librarians

I believe The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing may be the most important book I’ve ever written–one that can serve every public library (no matter how small) and most academic libraries, making it possible to add a new patron/community service without new equipment or expertise.

And now, you can get the book at a substantial discount: 40% off (not including shipping & handling).

Just use the code LGMP1 (that’s LGMP followed by a one) when you order The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing (follow the link!).

The discount’s good through July 30, 2012.

Quick Background

The new service: supporting micropublishing–that is, using print on demand fulfillment services to publish books that may serve niches from one to 500 copies, by producing books individually as they are needed.

The book shows you how and provides a starting professional-quality book template for Word, the same template used for the book itself. (There’s also a slightly simplified template for LibreOffice.)

Every public library has community members who have family histories and other specialized books in them–probably more than you’d ever guess. With this book, your library can make those books feasible and attractive (it’s enormously more satisfying to publish a family history as a professional 6×9 book than as a stapled or Velobound set of 8.5×11 pages!).

For smaller academic libraries, this may be a service faculty and staff would find useful–there are a lot of people out there who have special-interest books in them. For many academic libraries, there may also be another service, if (or as) you start to publish new open access journals in cooperation with campus departments: Micropublishing offers a no-cost way to make print copies (say of the journal’s annual compilation) available for those who want them.

There’s more detail on the blog post announcing the book.

Remember: Code LGMP1 for 40% off The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing.

Steven T. Shelton, member of Cozen O’Connor in New York, writes for the New York Law Journal about Threats to Brands From Social Media. This is an eye-opening article which discusses trademark risks facing companies and organizations on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It discusses potential remedies and courses of action as well as practical tips for prevention. Here are some of the recommendations discussed:

1. Obtain a trademark registration for each of your most important brands.
2. Proactively obtain account names using all of the trademark owner’s most important brands.
3. Monitor social networking sites to find unauthorized uses of brand names.

The Supreme Court issued three opinions today, all of them dealing with statutory construction issues in one form or another. The first of these is Holder v. Martinez Gutierrez (10-1542). Immigration laws allow the Attorney General to cancel the removal...

Photo by SEOULMAN66

I made the discovery today that we’ve reached a major milestone here at iLibrarian – this is the blog’s 2,010th post since its inception in 2007. Thinking back to my first post on August 1st, 2007, I hoped that this would be a place for conversation and community around Library 2.0 and emerging technology news and resources. And I’m happy to say that it has become just that – we’ve also had 1,110 comments made!! It’s been a great five years and I’m looking forward to many more to come. Thanks everyone for reading, commenting, contributing, and being a part of the iLibrarian community!

In reply to Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers, 2012 edition.:

See also this new Facebook page...and click "Like"!

Bill

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bealls-List-of-Predatory-Open-Access-Publishers/329861460417572

In reply to Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers, 2012 edition.:

See also this link.

Bill

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bealls-List-of-Predatory-Open-Access-Publishers/329861460417572

In reply to Wind-Up Toys @ The Library:

I've been collecting wind-up toys for years myself. It's something I started well into my "adult" years (chronologically adult, anyway) that never fails to give me a smile.

Actually three or more but Kashmir Hill, former ATL blogger, identifies three in her The Not-So Private Parts blog post on Forbes: Cam-u-flage, “the best spy camera app to take pictures without anyone noticing.” Night Recorder, a voice activiated recorder...

Google made changes to its search engine last week. One of these is Knowledge Graph. Results about things, places, or people will now include a side bar with related information for the searched term. This content can include key dates,...

The finalists in the ABAJ-Alabama Law School's second annual Harper Lee Prize are The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly Murder One by Robert Dugoni Breach of Trust by David Ellis The reader poll as well as brief descriptions of each...

