Laura Costello's blog

Summon 2.0 Webinar

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:39:03 -0400

This morning I attended a Serials Solutions webinar on the latest iteration of the Summon discovery system. If you attended the Materials Need for Speed D&R in March, you know that Summon is a federated search of the library's electronic resources that functions with a single search bar and has faceted results. Summon 2.0 is an upcoming release (June) that focuses on UX improvements to the system based on Serials Solutions' analysis of usage patterns in Summon and interviews with students. These improvements include:

A decluttered facets bar with increased whitespace
Facets ordered based on popularity
Fewer results shown, with more information for each result

Spread the News: Roomer is Live!

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:32:01 -0500

Roomer is live at room 103 on the 1st floor of the library! Go book some rooms! Tell your friends! Many thanks to Yudan, Josh, Wei, Basak, and Daniel for their work on the product, Hui Soo for his mad drill skillz, and Brian for providing an emergency iPad cable. It was a long road, but the end product is every bit as fancy as we'd hoped.

Sierra Adventure!

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:27:37 -0500

On December 26th we’ll be making the transition from Millennium to Sierra, Innovative’s new, open LMS. Sierra retains all of the functionality of Millennium, but has the advantage of an improved workflow and development opportunities. The improved UI brings the system up to speed with internet standards; it no longer resembles Windows 98 and includes a back button! Staff users will also appreciate the integrated login, which eliminates the need to open up new “modules” for circulation, acquisitions, and management. The system is also more focused on in-house library development and will give us more freedom to design applications that suit our particular needs. If the talk on the listserve is any indication, Innovative has made a product with the potential for exceptional change that also maintains workflow. Most sites have reported that the learning curve from Millennium to Sierra is almost nonexistent and that most users are able to continue to perform functions with little to no transition training.

That said, I’ll go over some of the most apparent changes in the new system:

Here you can see the drop down menu which takes the place of the left hand navigation icons and the additional modules. If you want to perform different functions in the system you will use this drop down for navigation.

Google Engineers Create Awesome Vacuum-powered Scanner

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:01:44 -0500

Check out this amazing book scanning machine powered by a household vacuum. Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh built this prototype during his 20% time. It costs around $1,500 to build and can scan 1,000 pages in 90 minutes! The plans are open source too! Makes me wish I had a garage...

[The Listserve] and Teaching

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:29:47 -0500

I got this email today from a teacher in [The Listserve] and wanted to put it out there in case anyone wanted to help out! Maybe we should reach out and see if she'd like to use Vialogues to host her video collection?

Hi! I hope that you're having a great day, I sure am! I got this "you won the listserve lottery" email on my birthday! OK, since I've got a big audience: I teach high school in a detention facility for teen-aged repeat offenders. One of the many things that we try to do for the kids is to give them some exposure to the different kinds of opportunities they might have as adults if they manage to hang in there and finish their education. Most of the students in our classrooms have had little exposure to the wider world beyond grinding poverty and limited adult support. That's where you come in (I hope).

I am using this platform to ask you to do something for my students. And maybe for students everywhere, who knows? I'd like you to make a video, maybe 3-5 minutes, about what you do for a living. If you can try to answer the following questions, that would be awesome: 1. What kind of work do you do (day to day duties and overall) 2. How did you come to do your job? 3. What kind of education or training does your job require? 4. What kind of salary, benefits, life enhancing joy does your job offer (either now or a range of projected earnings for a career) 5. How could a young person learn more about the kind of work you do?

The Game of Books

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 17:38:16 -0400

Novel Projects, of Booklamp fame, has recently embarked on a new Kickstarter project aimed at library-browsing youths. The Game of Books runs on the same data that fuels Booklamp, but utilizes the weird subject mashups to group diverse books and take users on book-based journeys. Players will build their characters and skills by reading and collected badges when they explore new subjects. Check out their video and kick in on Kickstarter:

Google Books and the End of an Era

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:43:47 -0400

The news today that Google Books and the AAP had settled their 7-year-old lawsuit was long-expected. Negotiations have been evolving over the past several months and last year’s decision to fracture the militant Authors Guild into separate litigations was the marker of growing peace between mainstream publishing and Google. The results of the case were also unsurprising. It seems like a modest victory on both sides and the agents of this victory might just be the slow evolution of opinions around digital publishing and the developing retail segment of Google. Publishers have accepted that they can embargo Google digitized titles by opting out of the database, but will also be able to opt-in to Google monetization of backlist digitized content.

Research Digest: A Win for Digital Information Literacy

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 12:53:17 -0400

Mery, Y., Newby, J., & Peng, K. (2012). Why one-shot information literacy sessions are not the future of instruction: A case for online credit courses. College & Research Libraries, 73(4), 366-377.

Long a staple of academic librarianship, the one-shot information literacy session has seen a radical change in scope with little evaluation of continuing effectiveness. This study examined test scores of students exposed to different kinds of information literacy training to determine if online instruction provided a suitable alternative to traditional in-person information literacy instruction. The University of Arizona Libraries are facing common problems in academic libraries: increasing student enrollment and a shrinking library staff and budget. In response to these pressures, the library developed ORL, a one-credit information literacy course meant to replace the information literacy instruction traditionally provided by the library and required in many programs.

EdLab Review: InternMatch

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 10:34:26 -0400

InternMatch has two major goals: to make the application process simple, informative, and intuitive for prospective interns and to create an accessible hiring bridge for lean organizations like startups and nonprofits. Columbia alum and founder Andrew Maguire pitches it thus, “On the student side, InternMatch is all about discovering employers, and on the employers’ side InternMatch is about connecting with students without going through a usually unorganized career fair process.” The site has gone beyond these goals with a hearty suite of educational resources aimed at helping interns develop professionally.

