 | Abstracts module 1: Technological Developments: Threats and Opportunities for Libraries |
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Trends, Strategic Issues and Opportunities for Libraries Today's information environment is constantly changing, frequently at rates that leave libraries in breathless pursuit. We're seeing software, information and content disintegrate into components that are dynamically reassembled and reused as needed and using frameworks that are dictated by the end user and their needs, not the library's interpretation of those needs. The web services architecture, blogs, WIKIs, RSS feeds and repositories are just a few examples that will be discussed as examples of these trends. In the new information environments the search, integration and aggregation of information and content will be determined by the users through collaborative and customizable tools that allow them to determine precisely what content and sources they wish utilized and when. Next we will examine and outline end-user behaviors trends and backgrounds. This will serve as a foundation for understanding how libraries must engage the users through the very service, search and access tools they provide to those users, in order to allow for the users to engage in the active and dynamic development of new configurations of those tools. Throughout all of this, the roles of the library and the librarian have not been abrogated, but are in fact, needed more than ever, due to the fact that the librarian can't be everywhere the user will be utilizing these tools and in need of the services of a librarian. Therefore, the values of librarianship must be delivered in new ways and through new mechanisms. Understanding how all of these trends, issues come together to create new opportunities will result in an open discussion of how and where libraries can devote their limited resources in order to gain increased visibility through the provision of maximum value to the end-users of libraries. PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (5.521kB) Recommended reading:
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Advances in Search Driving Library 2.0 The presentation will explore trends in information access impacting next generation digital library services. Examples include: effective access to rich media, extreme precision by contextual analysis and social networks. Based on these search opportunities we will discuss how Library 2.0 services can create new patterns for interaction with students and scholars. Finally, we will explore how strategic advantages can be realized in the eco-system of different digital library providers.
PowerPoint presentation as PDF file (4.598kB)
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Electronic Paper Display and its Impact on the Scholarly Information Chain In today's "connected planet" an unparalleled amount of electronic information is available in the form of text and illustrations. Newspapers and scientific journals are often being published in both paper and electronic forms. Conventional paper publishing has an insufficient time cycle in particular for business travellers and academic researchers. Digital publishing is highly desirable for both the publishers and users. There have been two main barriers in the development of digital publishing. One of them is the copyright and security issue. Another is the lack of electronic devices with a paper-like display screen. In the past few years, some progress has been made in secure transportation of digital content. In the mean time, display technology has been advanced, allowing one to read on a device with identical experience to conventional paper prints. Generally, in a widely used liquid crystal display screen, without a backlight the displays are just too dark and the reading experience just doesn't feel right. What we need is an electronic device with a display, which looks and even feels like paper. E-publication displays with a performance identical to conventional paper in terms of brightness and contrast are a holy grail of the display industry and enable a new usage model of "immersion reading" (i.e. reading a display for hours at a time as you do a book). An e-publication display needs to fulfil the following expectations:
Electrophoretic displays are a very good candidate in this respect. In these displays, charged particles move in a fluid when a voltage is applied to the electrodes. Here, positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles move in a clear fluid. The particles are contained within small capsules to keep everything stable. The viewer therefore looks either at a white surface which reflects in all directions (like paper) or to a black surface which is as dark as black ink. In this manner, it is possible to generate high resolution pictures and text which looks just like a piece of paper. Philips has been a world leader in researching and developing paper like-display technology. Jointly with the E Ink Corporation, the world first paper-like display has been introduced into the market since April 2004, as the display screen of Sony Librié e-reader. Recently new generation e-readers have been launched by both Sony and iRex Technologies. These display screens look like true paper. The appearance of the electrophoretic paper-display will accelerate the development of digital publishing and enhance the convenience for end users, in particular mobile users, academic researchers and students. Together with the advanced solution in content copyright and security, this technology will enable a new revolution in the digital information chain including publishing and libraries strategy. In this presentation, other potential technologies towards e-paper are also reviewed and the impact of e-paper to people's lifestyle, and the digital information chain including publishing and libraries strategy is discussed.
PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (9.714kB)
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When Portals Collide: Portals Between and Across Institutions Portal technologies promise to present often disparate tools and information sources to a variety of users in coherent and convenient ways, with the potential to cross organisational and technical silos. By combining services from Library, Course Management, Research and Administrative Systems with personalised and customisable interfaces, new contexts for using and interacting with services are enabled. With the experience of several years of use of portal technologies within Higher Education, much of this promise has yet to be realised, but work of considerable value has been undertaken. This session will review the portal experience so far, point to the technical and organisational challenges to developing the role of a portal in providing a personalised user experience, and look forward to how portals might combine with Web 2.0 approaches to enrich that experience.
