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Month: December 2006

New Subscription Option

Published by Iris on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

If I’ve learned nothing else in the last 18 months of being a librarian, I’ve learned that everyone has their own preferred method for keeping up with the world around them. I heart RSS. Unless there’s a feed, a page is pretty much dead to me. I won’t remember to go back and check later for updates. I won’t.

I still remember the day that my colleagues recommended I use Thunderbird for my email client because it’s easy, customizable, and “it has an RSS reader!” The first time I heard that, I figured I just hadn’t heard right. They must have said some word that I didn’t hear and it sounded to me like “r s s.” The second time somebody said that I realized that I’d run across another library acronym…. So I asked what the heck this RSS thing was. Somebody explained it. I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting,” and promptly forgot about it until I started reading people’s blogs last spring. Then it all became clear.

It’s kind of like when you first got a microwave and you thought, “that might be useful sometimes.” Now you can’t imagine life without it. That’s the way it was for me and RSS.

Anyway, I also keep up with a couple of email lists, but I read those through my gmail account because I was being crushed by my inbox every morning, even with handy filters and folders set up. So now my work inbox is just that. It’s my inbox for email I receive from or about work. I can (usually) keep up with it, and I’m much less overwhelmed.

But what works for me doesn’t work for everyone so, by popular request, I’ve added a “subscribe by email” link under my RSS feed on the left-hand column. If you prefer getting my posts in your inbox, now you can.

And while we’re on the topic, I just found out (while setting up the email subscription option) that my Feedburner stats say that I’m only getting 40% of my subscribers through Bloglines! If that’s true of all of my feeds, that means I have somewhere around 150 subscribers! I had NO idea. I wish there were a way to track my atom and rss feeds the way Feedburner tracks its own feed.

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eReserves: Blessing or Curse?

eReserves: Blessing or Curse?

Published by Iris on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Blessing. Definitely a blessing to our users and database vendors, but a blessing with a curse-ish aftertaste.

Everyone is familiar with the blessing part. Users get 24/7 access to their course readings, and database vendors get a more accurate picture of the amount of usage they’re getting for their license fees. (Without eReserves we’d have to print out a copy of an article and put it on paper reserve, where it would be read by a class of students, photocopied by most of them, etc. But there’d only be one hit on the vendor’s server.)

But on our campus eReserves is an easy target for all sorts of campus ills. For example, it’s common knowledge around campus that eReserves is the cause of our horrible printing problem, with reams and reams of paper filing through our printers every day. And I’m sure that classes that depend more and more on journal readings and less on text-book compilations do make for more use of eReserves and more printing. But what nobody seems to realize is that all the requests for electronic access to journals means that more and more of our journal collection is e-only. And even if we have electronic access and print access, guess which one will be used most often? And what do people do with journal articles they find online? They print them to mark up over lunch or a midnight snack.

Not only that, but there’s more and more good, authoritative, quality research available on the free web, and you can bet that students print these pages by the ream. This is especially true because printing is free on our campus, so everything from email to research to homework spills from the two printers in the reference area at the rate of 7.06 pages every minute the library is open. (The the two reference area printers account for more printing than every other printer on campus… combined.)

I’ve also seen more and more students lately who prefer to scan print journal articles slowly, page by page, and then convert the images into PDFs all so that they could print (for free) rather than photocopy (for a fee). In related news, the use of photocopiers in the library has dropped so much in recent years that our printing department is considering removing a few of the copiers from the library entirely.

So the upshot is that printing is a definite problem, but the answer isn’t as simple as, “Well, with the advent of eReserves printing went through the roof….” The information universe is changing, not just one section of it. All of it. eReserves, journal subscription, database licensing, online publishing, assignments and pedagogical approaches to information, everything.

Oh, and eReserves is also not a devious plot to keep professors from ordering text books or paying copyright fees or anything else like that. Moodle can do all that so much more easily. ;)

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Small Revelations in Copyright

Small Revelations in Copyright

Published by Iris on Monday, December 18th, 2006

Today Dan Donnelly from the University of Minnesota’s Copyright Information and Education Initiative came to talk to us about copyright in educational settings. It’s funny, but after a year of trying to wrap my mind around the four factors of fair use, I’d forgotten all about the actual language associated with fair use in the law. Here it is:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. (Title 17 USC, section 107)

This doesn’t get us off the hook for doing the four factor analysis, of course, but it sure does help with the confidence factor.

Dan reminded us that, ironically, this doesn’t apply to course packs, since those are by nature a commercial venture.

But he did emphasize that libraries play a HUGE role in the dissemination of information on a college or university campus. We’ve already licensed huge amounts of material and, unless the licenses prohibit specific uses, this means that we’ve already paid for permission to spread information to our users. So, if you’re making a course pack, DON’T include library licensed material or you’ll be paying twice for the right to use the articles. But if you’re worried about eReserves and copyright, link to as much licensed material as possible (within the license agreement, of course) because that’s already been handsomely paid for. And remember that I said “link” to licensed material. Don’t download and upload. Link.

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‘Tis the Season

Published by Iris on Sunday, December 17th, 2006

Cards of all sizes, sent with colorful stamps and mass-produced greetings, tumble from my mail box, each one a silent reproach against me and the stack of un-signed, un-stamped, un-addressed, and (most importantly) un-sent cards sitting on my desk. Long letters from half-remembered friends point out in tiny and ornate fonts that I have not had children (or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, or offspring of any kind), have not published a book, have not gone on a cruise, have not recently graduated from anything, have not started a not-for-profit organization or advocacy group (or a company of any kind). Nor have I recently adopted anything that would otherwise have gone homeless, or invented anything that will surely revolutionize … anything.

I will not be writing a letter this year. I have never written a letter. There’s a fine line between writing resume cover letters and Christmas letters, and I’ve seen too few actual Christmas letters to be any judge of my own writing during this season.

Truth be told, I’ll be lucky to send out a mailing of any kind this year, no matter how silently my stacked cards reproach me from the desk. And if I do, I will limit myself to an unimaginative, though legibly printed, “Merry Christmas, Love Iris.” I will concentrate on spelling names correctly and keeping names properly matched with addresses.

Next month I will go back to opening my mail box with anticipation rather than dread.

[Update: All that moaning and 45 cards later (many with individualized notes, no less), I’m done. Now I’m at liberty to enjoy any cards that should come my way in the next few weeks, secure in the knowledge that my cards are no longer on my desk.]

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