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Do Webinars always suck? 2010 March 24

Dean Dad over at Inside Higher Ed asks the question, “Why do webinars always suck?” and those go onto explain the ways they suck. I actually do attend my fair share of webinars so I obviously don’t think they always suck, but I know I’ve been disappointed in them way more then I should be. As Dean Dad points out, they fact that you don’t have to travel is a big plus considering the economy, but I never get as much out of them as a face-to-face meeting and usually get less out of the then I would a pre-recorded session. Also, if the webinar is more then an hour, forget it. My mind has had enough at that point. I think that is why I really dislike virtual conferences. Multiple hours staring at a screen and listening to someone present is just not a replacement for being there in person.

Besides the idea of listening to someone through a computer, the other negative is often you are sitting alone somewhere watching them. No human companionship. No person to talk to about the session. No “free” coffee. But I digress… I think the one thing I have found is that when I watch a webinar with someone else it is usually a much better experience. That is why at work I often will ask other people if they are interested and arrange to watch it together if the topic is relevant. Otherwise, like one of the comments made by Sibyl, I bring something wlse to do – although I can guarantee it won’t be Mafia Wars or Farmville!

What do you thin? Do Webinars always suck?

Ninth issue of Code4Lib Journal published 2010 March 22

The ninth issue of the Code4Lib Journal was published today. There are some really good articles in this issue. In fact, I think this is one of the better issues we have published so far, so I encourage you to check it out.

One particular article I’d like to point out is Sibyl Schaefer’s article on Challenges in Sustainable Open Source: A Case Study. In this article, Ms. Schaefer points out the challenges in creating a community around a Free/Open Source project that has a limited audience. In the example case study she discusses software for archival description and data management, but I believe the issues would be similar in many other projects as well. If you are involved in leadership or are otherwise heavily invested in a Free/Open Source project I’d highly encourage you to read it. Not only does she offer insight into the challenges this particular project had, but also offers suggestions on a way to move forward that I think will be useful for any software project that is trying to create a sustainable community.

If you not an Free/Open Source developer but are just looking for a few good, free applications for manging MARC records and links to electronic journals, you may want to read Brandy Klug’s article on Wrangling Electronic Resources: A Few Good Tools. It provides information about MarcEdit and three different link checkers: Link Valet, W3C Link Checker, and Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

Below are the complete contents/abstracts of issue 9:

Editorial Introduction – Moving Forward
Carol Bean

Welcoming new editors, and reflecting on the sustainability factor.

A Principled Approach to Online Publication Listings and Scientific Resource
Sharing
Jacquelijn Ringersma, Karin Kastens, Ulla Tschida and Jos van Berkum

The Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics has developed a service
to manage and present the scholarly output of their researchers. The PubMan
database manages publication metadata and full-texts of publications
published by their scholars. All relevant information regarding a
researcher’s work is brought together in this database, including
supplementary materials and links to the MPI database for primary research
data. The PubMan metadata is harvested into the MPI website CMS (Plone). The
system developed for the creation of the publication lists, allows the
researcher to create a selection of the harvested data in a variety of
formats.

Querying OCLC Web Services for Name, Subject, and ISBN
Ya’aqov Ziso, Ralph LeVan, and Eric Lease Morgan

Using Web services, search terms can be sent to WorldCat’s centralized
authority and identifier files to retrieve authorized terminology that helps
users get a comprehensive set of relevant search results. This article
presents methods for searching names, subjects or ISBNs in various WorldCat
databases and displaying the results to users. Exploiting WorldCat’s
databases in this way opens up future possibilities for more seamless
integration of authority-controlled vocabulary lists into new discovery
interfaces and a reduction in libraries’ dependence on local name and
subject authority files.

Challenges in Sustainable Open Source: A Case Study
Sibyl Schaefer

The Archivists’ Toolkit is a successful open source software package for
archivists, originally developed with grant funding. The author, who
formerly worked on the project at a participating institution, examines some
of the challenges in making an open source project self-sustaining past
grant funding. A consulting group hired by the project recommended that —
like many successful open source projects — they rely on a collaborative
volunteer community of users and developers. However, the project has had
limited success fostering such a community. The author offers specific
recommendations for the project going forward to gain market share and
develop a collaborative user and development community, with more open
governance.

Using Cloud Services for Library IT Infrastructure
Erik Mitchell

Cloud computing comes in several different forms and this article documents
how service, platform, and infrastructure forms of cloud computing have been
used to serve library needs. Following an overview of these uses the article
discusses the experience of one library in migrating IT infrastructure to a
cloud environment and concludes with a model for assessing cloud computing.

Creating an Institutional Repository for State Government Digital
Publications
Meikiu Lo and Leah M. Thomas

In 2008, the Library of Virginia (LVA) selected the digital asset management
system DigiTool to host a centralized collection of digital state government
publications. The Virginia state digital repository targets three primary
user groups: state agencies, depository libraries and the general public.
DigiTool’s ability to create depositor profiles for individual agencies to
submit their publications, its integration with the Aleph ILS, and product
support by ExLibris were primary factors in its selection. As a smaller
institution, however, LVA lacked the internal resources to take full
advantage of DigiTool’s full set of features. The process of cataloging a
heterogenous collection of state documents also proved to be a challenge
within DigiTool. This article takes a retrospective look at what worked,
what did not, and what could have been done to improve the experience.

Wrangling Electronic Resources: A Few Good Tools
Brandy Klug

There are several freely available tools today that fill the needs of
librarians tasked with maintaining electronic resources, that assist with
tasks such as editing MARC records and maintaining web sites that contain
links to electronic resources. This article gives a tour of a few tools the
author has found invaluable as an Electronic Resources Librarian.