Pros:
The site itself is quite lovely with an unusual, but not unwelcome vigor. It has an outdoorsy, orienteering vibe that jives well with its mission. Its social media presence is robust and innovative, a must with a young and plugged-in audience. Their Youtube channel is particularly awesome with lots of testimonials, G+ hangouts, and produced videos. Marketing is key with a business model aimed at employers and InternMatch seems to make position visibility a priority with prolific traditional and nontraditional internal advertising for clients.

Research Digest: Circ Data Fun

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:49:30 -0400

Zweibel, S. & Lane, Z. B. Probing the effects of policy changes by evaluating circulation activity data at Columbia University Libraries. The Serials Librarian, 63(1), 17-27.

This one comes from our friends across the street! As part of a mass digitization effort, librarians at CU explored 7 years of circulation data to determine methods for assessing policy and procedure changes. The paper began with an acknowledgement of the survey-based history of library assessment and the growing need for data-driven decision making in increasingly interdisciplinary and transparent organizations. The findings were none too shocking: physical item circulation has been trending down, renewals decreased when the lending period was changed to a full semester in 2008, and changing borrower classifications had no effect on library usage, but the use of this kind of assessment in libraries is going to change the way we do business.

EdLab Review: Memrise

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:35:26 -0400

When I lit upon Memrise as EdLab Review material I did my customary googling to ensure nobody had done it before. I found that Stephen had written about it...exactly one year and 10 minutes before. He reported it as being a bit buggy, but the mnemonic learning tool has come a long way this year and the awesomeness bears repeating.

Pros:
Mnemonics are a proven strategy for learning vocabulary in native and second languages and Memrise sticks to what we know, offering memorization of English terms and several introductory languages. The herbs course Stephen demoed is still quite robust and effective, but creating an account unlocks courses in the sciences, history, geography, and hobo symbols. The mnemonics are anecdotally effective too, I’m not sure I’ll be able to look at bay again without imagining myself keeping wild animals at bay by waving its leaves.

Research Digest: The Sustainable Digitization

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:12:40 -0400

Schlitz, S. A. & Bodine, G. S. (2012). The Martha Berry digital archive project: A case study in experimental pEDagogy. Code4Lib Journal, 17.

Our story opens at the Berry College Archives at Berry College in Rome, Georgia in a cascade of uncataloged correspondence and papers penned by the school’s founder, Martha Berry. Even with papers of significant cultural importance, the digitization and indexing process “can be technically demanding, time-consuming, and expensive.” Berry College sought to create a sound yet sustainable process firmly rooted in the participatory web.

The archives chose Omeka as their digital repository for its suite of helpful plugins and flexibility. The college has a deeply entrenched work study program and though it could be argued that digitization efforts don’t always represent the “meaningful, real-world employment” offered by the program, the culture of the school offered a work-oriented student force and careful thought was put into sustainable roles and training for self-support within the team. Still, repetition and the “spreadsheet shuffle” cannot be fully divorced from a project such as this, the student team was responsible for scanning, maintaining an original image file for preservation, and creating a compressed file for upload into the repository. Work progress was recorded on a series of individual and group-level sheets. A dropbox plugin was used for batch uploading and auto-fill of some universal fields and then the records were turned over to a student digital editing team for metadata creation and quality control. A crowdsourcing plugin was used so the college community could help augment the finished records.

Research Digest: Talking Copyright

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:14:04 -0400

Herman, B. D. (2012). Taking the copyfight online: Comparing the copyright debate in congressional hearings, in newspapers, and on the web. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17(3), 354-368.

In Taking the Copyfight Online Bill D. Herman seeks to examine differences between traditional and digital publications using the 2003-2006 DRM negotiations as an example. The idea has often been demonstrated, most recently in the coverage around SOPA and PIPA, but little research has been done around policy outcome changes facilitated by internet communication. It’s clear that the internet has changed copyright both in format and in best practices, Herman writes, “changes include increases in infringement and the difﬁculty of enforcement, as well as a decrease in the importance of copyright as an incentive to produce and distribute some kinds of content.” But the culture and communication on the web has also changed news, resulting in greater crosstalk between internet culture and traditional news outlets.

Trends in Ed: Penguin Crawling Back

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:22:06 -0400

Penguin announced a return to library lending today, though the offerings are notably not new, not forever, and not Overdrive. Penguin fled Overdrive in February over the e-book hawker’s then-recent partnership with Amazon. This time Penguin is cautiously signing on with newbie 3M Cloud Library, which has recently moved out of beta and seems to have no plans to support Kindle lending. The Digital Reader pegs this inflexibility as a disadvantage, but Amazon's glacial partnerships and restricted devices seem poised to make Kindle the first casualty of the dedicated e-reader exodus. Penguin’s year long pilot program will begin in August at NYPL and Brooklyn Public and will test the feasibility of a 6-month e-publishing delay and 1-year renewal cycle.

EdLab Review: Zinch

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:48:38 -0400

Zinch has a lot going on. A social clearinghouse for scholarships, events, and school connections, the site has nearly 5 years under its belt, a print book, over 900 participating companies, a partnership with Chegg, and a shout out in a White House educational brief.

Pros:
The key to Zinch’s success might be its flexibility. The site features an easily embeddable widget that’s become a go-to for sites offering scholarship essay contests. The site is a hub for students, institutions, and private scholarship providers and the data-heavy modules seem poised to appeal to these groups. The interface has a busy, lived-in feel and colleges seem to be very active on the site.