PowerPoint presentation as PDF file of the slides (3.006kB) or as PDF file of the handouts (180kB)
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Aiming for New Levels of Cross-Repository Functionality The manner in which scholarly research is conducted is changing rapidly. This is most evident in Science and Engineering, but similar revolutionary trends are becoming apparent across disciplines. Improvements in computing and network technologies, digital data capture techniques, and powerful data mining techniques enable research practices that are highly collaborative, network-based, and data-intensive. These dramatic changes in the nature of scholarly research require corresponding fundamental changes in scholarly communication. The established scholarly communication system has not kept pace with these revolutionary changes in research practice and has not capitalized on the immense capabilities offered by the digital, networked environment. In essence, the current electronic scholarly communication system is a scanned copy of its paper-based predecessor upon which a thin layer of cross-venue interoperability has been overlaid. The time has come to design and deploy the innately digital scholarly communication system that scholars deserve, and that is able to capture the digital scholarly record, make it accessible, and preserve it over time. A vision has emerged of a new scholarly communication infrastructure that has a wide variety of repositories at its fundament. These repositories can be institutional, discipline-oriented, dataset repositories, publisher’s repositories, learning object repositories, etc. But in this vision, the repositories are not regarded to be static nodes in a scholarly communication system merely tasked with archiving digital scholarly materials, and making them accessible through discovery interfaces. Rather, these repositories are regarded to be part of a loose, global federation of repositories, and scholarly communication itself is regarded to be a global workflow (or value chain) across dynamic repositories. Thinking about scholarly communication in this sense brings up intriguing questions including the level of cross-repository interoperability required to support such workflows, the consequences of the requirement to persist the communication infrastructure as technologies evolve, the manner in which to record and express the chain of evidence as a unit of scholarly communication is used and re-used across the scholarly communication system, etc. The pesentation will describe the vision of a new digital scholarly communication system, and will present perspectives on technical avenues to facilitate its emergence as they have been explored by the Pathways project (Cornell University and Los Alamos National Laboratory) funded by the National Science Foundation, and in the April 2006 "Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories" summit sponsored by Microsoft, the Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). great return on investment in libraries, join us and find out more! PowerPoint presentation as PDF file (774kB) Recommended reading:
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| Abstracts module 2: Hands-on: Library 2.0 technologies to reach out to the customer |
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Engage Your Users with Blogs and RSS: Create Community, Take Your Content to Them The combination of blogs and RSS offers powerful potential for libraries. In this hands-on session, you will learn how to use blogs to offer a more dynamic and interactive website for your patrons. Learn how other libraries have leveraged blogs to create new types of sites that enhance services, create community for and with their patrons, and extend existing services in exciting and creative ways. In addition, we'll discuss how to use RSS to push your resources out to where your users are, rather than forcing them to come to your website to find out what's new. In this session, participants will gain practical experience creating blogs, writing blog posts, reading RSS feeds, and displaying feeds on a web page. When we are done, they will have specific, concrete ways to bring both blogging and RSS to their libraries at little or no cost in order to make them more efficient and create community and conversation.
PowerPoint presentation as PDF file (23.577kB)
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Where Our Users Are: Instant Messaging for Libraries This workshop explores and explains instant messaging in the library setting, including software, training and policy. Ample hands on exercises will give participants a true feel of what launching an IM Reference service at their libraries involves. We'll discuss implementation strategies, best practices and the possible pitfalls of IM in libraries. IM carries a great return on investment in libraries, join us and find out more! PowerPoint presentation as PDF file (2.556kB) Recommended reading:
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Library 2.0. For the People, By the People? In those parts of the Internet prone to such things, battles are currently raging over the whole '2.0' label. We have Web 2.0, Business 2.0, Media 2.0, even Library 2.0. Some, myself amongst them, find labels such as Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 to be convenient foci around which to gather a remarkable plethora of trends, technologies, and observations. None, individually, is perhaps particularly world changing. But together, they presage a quite dramatic shift in our notions of community, openness, participation, presence, and collaboration. Library 2.0 paints a picture of a world in which monolithic, proprietary, expensive and unwieldy library systems are consigned to history, replaced by a lightweight set of components, built upon common Web standards, and deployed in a variety of contexts far beyond the virtual or physical walls of the library, meeting the real needs of real people who might never have considered 'the library' to be relevant to them. By the time we meet, face to face, the battles will doubtless have moved on and be about other things. Library 2.0 as a term will either have faded away, or be a venerable part of the library world's accepted wisdom. Either way, that which the term Library 2.0 so usefully encapsulates will remain, and all of us need to grasp its meaning and its potential.
PowerPoint presentation as PDF file of the handouts (18.627kB)
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| Abstracts module 3: Libraries Supporting Research and Open Access |
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Grids & e-Science: UK Experience & Their Potential to Impact Libraries The UK has invested heavily in stimulating e-Science. This generates, supports and uses many digital resources. It encourages and enables multi-disciplinary, multi-national and extensive collaborations. The socio-economic impact of so much data, used collaboratively, requires cultural as well as technical changes. An attempt will be made to discuss the nature of these changes. The audience will be expected to contribute!
PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (7 MB) or as PDF file (4 MB)
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The Place of the Digital Library within Virtual Research Environments This presentation will discuss the recent development of e-infrastructure (also known as cyberinfrastructure) and virtual research environments. Topics covered will include:
PowerPoint presentation available in HTML and as PDF file" (3.365kB) Recommended reading:
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What Open Access Does for Research and What Libraries Can Do About It This presentation will address the impact of "open access" on research and scholarship, while situating open access with the very history of the library's efforts to increase access to knowledge. It will discuss how open access offers librarians a new set of opportunities and challenges in supporting this new publishing model in all of its current variations. The presentation will include a brief demonstration of the open source software developed by the Public Knowledge Project which is being used by research libraries to support the work of faculty members and increase access to scholarship for a wider readership. Recommended reading:
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Whither Open Access Publishing? There is much discussion about the future of scholarly publishing. Digital scholarly output is proliferating and barriers to digital content are falling in the face of a thriving open access movement. Faculty authors increasingly question the wisdom of handing over their creative output to a commercial publishing industry that is bankrupting library budgets. Stirred by these trends and empowered by the capabilities of networked technologies, academic institutions are stepping up to publish and to steward their precious scholarly assets. But many questions remain unanswered and resources are limited. What possibilities are emerging in open access and university-based scholarly publishing efforts? This presentation will explore those options and identify key questions to be answered: What are the real needs of our scholars and researchers? How can the university meet those needs with the technical infrastructure of today? How should the university library allocate resources to promote change while maintaining its historic obligation to preserve knowledge for the future? What are the policy and legal issues necessary to support university-based scholarly publishing efforts? Who should pay for open access publishing? PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (5.982kB) Recommended reading:
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| Abstracts module 4: Libraries and Teaching and Learning |
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Partner or Pariah? Future Roles for Libraries in Learning and Teaching What is the role for libraries in the future landscape of learning and teaching? Depending on your perspective, libraries are either lynchpins or social outcasts - 'partners or pariahs.' This presentation aims to engage critically, and in an integrated way, with key strategic issues and trends, focusing on future scenarios and their impact on the library and information professional's changing educational role against the broader background of educational development and higher education. It will provide reflection and analysis on key conceptual themes, as well as exploring practical implications for library service, leaders and practitioners. PowerPoint presentation as PDF file (4.046kB) Bibliography
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Social Software: Building Networks of Learners The set of tools available for learners and teachers has grown enormously. The options to choose from are no longer limited to a few big tools, like the institutional virtual learning environment or website, but range from instant messaging tools, extensive virtual worlds, social networking services, weblogs, podcasts and video blogs. Most of these tools, known as Social Software, are available online as services, either free to use or for a small monthly fee. This enables users to start using them right away without the need for large investments. Are these services possible competitors of the services offered by the libraries? Or do they offer new possibilities for libraries that incorporate them into their organization? We will introduce and explore the available Social Software tools and their educational uses. In addition we'll discuss their relationship to the existing systems and services of libraries. Prior to the course, the lecturer set up a wiki at http://buildingnetworksoflearners.wikispaces.com/ to involve the participants. The wiki contains a list of recommended reading, as well as questions for the participants about who they are and topics to discuss beforehand.
PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (2.481kB)
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From Dewey to World of Warcraft: Libraries and Digital Games Since the turn of the century, there has been a rapid increase in serious academic research in many aspects of digital games, gameplay, and the people who play digital games. This is due, in part, to:
The presentation will begin with a brief overview of the digital games sector: who are the players; what are their demographics; what are they playing? The core of this one-hour presentation concerns the various ways in which digital games can have a relationship to academic libraries and digital information systems. Specifically, we examine three areas of interest:
PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (4.060kB) During his presentation, John referred to the following movies:
References:
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What Difference Does your Library Make to Learning and Teaching? Approaches and Techniques for Measuring Impact Libraries are increasingly seeking to assess the contribution of their services to meeting the mission and strategic aims of their host organisations. In higher education institutions, this means obtaining a better understanding of their impact and seeking to measure the difference that they make to learning and teaching. This means going beyond traditional measures of service quality such as inputs, outputs, and satisfaction. This presentation will explain what is meant by impact and, despite the difficulties, why it is important to seek to measure the library's impact on learning and teaching. Drawing particularly upon the experience of the LIRG/SCONUL Impact Initiative in the UK, the presentation will give practical examples of impact measurement by libraries. It will examine how libraries have sought to identify the difference made to learning and teaching through the introduction of new e-services, changes to the way that learners are supported, or through information literacy programmes. The transferability of the approach will be considered, the methods used to collect evidence of impact, and how participants could use this kind of approach to measure the impact of their libraries on learning and teaching. PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (4.612kB) Recommended reading:
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