I am a librarian at Cal Poly Pomona. I have an M.S. in library and information science and an M.A. in English. This weblog reflects my interests in library & information science, literature, language, culture, and the arts.

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A knol is a unit of knowledge (7/24/2008)

Check out Google's answer to Citizendium.

The Disconnected (7/23/2008)

A fantastic article on the approximately 3.8 million people nationwide aged 18-24 that are not in school or employed and how libraries can help them.

Who is Shakespeare? (7/22/2008)

Questioning whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays is becoming an increasingly legitimate intellectual pursuit.

On My Reading List (7/22/2008)

A comic book on copyright and fair use! Nifty!

This brings back memories of my childhood in Taiwan, hanging out at my friend's house and reading comic books about inertia, oxygen exchange, the digestive system, etc. Learning can be fun!

Google and Yahoo to index Flash content (7/12/2008)

You'll be able to search for text in the SWF files, but not the images.

U.S. copyright records available from Google (7/01/2008)

Google has collated data from the U.S. Copyright Office and Carnegie Mellon to create a file that contains copyright renewals filed between 1923-1963. Use it to find out whether a book published during that time is still under copyright or if it is now freely usable. (Via The Googlization of Everything.)

Get your email delivered by real snails (6/26/2008)

According to an interview with the BBC, the Real Snail Mail researchers "hope the project will encourage people to take their time and contemplate the technology and the work." (Via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog.)

What libraries can gain from gaming (6/25/2008)

In this video, two librarians from the Netherlands visit Illinois public libraries to see how incorporating gaming into their program offerings have affected visitor counts and circulation statistics. They also interview librarians Kate Williams, Jenny Levine, Edwin Mijnsbergen, and Michael Stephens as well as gaming experts Jan Meijroos and Igor Mayer. The discussion of gaming and 21st century literacies is intriguing, and non-gamers will find the overview of game consoles useful.

Northwestern study reveals a different kind of digital divide (6/24/2008)

The survey of 1,060 freshmen revealed that while 61% of both men and women engaged in creative endeavors offline, more men shared their work online (2/3 of men vs. 1/2 of women).

Presidential Debate via Twitter this weekend (6/21/2008)

Moderator: @anamariecox
McCain: @lizmair
Obama: @mikenelson

More details here!

Think twice before you hit send/submit/post (6/21/2008)

Because more often than not you can't take it back. (Scroll down to #8 and beyond to see what I mean.)

Book Rental Fail (6/05/2008)

This would be funny if it weren't so sad.

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower (6/02/2008)

"You might want to get some extra help," I told her. "You can schedule a private session with the librarian."

"I'll get it," she said. "I just need a little time."

Microsoft no longer a player in ebooks (5/25/2008)

"...we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects ... both sites will be taken down next week." Wow! I didn't see this coming!

German Wikipedia dead tree edition (4/23/2008)

Bertelsmann AG is going to publish a volume containing the 50,000 most popular entries, available September 2008. Beate Varnhorn, head of publishing at Bertelsmann Encyclopedia Institute, said publishing all the entries didn't make sense, but "a yearbook really can be a documentation of the zeitgeist."

Britannica widgets (4/22/2008)

Stick them on your website for dynamic content. Free for all web publishers.

Proposed cuts to California's higher education system in the news (4/17/2008)

If the cuts go through, UCs and CSUs would have to decrease student enrollment by 27,000 over the next 2 and a half years. Cutbacks would affect low-income, first generation, and minority students as well as California's economy by depriving employers of educated workers.

Half of LA County libraries hold gaming events at least monthly (4/17/2008)

Also, Friday, April 18 is National Gaming @ Your Library Day.

Georgia State sued over e-reserves (4/17/2008)

This is huge. The suit was filed by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications, with support from the Association of American Publishers. No statement has been issued by Georgia State yet. Also on NYT and Chronicle.com.

JK Rowling copyright/fair use trial (4/17/2008)

If you haven't been keeping track, the trial surrounds publisher RDR's intention to publish a Harry Potter Lexicon, written by Steven Vander Ark, based on Vander Ark's fansite of the same name. Rowling and Warner Bros. argue that the Lexicon was plagiarized from Rowling's own work. According to the PW article, this case will probably drag on for some time.

See Dead People['s Books] (4/16/2008)

Compare your reading tastes to those of famous dead people, such as Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings, Marie Antoinette, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Via SLJ.)

Fire Vox is... (4/04/2008)

...an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox. Very cool!

