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Category: Tools and Technology

Admin Stuff: Moving to Blogger Baby

Published by Iris on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Ok, so as soon as my little “switch to the new blogger” button comes back (they’ve taken it away because too many people are switching all at once), I’m planning to transition this blog over there. This may mean that you get a whole bunch of posts coming through your aggregators… sorry. Hopefully this will only happen when I first make the switch, though I don’t know what happens when you start applying “labels” and stuff, but I’ll do my best not to spam you with too many updated posts.

Wish me oodles of luck. I definitely do NOT want to spend hours and hours trouble-shooting. But I also want to do this thing on my own terms and not log in one day and find that it’s been done for me.

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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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Open Book Cover Images?!?

Open Book Cover Images?!?

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 14th, 2006

The amazing people who actually contribute to NGC4lib (as opposed to pure lurkers, like me), got tired of talking about license agreements, money, license agreements… oh yeah, and license agreements when it came to getting book cover images into library catalogs. So they’ve decided to create an open database of book cover images.

At first, when they put together a wiki page to think about the project and then started thinking about how to match images with books, I figured it would be like most of the other discussions that happen on listservs: it would unearth a whole bunch of interesting questions, start a plethora of interesting discussions, and then die a slow and painless death.

But then Tim Spalding from LibraryThing and Rob Styles from Talis both offered to host the database. Spalding is checking to see if he’d be able to contribute his hundreds of thousands of user-generated images to the database, and everyone is talking about easy ways for libraries to contribute new images to the database. This could happen, folks! And if it does, I would LOVE to add images from it to our catalog.

[Update: Since this remains my most frequently visited blog post, I thought I’d just mention here that as of 8/7/2008, LibraryThing is offering free user-generated book cover images to libraries and bookstores. See the LibraryThing blog post for details.]

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