you won’t allow proxy access? guess again!
no post-cancellation access rights? ha ha.
ILL not permitted? please rethink your stance on that.
made over at the heromachine
every once in a while you need to be reminded that your way of doing things isn’t the only way things can be done. take archie mcphee, for example. if that were my store i would reorganize the bins and put things in thematic order: bottle stoppers, three-fingered chemical gloves, nuclear pants would all go together; wind-up cows, hopping lederhosen, dashboard jesus would all go together. that kind of organizational scheme would work well in a library but is a horrible, boring solution in a toy store. the delight of archie mcphee is finding a giant rubber bat in the same bin as rubber brushes and a couple of bouncy balls. the disorganization is intentional and the result is really a lot of fun. i may reconsider the way i’ve got my office set up. maybe i need more monkeys.
big ups to nikki for taking me there, twice!
It was encouraging to see so many librarians at the ACRL conference using social research methods. As discussed in the sessions I attended, there is real effort to understand the culture in which we work so that we can serve our patrons effectively. Some of the methods used to find out about the faculty and student population are contextual inquiry, Q methodology, and focus groups, to name a few. Awesome! I think I’ve found the conference that matches my needs and curiosity level. See you in 2011 in Philadelphia, ACRL.
Here are some posters and presentations that used the methods I mentioned:
(poster, used contextual inquiry) Millennial students’ mental models of search tools. Lucy Holman, Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore
(paper, used Q methodology) Conflict and Consensus – Clusters of Opinions on E-books. Aaron Shrimplin and Andrew Revelle, Miami University
(paper, used focus groups) Fishing for Information: Using Focus Group Research to Discover Student Perceptions of Library Services and Resources. Rebecca Byrum and William Weare, Valparaiso University
bonus geek fact: the word research was used in the titles of eight poster or paper presentations at this conference
you know what i’d like to see at a national conference someday? a poster session of failures. each poster in the session would have to demonstrate some aspect of a failure in a library, and what was learned from it. so much focus at conferences is given to successes, but i think our profession would gain as much from learning about each other’s failures.
Summary: Online storage tool that synchronize your files across multiple computers. How can a synchronization system be considered an organizational tool? I don’t have to remember where I put my thumb drive, remember to bring home my external hard drive, or email myself any files. Time saved = organization!
Review and how-to: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dropbox-review-invites-and-7-questions-with-the-founder/
Here’s a link from the cogscilibrarian to a document she wrote and shared with a class via Dropbox.
personal notes: I’ve been testing Dropbox while writing my latest article. I have a PC at work, a Mac desktop at home, along with a Dell Mini laptop. I installed Dropbox on all machines and have been working on my article at whichever computer I happen to be in front of at the time, all without a flash drive or emailing myself files. In my Dropbox for this article I was working with the programs Excel, SPSS, and Word. Dropbox allows me to save those files in their native formats, no conversions necessary.
the language of JSTOR’s terms and conditions is written with positive language. rather than just telling you all the things you *can’t* do, they swing it so they also tell you all the things you *can* do with the archived journal articles. clause 2.1.e. is especially nice. i’ve never seen this written explicitly in a license before:
on an ad hoc basis and without commercial gain, sharing Content with an individual who is not an Authorized User for purposes of collaboration, comment, or the scholarly exchange of ideas;
