JISC , the UK based body that researches the innovative use of ICT in Higher Education education and research, has released an interesting 10 minute video discussing the future of academic libraries, JISC – Libraries of the Future . They are just finishing their year-long research programme about Libraries of the Future .
Libraries as bee-hives? Google as a partner? Librarians as network administrators as much as information specialists? Librarians “entrepreneurial, engaged and outward looking”? Investing thousands of pounds in change management programs?
This is an “answer engine” that was launched on 15 May 2009. It mines factual databases to provide comprehensive data of the type in an almanac or ready reference collection.
It is especially suited to mathematical calculations, especially complicated equations. Once you work out the best way to ask it questions - and it can take a bit of experimentation - it is useful for all sorts of queries. You can check the source information by clicking a link at the bottom.
Searches to try: population of australia , time in new zealand, when was Murdoch University established?
Oh Hooray. Now Zotero can synchronsise from my laptop PC to my desktop PC to the web.
The fact that Zotero was previously limited to just Firefox on one PC was what was stopping me from using it as my major tool to organise and store research citations.
Zotero still automatically extracts bibliographic detail from any page online. It still allows me to save the entire page, article or pdf. It still indexes it for easy retrievability and allows me to tag it and make notes. It still spits out citations in many different formats, and inserts them appropriately in my writing.
I don’t *think* it will write my paper for me yet…
I’ll also be researching material for a Masters of Information Management at Curtin University. My thesis is tentatively titled: Taking matters into our own hands: Influencing factors and concerning factors for libraries that developed Open Source Library Application Software between 1999 and 2009.
I’ll be presenting a plenary session at Library Camp East on 26 March and be part of a panel session about Unconferences at Computers in Libraries on 31 March. I’m really excited to finish my trip by speaking at the U Game U Learn symposium at Delft in the Netherlands on 23 April. I’ll be asking “What kind of better than free is your library?”.
Results and screens look very clean to me after an initial play. The prompts that appear as you type in the search term would be a bit distracting, but very useful I think.
They are the first to do this in Australia, and what is particularly interesting is that this is a commercial product is not designed specifically for libraries, but for all sorts of datasets.
Project Information Literacy from the University of Washington has just issued its 18 page mid-project report, based on discussion groups help October - December 2008 on seven U.S. campuses with 86 college students. The research was sponsored by Proquest. Abstract below.
They also had some interesting findings on the students’ use of libraries pp11-12.
Abstract: A report of preliminary findings and analysis from student discussion groups held
on 7 U.S. campuses in Fall 2008, as part of Project Information Literacy. Qualitative data from
discussions with higher education students across the country suggest that conducting research is
particularly challenging. Students’ greatest challenges are related to their perceived inability to find
desired materials. Students seek “contexts” as part of the research process. A preliminary typology
of the research contexts is developed and introduced. Finding contexts for “backgrounding”
topics and for figuring out how to traverse complex information landscapes may be the most difficult
part of the research process. Our findings also suggest that students create effective methods
for conducting research by using traditional methods, such as libraries, and self-taught, creative
workarounds, such as “presearch” and Wikipedia, in different ways.
Today I’m attending the Library 2.0 Masterclass and site visit in Melbourne. I’m sending out updates via CoverItLive and on my Twitter stream using @libsmatter . I will be liveblogging the first half of the day about marketing and innovation.
The second half of the day is a visit to the Yarra Plenty library.
Alan Levine created the same digital story fifty different ways using fifty different online tools. Something to save up for later … 50+ Ways to Tell the Dominoe Story