Amy-Mae Elliott at Mashable offers 10 Facebook Tips for Power Users. These are all excellent and useful suggestions, many of which I didn’t know myself and will be excited to try out! Here are the first five recommendations:

1. View Photos Full-Screen
2. Hide What You Read
3. Create a List Based on Your Interests
4. Populate Your Map With Pics
5. Reposition Photos on Your Timeline

FOIA expert Scott A. Hodes shares his professional experience working with FOIA Analysts, and their perspective on how they make the FOIA process smoother in regard to their relationships with requesters. This however is a double edged coin – FOIA requesters can also take specific steps and make efforts to assist with the satisfactory and timely completion of a request when communicating with government FOIA personnel.

In reply to Libraries and the Myth of Mobile Phone Use:

amazing post Mobile Number

Stephanie Sammons at the Social Media Examiner offers 5 Tips to Build and Grow Your LinkedIn Network. If you’re wondering how best to leverage LinkedIn’s 150 million–member worldwide network, you’ll want to check out this post. Here are her first 3 recommendations:

• #1: Update Your Status Frequently and Consistently
• #2: Build Connections Constantly
• #3: Be Strategic about When You are Active on LinkedIn

Take a look: For more, see Sebastian Anthony's Disney Touché turns everyday objects into multi-touch, gesture-recognizing interfaces on ExtremeTech. [JH]

In reply to Give Ebooks To The World! Unglue.it has launched!:

Can unglue.it succeed? Quirky initial selections raise questions http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/can-unglue-it-succeed-quirky-initial-selections-raise-ques...

In academic libraries, there are usually so many levels of priorities. There are the priorities of the university. There are the priorities of the library. Each unit probably has its own priorities, as does each individual. Ideally, these all sync up nicely, where an individual can show how their priorities mesh with library’s and university’s priorities. However, it’s not always easy for the library to support all of those university priorities. That’s often because the library doesn’t have the people-power or financial resources to do everything well. So the library has to choose whether they follow every university priority in a superficial way, or whether they focus on the priorities that they can accomplish well in light of limited resources. Neither is a completely satisfying choice.

At my library, and really at the University a a whole, there is definitely a tug-of-war going on between the original access mission of the University and the growing importance of research. Clearly both are important and both require library support. My colleagues are deeply committed to both roles, but it’s frustrating when you know you can’t do it all as well and completely as you’d like. You can’t develop a vibrant scholarly communications and data management program AND have a comprehensive program of outreach and instruction to the neediest students when the same people are involved in both. And yes, we’re doing all of those things, but not to the extent that we’d like to. Having been at a small place before, we certainly dealt with those limitations too (we still don’t have an institutional repository at Norwich), but the expectations of the academic community were lower because we weren’t a large research institution. And in light of budget cuts, I’m sure many, many academic libraries are feeling similarly frustrated by what they can’t do (or do enough of).

And this tug-of-war is seen in the instruction program as well. We can’t do all of the teaching we’d like given our staffing, so we have to prioritize. But how? With the growing research priority, do we focus more on faculty outreach and graduate-level instruction? With the focus on Freshman retention, do we put more time and effort in teaching first-year students? We have a strong liaison program and a ton of teaching goes on in upper-level undergraduate classes, especially those that are core to majors (like research methods). This is fantastic! I remember when I got to Norwich, very little library instruction was going on outside of the lower-division classes and we worked hard over the years to get information literacy instruction integrated into core courses in the majors. PSU has been there for a long time. Is that less important than reaching Freshman or more? Or is there, as I suspect, no one right answer to that question?

So how do we set priorities? How do we determine how much focus to put on each thing we do? A colleague recently showed me stats on what percentage of the total enrollment is each class (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, etc.). Do we use that to determine our instructional priorities? Do we say “sophomores make up x% of student enrollment, so we will provide x% of our teaching in 200-level classes?” It’s certainly a concrete way of making decisions, and probably as good as any, but I don’t feel like needs and priorities translate so easily to exact numbers and percentages. We still need to take into account Univerity priorities, student needs, what classes are the most valuable to be involved with, and in what classes can we make the greatest difference. If someone comes up with a formula for figuring this out, they deserve some kind of award.