Stuff Librarians Like (4/04/2008)

Darn! I'm 5 days too late to register stufflibrarianslike.com! It was registered on March 31 by Blake Carver of LISNews and LISHost. And I had already come up with several things librarians like: sensible shoes, Google, old books, Harry Potter... Maybe I'll suggest them as topics to Blake? :)

Library 2.0: YouCat (4/02/2008)

Check out this hilarious April Fool's joke!

Disclaimer: I really don't think tagging will result in mass unemployment for catalogers. That's like saying the Internet will result in mass closing of libraries.

David Tempest of Elsevier reveals how people are gaming the system (3/28/2008)

Call me naive, but I found this interview positively titillating! Researchers and publishers trying to manipulate bibliometrics such as impact factor in their own favor? How scandalous!

(Via Thomson Scientific, maker of Web of Science and other products.)

Will libraries be extinct by 2019? Slashdot readers respond (3/22/2008)

These are the same arguments that I've heard librarians make, but it's so much more heart-warming to hear them coming from tech-savvy non-librarians.

Since I started my studies, I spent exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes in the university libraries. I access all the scientific material online ... (and by online I mean in our university's electronic library) ...

I am a Computer Engineering student ... and I have spent many hours in the library. Many books I use are available electronically but I prefer to have the actual paper version because I find them easier to read and easier to search through.

Growing up, I used the library to be able to freely read books.

I think this remains the fundamental and most important role of a library. Equalizing access to information that the public could not otherwise get to ... As long as there is an underclass, the role of a library will remain important.

I agree on public libraries needing longer hours.

Another great thing,at least where I live,is that if you spend some time at the library they quickly develop a more personal relationship with you ... when I go into the local library the librarian is often greeting me with "Hey, I got some books that are right up your alley!"

[I]n my field (English), many research resources are still in print and not available online. It's not clear if or when University Presses will start making criticism online en masse, and even if they do, so much of the twentieth century's critical output will remain in dead tree form that, at least for some, the library isn't going anywhere.

A library serves as a filter in a very important way: the material there was "good enough", in some way, to get published.

Right now, I have about two dozen books from the university library. Only a couple of them would be available online. Intensive reading is also much easier with physical books.

There are a hell of a lot of people for whom libraries are the only form of access to high-quality information. The internet hasn't changed that very much, because most of the best information still costs money.

The Extinction Timeline is total garbage.

I think libraries will still need to exist. The heart of the concept exists in free (or at least cheap) public access to information.

Best thing about libraries is they are quiet places to study, read, write etc. I use them for research and when I need to get away from the internet.

we still have colisseums, we don't feed christians to lions in them. we still have public squares, we don't have gallows in them. true, we don't really have forts with cannons and we don't have stables, but we do have military installations, and we do have garages. so its not like the need for a public place for information storage and retrieval will go ever go away, just how it is accessed will change and evolve.

The death of the library is a harbinger of the death of free education.

Being able to search the library catalogue, and reserve books, online has increased my library usage. One of the handier things web access has given me.

Someone once described the Internet as a library with all the books dumped at random in the middle of the floor. What makes the library different is an organized body of knowledge with people assigned to help you. The people in public libraries generally have a Master's degree in Librarianship, and in academic libraries a second masters degree in their subject area ... If you're one of these people who believe 'well-educated' means being able to search Google, read a blog, and search Wikipedia, then may God have mercy on your soul.

You fail at information literacy ... The internet has "answers", Libraries have reference materials, sources, and most of all hard data. Digitization is nothing but a boost to libraries and Librarians.

I'm an academic working in the field of medieval culture. While I can access facsimiles (print and electronic) of medieval manuscripts, it's sometimes essential to look at the originals ... there are two ways of treating books (and other sources of printed information). The first is to see them as simple repositories of information ... The second is to see them as objects of study or artefacts in themselves ... this second category of book is one reason why libraries will never entirely disappear.

(Via DrWeb's Domain)

The Horizon Report identifies 6 technologies shaping education in 2008 (3/20/2008)

Disclaimer: the examples in parentheses are my own.

1 year or less: grassroots video (Youtube, Vimeo, Teachertube) and collaborative Web technologies (Google docs, Meebo chat rooms, Refworks)

2-3 years: mobile broadband (texting, picture messages, emailing, tracking via Twitter) and data mashups (Twittervision and Google Maps' collaboration on Super Tuesday, Flickr Map, Meebo Map, Pageflakes)

4-5 years: collective intelligence (Wikipedia, del.icio.us, LibraryThing) and social operating systems (see my previous entry on context-specific social networking).

Challenges for educators include "a need to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and
technological literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today's tools." (Here's where next-gen librarians come in!)

For more details, check out the 2008 Horizon Report (PDF).

