Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC) post on info lit

Lorcan Dempsey's blog this morning has a post quoting Paul Courant on info lit and scholarly literacy. There's a link to Paul's article/chapter in which he's arguing that "our most important audience is already information literate and then some. [3] Our interest should be in ensuring the production of something that we might call "scholarly literacy", by which I mean the understanding of sources, methods, and their use that is at the heart of knowing what one knows and does not know."

Jazzing up information/scholarly literacy

http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001798.html

Thought you might be interested...

Linda

Information Literacy in Disciplines

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have grouped together information literacy standards, articles and curricula resources by discipline. Worth a look if you haven't seen it already.

http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/about/sections/is/projectsacrl/infolitdisciplines/index.cfm

Online tutorials

Here's something that might be useful - online tutorials contextualised to subject areas (!!!) . They focus on finding information on the internet (including subscription databases but not in detail) and obviously have a UK bias, but I found them useful particularly when thinking about the discipline specific information skills and knowledge students will need in their lives beyond university.

http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/

New place to confess all

More Web 2.0 developments.......Ning have just launched 30 applications to enhance social networking sites including Confess which is apparently a place to confess your inner most secrets anonymously. This might have a cathartic use for those with more colourful lives and hence interesting secrets to tell...I guess the rest of us will just have to make them up!

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/10/10/opensocial-ning-google-tech-enter-cx_ec_1010ning.html

Jay Walker's amazing library

On the Libraries Interact blog today they linked to an article in Wired magazine about Jay Walker who built himself a library (and a house) to showcase not only his books but also his collections of artifacts. The article is worth reading and the photos are out of this world.

ALIA Dreaming 08 Conference paper

I thought the following paper was the best at the conference for Liaison work " Turning 'cold sellers' into 'must haves': marketing unsought library products" by Julie Badger Swinburne University of Technology.
If you are interested the link to the paper is below:
http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2008/pdfs/320.TT.pdf

Cherie

Odd endnote issue when opening word

I have dealt with this endnote issue twice in the last couple of weeks. The issue occurs when opening word, an error message comes up "The specified Word library can not be unloaded because it is in use" and CWYW cannot be used.

There is a solution on the FAQ page here which involves going into Help>About MS Word> Disabled items, and enabling any endnote related items.

First mass adoption eBook reader - iPhone

Richard Wallis from TALIS discusses the iPhone as an eBook reader on his blog here



I've been using the Stanza software for a few weeks on an iPod Touch, and it is very nice, you just touch one side of the screen to turn a page, and the display is quite readable. There is a pretty good selection of free books (out of copyright classics mostly) to download via wireless, and you can download software to turn other documents into compatible files. You can also get some newspapers for free. I haven't read a whole book on it, yet, but it is quite comfortable to read newspaper articles on. I like it, but I haven't stopped borrowing Library books yet.

The official website of the Stanza software is here

What does this mean for libraries? Should we be promoting software like this to our users? Could this be the ebook application that reaches a critical mass of people and changes the book market for good?

Endnote and Refworks

We had quite a chat about whether we should buy RefWorks in MML yesterday and agreed that there is no hurry to rush into it. A higher priority is to do a better evaluation of EndnoteWeb (ENW), which we already have access to at no extra charge.
I have been working on a helpsheet for ENW for some time and have sent it out to most of you by email.
I have put at at:
N:\PVC-T&L\Library\Functional Documents\Information Services\Guides_2008
I would be good if a number of LLs could give ENW a really good test and feedback to me.
We really need to answer these questions:

• Is ENW a viable and reliable enough web based bibliography system for undergrads?
• Could we transition most undergraduate training and support to it rather than traditional EndNote?
• Is there any prospect of shifting our labs to ENW rather than continuing with the complex two yearly upgrades of labs to a new version?

Answers to these are needed. We should be thinking about what to do for semester 1 next year.

Postscript: Linda Forbes sent this extra useful information:
Yale have a table comparing EndNote Web with EndNote and Refworks - http://www.library.yale.edu/cite/whichone.html - thought it might be useful in your present discussions.

UWashington has one too - http://www.lib.washington.edu/help/endnote/endnoterefworks.pdf - which has references at the end to others.

Yes this is a web search engine!

Is this really the future of "Search"?
You've got to 'check out' MSDEWEY.
...and don't foget to try the "Best of.." button a few times.