Kate and I have been working on a series of Vialogues and an mSchool hub aimed at language acquisition. We’ve been chipping away at Mandarin Chinese with a series of videos and a moodle home in its nascent stages. You can see the videos we’ve uploaded at Vialogues #Chinese. This EdLab Development & Research meeting is meant to generate ideas and feedback, it’s still an early-stage project, but we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Activity #1: Pick a Vialogue

Activity #2: Find a Youtube Video
Find a Mandarin-based YouTube video
Upload to Vialogues.com
Add relevant questions, comments
Add hash tag #Chinese & corresponding level for example: #Beginner, #Intermediate etc. as the very last possible time-stamped comment.
Tip: Be sure your vialogue is public!

Activity #3: Please navigate to our mSchool shell, called Vialogues Language Acquisition Hub (http://library.tc.columbia.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=1144) The hub is meant to be a home for all our language acquisition resources and Vialogues as well as an evolving FAQ for how to use them. As you can see, it’s not quite done yet! Please help us improve by answering the following questions:

Instebooks is but one among a crop of mobile photo e-book publishing apps, but has a few interesting features that set it apart from the pack. Instebooks lacks the weird mobile-to-print push that characterizes sites like Shutterfly and Blurb and subs in increased hand-holding, librarian cool extras, and high social network connectivity.

Pros:
Reference books! Instebooks automatically indexes all your tags and in-text references creating a wonderful appendix of your people, places, and events. It also has an atlas option so you can map it up on you travels. It’s voice-to-text feature seems cool and useful, escaping tiny keypad typing makes it easy to maintain a record on the go. Instebooks also offers 50 pre-created apps with stock photo covers that’ll work out of the box for even faster creativity.

There’s been a hullabaloo over a little piece that Publishers Weekly ran in their Genreville column. It represents a most perfect fusion between smarmy, p-publishing and old-fashioned internet outrage. The piece in question, Authors Say Agents Try to “Straighten” Gay Characters in YA, follows the tribulations of two young adult authors trying to market a non-white, non-straight, post-apocalyptic novel to major publishers who, typically, try to nudge them towards a more mainstream audience. Agents were horrified, other YA LGBT-friendly authors rebuked their sensational story, people were tweeting up a storm (#YesGayYA), yet some authors stood aside for “fear of being blacklisted.” Wait, what?

Let’s back it up a moment.

With the recent news about the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust suit a lot of information has been popping up about Hathi's strategies for identifying and contacting the copyright holders of their orphan works. This blog post from the Authors Guild presents a seeming fail by Hathi's researchers to discover a literary agent through Google. The Guild's seemed a little circuitous, but they apparently identified and alerted the author about his pending orphan status. According to HathiTrust's identification workflow even an author who did not respond to phone or email contact would be considered a potential orphan rather than a candidate, but I'm honestly a little shocked that the 163 current candidates haven't been perfectly checked and rechecked by Hathi's librarians.

Christenson, Heather. (2011). HathiTrust: A Research Library at Web Scale. Library Resources & Technical Services, Apr2011, 55(2), p93-102.

Description:
This article presents a description of the techniques and infrastructure of the HathiTrust, a digital repository for library collections. The platform of the HathiTrust is a library shared and controlled repository which rose up to house the bountiful digi-crop of the Google Books Project in the wake of their legal troubles. While Google books has floundered into a shadow of its former self, HathiTrust has flourished and began to problematically tackle the problem of orphan works.

Bookhunch is meant to be a social, crowdsourced review site for new and unpublished literature. Readers are able to leave their mark on the in-site book display to interact with other users and earn points for additional access privileges. There are very few books available on the site right now, but if they gain access to the exclusive pre-pub content they’re after, a big user community should follow.

Pros:
The concept seems very cool and it’s currently invitation-only (mine a few days after I requested it) so they’ve built a very engaged user-base that seems to reflect the ultimate purpose of the site. Users leave insightful comments against an in-site view of the book content. Most of their books are public domain, but as the site develops it should be easier for users to find interesting content.

The 9,558,529 total volumes digitized in the HathiTrust will soon be full text searchable in EBSCO and OCLC. As you may know, the HathiTrust provides a home for materials digitized as part of the Google Books Project and Internet Archive initiatives and has partnered with several academic libraries (including Columbia) to host digitization efforts for both public domain and under copyright materials. These materials will retain their copyright and privacy status, but their content will be search-accessible.

This development will be the googliest thing to happen to OCLC since the single search bar. With full text searching, OCLC will begin to function much like Google Books, though this library-headed effort excludes the problematic snippet views. I think that Google has pretty effectively shown us that full text searching, while easy and awesome, doesn’t fully replace full bibliographic records or information literacy instruction.

Gluejar is a movement to “liberate” copyrighted e-books. Users will be able to rally around books in a Kickstarter-esque fashion to crowdraise the re-licensing of beloved e-literature under Creative Commons. Gluejar isn’t currently live, but they’ve been plotting and blogging at gluejar.com and have recently established a home base for “ungluing” books at unglue.it

Pros:
Gluejar’s mission is to pay e-book producers a fair price for their work and ideas and release those ideas into the world to freely share, copy, and remix. This is certainly a lofty goal and Gluejar is aiming broadly. I can see a site like this contributing to a future in which nothing goes to the digital equivalent of “out of print.”

There’s been a buzz lately around DIY information space creation. The successfully funded Uni project, which Julia blogged about last month, is an example of an outdoor space serving up a selection of services formerly found in traditional library buildings. Another example of this is the Library Lab project created by Noll & Tam Architects. The Lab project uses geometric modules based on Penrose tiling to create flexible service spaces targeted at major library functions but suitable for non-library locations. These functions center around print-to-digital and digi-to-print services, storage, and access to selected subscriptions and software. Best of all, the modules are highly customizable and the plans are open source.

The friction and interest generated around “bookless” libraries and embedded librarianship in the past few months has made clear that we are becoming untethered from our library spaces in a way we have long predicted.

Toce, J. & Schofield, C. (2011). Technical Services Outreach Strategies for Academic Libraries. Technical Services Quarterly, 28, 312-321.

Technical Services (Materials at TC) is responsible for much of the backstage work in libraries. Cataloging, resource maintenance, acquisitions, and delivery are essential and traditional library functions that suffer from a publicity problem, even amongst other modes of librarianship. Shrinking budgets and the proliferation of collaborative and commercial alternatives to on-site cataloging and collection development have eliminated many a technical services department. This article aims to present strategies of outreach and production for maintaining relevance in technical services.