The Economist debates the use of social networking in education (3/20/2008)

Back in January the Economist.com hosted an Oxford style debate on the proposition, "social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom." Ewan McIntosh argued for the affirmative, and Michael Bugeja argued for the opposition. My own position is somewhere in between, reflected in Nancy Willard's featured guest comments:

We ... need to be more precise. When we talk about social networking in schools do we mean students using MySpace, Facebook or Bebo? Or do we mean using interactive technologies that provide for rapid communication and have changed the way we preserve, update, retrieve, acquire, and disseminate knowledge? When I talk about the opportunities, I am obviously talking about the latter. But when people hear "social networking in school" they frequently think the former.

Commercial sites are not appropriate for routine use in an educational environment because they are for entertainment purposes. However, it may be very appropriate to access these sites from time to time when the material is educationally relevant.

But it does not appear that these technologies are impairing the social interactions of young people ... Most young people using these technologies are increasing their social interactions, not decreasing.

The bottom line is that we have to prepare young people for life in their future, not our past. And their future is social networking.

On a related note, check out SciTechNet, a blog that focuses on social networking services in the sciences and technology. Recent links include MyExperiment.org and 2collab.com.

Why Seattle is important in the publishing world (3/18/2008)

While [Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl] doesn't have as much clout as Oprah Winfrey, authors tell Ms. Pearl that her recommendations cause book sales to jump. She even has an action figure modeled in her likeness - a Seattle novelty company has sold more than 100,000 of them ... Ms. Pearl's rise in the book world parallels Seattle's rise in the publishing world. Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.

I really enjoyed attending ALA Midwinter 2006 in Seattle. Also, I have both versions of the Nancy Pearl action figure :)

Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums Conference (3/08/2008)

Today was my second time attending a virtual conference and my first time attending one in Second Life. Here's the first of several writeups I plan on doing to keep the lessons fresh for myself.

For starters, this conference required a registration fee of US$30 be paid in Linden dollars. I had to deposit money into my Second Life account, where it's converted to Linden dollars, which I then used to pay the conference registrar. If you've never deposited money into your Second Life account before, the first time you try to do so you will discover that you cannot deposit more than $10, but after that your daily trading limit goes up. I made 2 deposits on 2 separate days to add up to US$30.

To attend the conference, I crawled out of bed this morning at 7:30 am, put on my bathrobe, grabbed some breakfast, turned on my computer, and logged into Second Life. I scrolled through a list of conference-related messages and accepted a a packet of conference materials, including a schedule with locations/SLURLs.

To get to the keynote at 8 am, I opened my schedule, scrolled until I saw the keynote listed on the schedule, and clicked on its SLURL to get teleported to the amphitheater where it's being given. I repeated this process for the presentations at 9am, 10am, 11am, 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm.

I was impressed that all of the presentations started right on time. Every presenter used audio chat to talk to the audience. There were some technical difficulties early on, both on my end as I fiddled with my audio chat settings and on the presenters' end, but they were resolved very quickly as there were many conference volunteers on hand to help. For the text chat portion, some presenters got help from volunteers or co-presenters to type as they spoke, and some copy and pasted notes into the chat window. Very few provided no text at all and only did so after confirming with the audience that this was acceptable.

Seating was limited at each location due to (I believe) connectivity purposes. While your seat location matters less in-world than in real life (RL) because you can always zoom to see better, it does help to sit close to the projection panel if you want to take snapshots and avoid getting the tops of people's heads in your pictures.

As far as meeting people, I was utterly delighted at how similar a SL conference was to a RL conference. To find out more about the presenters and my fellow conference attendees, all I had to do was click on their names, open their profiles, and read the information they provided. I added many people as friends, the SL version of exchanging business cards, and joined several groups I didn't know about as well as one that I did know about but couldn't join until a member added me today.

Today's conference in SL beat the virtual conference I attended several years ago by miles and miles. Back then a virtual conference was all asynchronous. To "attend" the presentations and posters, I had to scroll through pages and pages of text. I didn't feel engaged at all, and of course I met no one.

The RL conferences I've attended are barely any better. They're expensive and exhausting. The long plane rides, the uncomfortable hotel beds, the constant running to get from one presentation to another, and the lack of time to feed oneself have led me to come home with a cold more than once. In comparison, today I was able to take a nap between the morning and evening sessions just by walking from my computer to the bedroom.

The feedback survey I filled out at the end of the conference indicated that our input would be used to plan next year's conference. I sincerely hope there will be one because I'll be the first to sign up!

PS: Check out my pictures from the conference!

PPS: Read this entry on the ALA TechSource blog by Tom Peters.

This Web page is designed and maintained by Julie Shen.