CONFERENCE REPORT: Code4Lib 2010
Birong Ho, Banurekha Lakshminarayanan, and Vanessa Meireles

Conference reports from the 5th Code4Lib Conference, held in Asheville, NC,
from February 22 to 25, 2010. The Code4Lib conference is a collective
volunteer effort of the Code4Lib community of library technologists.
Included are three brief reports on the conference from the recipients of
conference scholarships.

Why so few?

The ratio of men to women in library technology comes up every once in a while in Code4Lib and other library technology communities. People interested in that topic may want to read the Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics report just released by the AAUW. I learned about the report via a post on Inside Higher Ed called “Attracting Women to Stem.” The134 page report for the most part is a large literature view with some recommendations added. To a large degree the report focuses on issues of girls in STEM during K-12. Because of that and the length I didn’t read the whole report, but the executive summary and recommendations were interesting. As mentioned, the report discussed a lot of K-12 issues that academic library technologists have little, if any, direct control of, but there is also some recommendations on how to “attract and retain female faculty” that may apply to library technology positions within academia. The three recommendations are:

• Conduct departmental reviews to assess the climate for female faculty.
• Ensure mentoring for all faculty.
• Support faculty work-life balance.

I think all three of these can apply to libraries. And really, at least the second and third, will improve the work environment (and hopefully retention and happiness) of all employees.

The AAUW is going to have a podcast about the Why so Few? report on Thursday, March 25, 2010 from 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM (ET). The registration deadline is March 23. If you are interested in the report, you may want to register.

Concept Mapping 2010 March 12

While reading comments to a blog post about whether or not faculty should ban laptops in the classroom, I came across a comment that linked to a blog post about a student using concept mapping software to take notes.

This particular student was using Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The student wrote that he was taking much more useful notes by applying them to concept maps and he was at the same time paying better attention to the lectures instead of just transcribing the presentations.

This got me thinking. I’ve been considering using concept maps for projects and preparing presentations, articles, excreta. However, would this approach work for conferences notes? If I did decide to use concept mapping software for conference notes, would I make separate concept maps per session? per tract? just one for the whole conference? I’m not really sure, but I think this has some potential. Taking notes in a linear way works for certain sessions but never seems to work for a whole conference – especially a focused conference. Yes, I record information about the sessions, but it kind of misses out on capturing the whole theme of the conference and what the general vibe and intellectual feeling was. For me, it is almost like looking at the trees but not seeing the forest.

I am not sure that concept mapping would really capture the forest, but it may very well be better at it then traditional, linear, note taking. Has anyone tried this at a conference? If so, I’d be interested in your experiences. I think I’ll try it at an upcoming conference and wee whether or not it works well for me.

Kim Komando’s link of the day and libraries 2010 March 10

Nationally syndicated tech radio talk show host, Kim Komando’s download of the day is Zotero. Personally, I am a big fan of Zotero so I am happy to see it getting some love. However, one of the things she writes in her short blurb about the download is:

Research used to be done in the dark stacks of a library. Archived news stories were stored on microfiche. [...] Today, the Web holds all the information you could want.

Librarians will know that not all archived news stories are available in digital format, and many that are come with subscription fees. Yes, there is more information available at your desktop and Zotero is an excellent tool to organize it, but to say that all the (research) information you could want is available on the Web has no basis in reality – yet many people seem to think that it is.

While today’s libraries provide more then just access to information and IMO would still be valuable even if all information were freely available on the Web, librarians need to realize what some influential people are saying and be prepared to counter those claims. We need to be able to make a case to our stakeholders, whether they be voters and elected politicians in the case of public libraries, or faculty and administration in academic libraries, that we are a) providing information that people can not get elsewhere, and b) that we provide valuable services around that information. We can’t just lament or criticize people like Kim Komando for not knowing this, we need to educate them.

Koha finds a new home on the Internet 2010 March 3

The Koha community has decided to create a new home for Koha on the Internet. The new URL is http://koha-community.org/. The stated reason is that the host of the old site, LibLime, was not responsive in updated the previous site. I really haven’t been following the LibLime and Koha saga that closely but it is clear that the actions (or in this case, inactions) of LibLime have left a bad taste in many people’s mouth and it is a shame that it has come to this. Much of the success the Koha has had, at least in the United States, can be directly traced to the work of LibLime. It is sad to see that they appear to be no longer an integral part of the community.

Redwoodvirtual closing down 2010 March 1

When I started this blog way back in October, 2004 I started it on a Linux Virtual Private Server hosted by Redwoodvirtual. Although I moved my blog about a year ago to another provider, I kept my Redwood account although I really only used it for SSH access to IRC. Still, it was with a bit of sadness I recieved the following in an e-mail the other day:

Due to many factors we have decided to close redwoodvirtual. This is a difficult decision to make after being in business for six years.

Our last day of operation will be March 24th, 2010 at noon. This will give one last month for monthly accounts to migrate to another host provider. For yearly accounts we will refund the remaining amount, prorated from March 24th, 2010. If you have any questions, please emails us at support@redwoodvirtual.com.

We apologize for the sudden announcement, but wish you all the best.

Sincerely,
the Redwoodvirtual Support Staff
support@redwoodvirtual.com

While Redwoodvirtual was not always the most responsive company, they were also very inexpensive and overall doing business with them was a positive experience. I’m sorry to see them shut their virtual doors and I wish them good luck in their future endeavors.