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San Diego State University has over 20,000 comics and related items to process! (Here’s a basic list of comics waiting to be cataloged!) Like most libraries, they don’t have the funding to process the donations, and to make them accessible to patrons. Thus, San Diego State University has set up their own crowdfunding portal, called […]

Harper College, located in northwest Chicagoland, is a community college serving 40,000 students. Since the 2011-2012 school year, Harper College has a selected a title as part of their “One Book, One Harper” community read. (A community read is where a local library sponsors a community-wide book club featuring one title which is read and discussed locally. […]

I’m happy to report that my University has passed a Senate resolution (pdf) requiring all faculty members to deposit peer-reviewed journal articles in the University’s repository - Spectrum. Perhaps a little shameless promotion here, but the University Librarian and the Spectrum repository library committee really championned the cause of Open Access to Faculty in the last 2 years, and in the process, increased the visibility and importance of the library at Concordia. Small step for our library, big step for librarianship.

The Progressive Librarians Guild has issued a statement regarding Elsevier’s publication of fake journals. Here’s a quote:

The Progressive Librarians Guild decries the distortion and abuse of research and science by corporate greed exemplified by Elsevier and Merck, and calls upon librarians to educate the public and researchers about all instances of collusion of academic and scholarly publishing with profit-making business entities in palming- off corporate propaganda through deceptive publishing practices, which debase scholarship and science, conspire against the public interest, and pollute the well of genuine scholarly information and communication.

On another note, in 2007, a coalition called PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine) started a website whose goal it was to “advocate for policies that ensure the quality, integrity, and economic viability of peer-reviewed journals.” This group was established by the Executive Council of the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). On the AAP Board of Directors sits an Elsevier representative.

This group has nothing to do with the current Elsevier scandal (the coalition was created to lobby against government mandated Open Access policies), but perhaps Elsevier should go back and read some of the principles (see how often the word integrity is used) and goals of this coalition, which was created to tout the importance of private sector publishing:

PRISM seeks to educate all stakeholders about the importance of maintaining the integrity of published information, and sustaining the incentives for all publishers to invest in the system of independent publishing that continues to sustain the public’s trust in scientific and medical research.

Two undergraduate students are pitching their tents inside the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre @ UBC for the next 10 days as part of a national campaign to raise support, awareness and funds for global literacy, according to UBC Public Affairs. Check out the Live-In for Literacy site (with live webcam!). Other participating libraries include Queen’s University, University of Toronto, Concordia University, McMaster University, Laurentian University and Memorial University.

Jamie Coniglio, George Mason University

- computers aren’t technology
- internet is better than tv
- doing is more important than knowing
- learning more closely resembles nintendo than logic
- multitasking is a way of life
- typing is preferred to handwriting
- staying connected is essential
- zero tolerance for delays
- consumer/creator are blurring

quick overview of social networking and different types of sites

at George Mason University, they’re playing with:
- wiki for internal communication
(showed Chad Boeninger’s business wiki as an example of a public wiki)
- Meebo widget chat box
- blogs, although they have fewer now than before because they were using them to route around the fact they didn’t have a CMS
- moving to a research portal that blends WordPress and the Internet Scout Toolkit
- have fooled around with MySpace, and they’ll respond, but not much going on for them there
- same thing with Facebook
- seriously looking at LibGuides; playing with it right now
- have discovered Zoho and are trying Zoho Show as a way to share materials among staff
- del.icio.us bookmark sets
- showed the UThink blogging project at the University of Minnesota
- virtual reality
- showed the browser Flock

marketing & social networks
- keep your content fresh
- provide reliable content
- know your market
- have good content

from an organizational point of view, where do we put the personnel for this

challenges
- declining visits/gate counts (at least in academia)
- fewer reference desk transactions
- fewer circulations of print materials
- competitors in the information environment
- disintermediation

- being where our users
- being useful where our users are
- realizing we aren’t in control (chaotic versus structured)
- silo-ing or personalization
- who’s on desk
- face time versus online
- privacy? her staff uses nom de plumes on Facebook to protect their email addresses and identities
- keeping up/”losing” skills
- getting/keeping good parapros
- riding the tsunami
- organizational structure/agility
free the bound periodicals? and more?
- discomfort (certainty versus uncertainty)

students aren’t using their GMU email addresses because they already have other personal ones

responses
- stay aware of “uber” environment to kee up
- pilot/try it out (if someone wants to try it, she says sure)
- student input/feedback/training us
- keep/move on/ can’t be wedded to “one way”
- avoid searching for a magic bullet; can’t emphasize flexibility enough
- departmental facility; take advantage of your staff’s expertise
- streamline aspects of “standard” job elements
- read special library “tactics”
- create zones of experimentation
- building a “knowledge practice;” start with the ones who will work with you
- closer alignment with curricular changes, emerging and redesign academic programs
- movement from “support service” toward collaboration and partnerships
- value risk-taking
- reorientation toward user-centered services; noted University of Rochester’s anthropological report published through ACRL

service transformation to
- visible
- trainer/learner
- collaborative
- informal
- visual

Robarts Library has always been a popular conversational piece. Whether you love it or hate it, the news of a $75 million upgrade reported in the Toronto Star will no doubt add interest to what is an already popular topic. The provincial government is providing a $15 million grant up front.

In addition to being known as ‘the dungeon’, looking like a turkey and its brutalist architecture, Robarts is a closed stacks system. When it opened in 1972, Robarts was initially planned to be closed to undergraduate students as well. Student protested successfully with petitions and a sit in to which 500 students showed up.

While there are plans to replace the concrete covering the stacks with windows that will let some light in, there’s no mention of changing the system from the closed stacks system to one with increased browsing access for the public.

Is there still an argument for closed stacks in academic libraries? To be fair, access is being improved through UTLibrary’s embracing of open access. Copyright friendly books are in the process of being digitized through UTL’s partnership with the Open Content Alliance. The public can also browse reference books and current journals. For access to current materials, the public can request item retrieval, but to browse the stacks or borrow current materials the minimum cost is $60 for three months.

-PC-