Another thing we talk a great deal about is using learning objects to augment and/or replace the one-shot. And I’ve started to wonder where is the best place in the curriculum to implement this? Should we replace Freshman-level instruction with online learning modules because most students are not really at an emotional/intellectual space yet where they are capable of serious research or do we focus on face-to-face instruction because they need the high-touch approach? Do we employ learning objects in upper-division classes because the students are more self-motivated once they’re in their majors, or is that the critical time to connect with them because the sort of research they’re doing is higher-level? Do we stop teaching grad students face-to-face because of their much higher motivation level, or is that the perfect reason to focus on them? I don’t know if there have been studies on this, but it would be interesting to figure out at which level does it make the most sense to provide face-to-face instruction and at what level would students benefit most from learning objects. It seems like most suites of learning objects designed to replace face-to-face instruction happen at the Freshman level, but that might just be because there are so many sections of the same few courses and it’s easier to create something that works for many, many, many classes.

None of these issues is unique to my University; in fact, I’d argue that in a world of rising materials costs and shrinking budgets, they’re pretty darn universal. Even at little old Norwich, where the student/librarian ratio was so much smaller, we had to prioritize. It got to a point where I had to start cutting down on the number of history classes I was teaching, because it was taking up such a disproportionate amount of my time (although I really enjoyed it!). So, at your institutions, how have you determined what to prioritize in terms of library instruction? When demand for your services exceeds supply, what do you stop doing? Where have you replaced face-to-face instruction with other lower-touch models and why?

 

http://www.imls.gov/new_report_explores_roles_of_libraries_and_museums_in_an_era_of_participatory_culture.aspx

The Salzburg Global Seminar and the Institute of Museum and Library Services announce the publication of “Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture.” The report details the events of the October, 2011 convening of fifty-eight library, museum, and cultural heritage leaders from thirty-one countries. Together, the participants developed a set of recommendations to help libraries and museums embrace new possibilities for public engagement that are made possible by societal and technological change.

The deliberations identified “imperatives for the future” including accepting the notion of democratic access, placing a major emphasis on public value and impact, and embracing lifelong learning.

Building on the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) initiative The Future of Museums and Libraries as well as on past museum and library sessions convened by the Salzburg Global Seminar, this session brought together library and museum leaders, cultural and educational policymakers, cultural sector researchers, representatives of library and museum education programs, technology experts, sociologists, journalists, and library and museum associations.

The report captures rich perspectives about the changing roles and responsibilities of libraries and museums. The publication describes each of the five plenary sessions and the working group recommendations that resulted from them: culture and communities; learning transformed; building the skills of library and museum professionals; and demonstrating public value. It includes descriptions of innovative case studies from around the globe and a summary of the concluding keynote lecture given by Vishakha Desia, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society.

Download the report.

A limited number of hard copies are available. Contact imlsinfo@imls.gov for more information.

 

http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2012/05/deans-list-50-must-read-higher-education-technology-blogs

Thanks EdTech and thanks to the fine folks that write with me here at TTW.

In reply to Vermont resident hopes to start private library:

In the 1950's the town of Athens voted to stop funding the library that the town had started in 1895. There was no librarian, no physical building to call a library and the number of books had decrease through loss. But there were better roads which meant people could now go to Townshend, Grafton (both with small public libraries) or to Bellows Falls which has a large library. There was also the Bookmobile during the warmer months. This sufficed for over 50 years. A library needs to be more than donated, second hand books. There should be new books, magazines, internet availability, newspapers, and much more. We are a small town, a very small town (less than 450 residents). The finances are not there to properly support a library. And unless a library meets certain criteria there are no grants nor any funding. We have survived for many years without a physical library in town. We have people who volunteer and donate at local libraries that are literally minutes away from our homes. As for some of the other information from Ms. Stevens. Maybe not all of it is quite as clear as it could be. But if she wishes to go ahead and have a 'private' library then she should at least try.