled with the view to subscribing to the Choice Reviews online database. This never went ahead but Choice has been available for some time as an ejournal via Proquest.
I have just been experimenting with this and notice that Proquest has a good RSS feature now. This means that you can theoretically set up RSS alerts for topics from Choice.
I have tried this out and it seem to work OK, so this could be another tool to add to our list that clients could use to be notified of new books in their field.

Librarians teaching publication strategies?

Knievel, J E, 2008, ‘Instruction to Faculty and Graduate Students: A Tutorial to Teach Publication Strategies’, portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 175-186.

I recently came across this article on teaching publication strategies to junior faculty and graduate students - kind of like our "Getting Cited" session, but going a whole lot further.

My initial reaction to the idea was "Blimey! I'm not sure this is really the Library's patch", but Knievel's argument is that while graduate students/new academics know their field, they often do not fully understand the publication cycle.

The online tutorial that University of Colorado Libraries created to teach publication strategies to researchers seems to have been a wild success, and you can access it at http://www.publishnotperish.org

I think it's great (although a bit text dense) and I learned quite a lot - being in a profound state of ignorance to begin with.