Information Futures » library

23 things and an avatar

Margaret L Ruwoldt — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 01:22:37 +0000

Staff of the University Library are participating in a “23 things” program this month, learning about social media and online teaching by completing a series of self-paced modules.

This week’s topic is blogging, and this post is my demonstration that I know how to blog ;-)

It’s also the debut appearance of my new avatar:

The “23 things” program is based on a concept developed Helene Blowers in the US. The program became the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County’s “Learning 2.0″ project and inspired the activity-based concept of ‘23 things’ which has been successfully implemented in libraries worldwide.

The Melbourne University Library program will run over a 6 week period in which participants will use free web and LMS-based applications in order to complete the 23 activities. Weeks 1-3 will run from 24 November until the Christmas closedown, and then weeks 4-6 will run from late January for completion by early February 2009.

Library research as a form of computation

informationfutures — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:32:42 +0000

Posted on behalf of Steering Committee member Professor Janet McCalman, who writes:

I am anxious that a paper, originally recommended to me by Pip Pattison, be shared as widely as possible in the academic community and among those involved in the IF Commission.

The document is a draft paper (2007) by Andrew Abbott on “library research as a form of computation.” It is available from the ‘books and papers’ list on Abbott’s personal web site.

The Information Futures Commission’s Consultation Paper quotes from this document, and from other works by Abbott, who is a sociologist at the University of Chicago.

Benchmark surveys: research support provided by libraries

Margaret L Ruwoldt — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:16:03 +0000

From our own Library Intelligencer (Shirley Sullivan), a handful of links to benchmarking surveys about research support provided by libraries.

Physical spaces for scholarly information

Margaret L Ruwoldt — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:13:45 +0000

This week’s VALA 2008 conference in Melbourne includes a series of presentations about designing physical and virtual spaces for scholarly activity.

Scholarly activity happens in many different kinds of places. Perhaps the most obvious is the library building.

What does a library look like? Here are photos of two libraries that look like giant bookshelves: temporary construction hoarding around the Cardiff (Wales) library; and a more permanent decorative wall in Kansas City, Missouri (USA).

The Nonist provides 14 photos from Candida Höfer’s book, Libraries, showing quite a traditional style of library: multitudes of old books, galleries overlooking reading rooms, and so on.

Things are changing in the world of library design: just look at the variety of topics on the UK Designing Libraries web site. The list of resources on the Libris Design site covers a similarly broad range of topics, from signage to acoustics. The Whole Building Design Guide describes some typical attributes of an academic library and outlines the design considerations that arise from these. All three of these sites are intended for people who plan and (re)develop physical library spaces.

Among my webby/designer colleagues, the renovation of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has become a well-known (and admired) example of user-focused design techniques being applied to both physical and virtual spaces. In particular, the team of architects and design consultants spent time learning about the different ways people seek, find and use information in a library.

Where else do we interact with scholarly information? What kinds of physical spaces do we need on campus to encourage and enhance that activity?