- link to .pdf of final report
- Cameron Neylon on Google Wave
Archive for the 'UNC' Category
Title: Toward Academic Library 2.0: Development and Application of a Library 2.0 Methodology
Authors: Michael C. Habib
Issue Date: 17-Nov-2006
Publisher: School of Information and Library Science
Abstract: Recently, librarians have struggled to understand their relationship to a new breed of Web services that, like libraries, connect users with the information they need. These services, known as Web 2.0, offer new service models, methods, and technologies that can be adapted to improve library services. Additionally, these services affect library users’ information seeking behaviors, communication styles, and expectations. The term Library 2.0 has been introduced into the professional language of librarianship as a way to discuss these changes. This paper works to establish a theoretical foundation of Library 2.0 in academic libraries, or Academic Library 2.0.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1901/356
Available for download: http://mchabib.com/masterspaper.pdf
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I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the paper. Please leave feedback in the comments. Thanks.
Technorati tags: library 2.0 library-20 library2.0 L2 web 2.0 web2.0 academic libraries academiclibrary20
I am live-blogging this from UNC-Chapel Hill where the Health Sciences Library is hosting a talk by Craig Silverstein (Google’s first employee and Director of Technology) titled, “Organizing the World’s Information: Google’s Vision for the 21st Century”. Please pardon the lack of editing. Tickets ran out a while ago. I procrastinated and was lucky to get a seat in the overflow section watching a live feed of the event.
I missed the intro. the wireless was messed up in all the auditoriums. I was able to make it into the balcony though.
Craig had a little problem with the powerpoint and joked about having problems with technology. Craig is giving a history of how Google came to be (Pagerank). Showing a slide of the prototype. They couldn’t afford real legos, so they used generic legos to build a case. However, the cheap imposters fell apart one night.
“Britney Spears” was one of the first reasons they moved beyond search. They noticed tons of mispellings and realized they had the the sheer quantity of information to mine for correct spelling and to offer them when someone searches for the wrong spelling.
How then can we make it better? A Google product timeline. They also acquired products like Blogger that help people create content. Of course everything is paid for by their advertising model.
Slide: “Tech Revolution: from mainframes to the web” – big servers, many clients. In other words, the web as platform.
Their goals:
- Organize all of the worlds information
- Make it accessible
- Make it useful
But how?
- Is it practical to scan all of the books ever published. Used a metronome to time how long it takes to scan a book. At 45 minutes a book, they decided it was practical and set forth with Google Book Search.
- The idea is to search the full text of every book and recieve appropriate snippits.
- But many books are still under copyright. Partner with publishers for current print (5%), out of copyright (20%), the other 75% are out of print and in wierd copyright limbo. This is what libraries help with, but it is hard to find them. Thus, they only show snippets.
- Google Scholar: Anurag’s undergraduate thesis. Within 48 hours of publishing, someone told him he made a mistake on page 2 that had been disproven a few years prior. He then vowed to make it possible for people to find those important citations like the one he missed.
- Find a paper
- Shows found cited by
- (missed it)
- Appropriate books
- If they don’t have the item indexed, they at least show the citation if they have it.
- Points out OpenURLlink resolver integration with scholar.
- “Mobile is ubiquitous” – they envision searches to be primarily on cell phones or their descendants.
- He points out what mobile services they already offer, but admits that it is still a very clunky experience.
- Seeing and hearing what we want when we want it. Example used was video iPod.
- Support of one laptop per child program
- “Google Co-op” – how to collect human expertise to help with domain specialties. Didn’t get all of what he was saying.
- Health is one of the first topics they tackled. More health searches than anything else.
- This empowers both consumers and physicians to make better decisions.
- They were told early on by a user”I just wanted to let you know that Google may well have saved my life…” He was having chest pains and googled heart attack to find out symptoms. He was soon calling 911.
Technorati: google
Hopefully I will be able to blog more in a week or two once I settle in for the semester.
Leslie blogged about her visit in a post on Talking to Strangers on ALA Buses and put up a picture as well. Michael Stephens then mentioned her post and then Karen Schneider mentioned it on her blog. Michael was just using it as an example of her posts, but we were still glad that he chose the one about our event.
I just found out that I will be staffing the NC Knows statewide virtual chat reference service one evening a week next semester. This is exciting because I have not yet to provide reference service in a collaborative project of this size before. It also provides service to a variety of user populations making it different from the collaborative chat service that I staff currently. That service only covers UNC-Chapel Hill, NCSU, and Duke. I will also get to try out the QuestionPoint software, which I haven’t used before.
I just completed a review of 43 Things as the final project for JOMC: 191.3, Blogging, We the Media, and Virtual Communities. The review is it iself a website located here. Each student in the class is also reviewing a virtual community. You can see the links to the reports in bloggroll on the class blog.
Yesterday, Brian Russell (audioactivism.org) spoke to my blogging seminar about podcasting. His talk discussed a number of topics including the use of podcasting for activism, not journalism. I, however, was most interested in his discussion of media literacy which describes the ability to understand the the structure and presentation of content in mass media. This is clearly a very important skill for an informed public in an age with so many different types of media. I certainly see this as highly related to information literacy. While librarians train patrons to evaluate information on the web and in print media, it seems that the evaluation of audio/visual forms of mass media, such as TV, are often left out of information literacy curricula designed for college and adult students. I am not sure if school media specialist’s are trained to teach these skills to students. One important aspect of media literacy seems to be empowering individuals to understand how mass media communications are created and designed to influence viewers. I think all too often librarians, myself included, focus too much on how users can evaluate the end product and don’t go into enough detail on how websites or journals are actually created. Stepping back and examining the structure of something can often add a deeper level of understanding. For example, learning algebra adds an additional layer of meaning to simple arithmetic. Brian will be podcasting the entire discussion soon and I will add a link then.
Jimmy Wales visited my class this morning. I learned a lot about the way conflict has been managed on the U.S. version of Wikipedia. One topic of discussion was how the communities of different language versions have developed different methods for mediating conflict. It makes sense, but I hadn’t thought of that. Jimmy admitted to having little direct knowledge of how some languages are managing these issues because he can’t read many of them himself. This is good news when considering the sustainability of the project once he leaves. It was very interesting to hear his thoughts on issues of control and how the Wiki model is very different in this respect from many other models for social software. I definitely need to do some more research into the theory underlying the Wiki model. One funny thing I found out about was the Guerilla UK spelling campaign. Fortunately, I just discovered that their is a counter campaign. Had I known sooner that my nation’s honor (not honour) was at stake, I might have become a more active user!
