Burritt Library Blog

I returned recently from a trip to the great city of New Orleans. The main objective of the trip was to help rebuild houses in the Lower Ninth Ward, an area that was ravaged by floods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This area was particularly hard hit, and many residents had water up to their rooftops. Two and a half years later most of the area is still in need of repair and since only 10% of the population has returned, much of the area feels like a ghost town.

We (my husband and I) were able to volunteer with an organization called lowernine.org, which is a non-profit group that assists with placing volunteers in area homes that need repair, along with offering assistance to the homeowners of the area. The amazing people of this organization also provide a place to sleep and food to eat to their many volunteers. In addition they teach volunteers the skills they need to drywall or frame buildings or whatever may arise. I was able to learn how to tile floors and backsplashes while I was there.

The best part of the whole experience was getting to meet the homeowners. One morning I was dropped off at one of the houses, and was immediately greeted with a giant hug and thank you by a lovely woman whose home was near completion. On another occasion, I witnessed an owner start to well up with tears as the realization that he and his family would soon be able to move back into their home dawned on him. On the whole it was a fantastic experience, and I am hoping to go back for some more renovation projects in October.

You can find out more at www.lowernine.org

If you would like to see the photos let me know!

Defective by design is a group opposed to digital rights management (DRM) software.  They have published an open letter to ask public libraries to stop using DRM.

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/Libraries-Eliminate-DRM

I would urge you all to look at this letter and consider possible future implications for the library world.

If you are not familiar with the work of Lorcan Dempsey you should be. He is one of the best thinkers out there in libraryland. I highly reccomend his blog at

http://orweblog.oclc.org/

He has a very good publication called Reconfiguring the Library Systems Environment

http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2008/dempsey-portal.pdf

which is one of the best overviews I’ve read of our environment.

More presentations are at

http://csdirect.iii.com/ppt/#iug16

I just got back from IUG 16 in DC. It was very informative and I thought I would share some of the highlights. Keep in mind you need the IUG user name and password to get to these. Let me know if you do not have them.

Release 2008 Development Update

I attended a session on the Release 2008 development update. This is ironic considering 2007 has not been released yet. They admitted that 2008 will not be out in 2008 either but the 2007 release should be up in a week or so. We’ll see.

Google Analytics

Probably the most exciting session I attended was on Google Analytics. Ohio State is using this product extensively to track data. Okay, I found it exciting. Your mileage may vary.

Webpub.def: The untold Story

This was a very useful session I wish I had attended before going to webpac pro.

ERM Soup to Nuts

Another great session except for the annoying person who took up half an hour with her unfilled helpdesk call. There is going to be a lot more integration with 2007 that will fix many issues currently encountered.
Archiving Order Records in MS Access

This library had an interesting take on order records. Instead of buying more from III they just exported them, put them in an access database and then deleted them every year or so. Shows how creative you can get when there is no money.
What Should We Do with Our WebPAC? Can We Make It Relevant in a Web 2.0 World?

This was probably the most fun session for me. John Wenzler, the presenter, is something of an apologist for the WebPac and addressed what he referred to as the “opac sucks meme”. I am part of the chorus chanting this phrase but his explanations were insightful. I invite all of you to check out his slides.

There were others but these are the highlights. Hopefully they will all have their materials up soon.

A great resource if you are new to blogging is this wordpress page on writing posts. It walks you through the basics if you have never used the product before.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

I’ve also cooked up a quick into in Word format below.  any feedback would be appreciated.

welcome-to-the-burritt-library-blog

The Chronicle has a reference to a great post on the OED blog:

E

Publisher Compares Wikipedia to Oxford English Dictionary
by Catherine Rampell

Over at the Oxford University Press’s blog, OUP publisher Niko Pfund paid Wikipedia the ultimate compliment: It’s like the Oxford English Dictionary.

An excerpt from his comments:

“I’m actually increasingly bored by this question of whether Wikipedia is good or bad, and even more so by the easy vilification of it, a reaction often rooted in professional self-interest. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language…found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words. The response was astonishing (never underestimate the enthusiasm of amateur lexicographers), so much so that the building in which the word submissions were kept, called The Scriptorum, began to sink under the weight of all the paper. Wikipedia is here to stay and its evolution will be one of the more interesting publishing and technology stories in the next decade.”—Catherine Rampell

Today is my first day back in the library after attending (and presenting at) the Computers in Libraries conference in Arlington, VA. The weather was well, crap, but at least we had plenty to keep us engaged during the very eventful 3-day conference. As promised to many of you great folks who were hanging with us until the bitter end (yes, we were scheduled for the last session block on day three of the conference, which I was assured by some veteran presenters is the MO of the program planners to vet the newbs), I’m posting the Vidcasting presentation slides.

Steven and I have been having a wonderful flame war on the library list that I thought could work much better on the blog so here goes.

Original Post

From: Bernstein, Steven (Library)
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 9:59 AM
To: Library
Subject: Overvaluing the Virtual

The following letter to the editor appeared in this month’s issue of American Libraries in response to an opinion piece that appeared in last month’s issue.  I couldn’t agree more with this librarian’s sentiments that it is not a good idea to allow kids to dictate what they will and will not learn.  This applies not only moving our libraries over to Second Life, but also to (and probably more to) the way in which we set up our systems of information retrieval.  Google-style keyword searching, while perfectly suited for finding relevant web pages is only one of many methods that can be used for searching a library catalog.  I would argue that when this method is used exclusively, the algorithms it employs leave gaping holes in what the user is able to find vis-à-vis library resources–both physical and digital.  A library catalog, which contains properly authorized, standardized, and formatted metadata, is best searched via the tried-and-true methods whether or not that is how the user is accustomed to searching.  An essential component of learning is considering things with which we are not familiar.  As educators, librarians are responsible for bringing their students out of their element so that they can become truly information literate.

Overvaluing the Virtual
I can appreciate Lisa Forrest’s skepticism about Second Life (Mar., p. 11). I, too, am a forward-thinking librarian but am reluctant to give up teaching users to find and use information in the real world-there’s far too much to be lost. The constant argument for a virtual library world is that we must charm a generation of kids raised on Playstation and X-box. At what point in the past 30 years did kids get to dictate what they will and will not learn? They were born digital, so they can’t learn to use books? Well, they were born unable to walk but we don’t cart them around in strollers for the rest of their lives, do we? They learn to walk and are able to discover the world on their own. And like walking, which babies learn to do instinctively, I believe that students have an inherent desire to learn-it just needs to be fostered by parents and educators. In an overzealous and shortsighted attempt to appease students, I hate to think that we’re neglecting to teach them to use resources that will offer them a larger view of the information that is available in the real world (much of it digital!). So they fall down a few times. We know-and believe they will discover-that it’s well worth it.
Kathleen Collins
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
New York City

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Steven Jay Bernstein
Assistant Catalog Librarian
Elihu Burritt Library
Central Connecticut State University
1615 Stanley Street
New Britain, Connecticut 06050
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PHONE: (860) 832-2079
FAX: (860) 832-2053
E-MAIL: Bernsteinstj@ccsu.edu

Charles Menoche, Otis Mamed and I will be leading a discussion today about alternatives to the campus listserv as a means for scholarly communication. Tom Burkholder in Chemistry has been kind enough to set up some examples of the kind of software freely available as points of comparison.

Drupal (Full CMS)

http://ccmst1.ccsu.edu/drupal

Wordpress (What you’re on)

http://ccmst1.ccsu.edu/wordpress/

Mercury (A threaded forum)

http://ccmst1.ccsu.edu/mercury/

A phpBB discussion server:

http://ccmst1.ccsu.edu/phpBB3/