Google Scholar Blog

From Open Access News: check out this new blog about Google Scholar. It's called On Google Scholar and should be a good repository of schoogle info.

I promise this is the last thing I'm going to post about Google Scholar until at least Monday! Happy Thanksgiving!

Another Google-Related Item

In fall 2003, Virginina Commonwealth University Libraries used Google as part of a 1.5 credit hour honors module called "Google: An Information Literacy Case Study." Check out an article about the class in the November 2004 issue of College & Research Libraries News: "There's an 800-pound gorilla in our stacks," by Jimmy Ghapery, p. 582. (Must be a subscriber to read it online.)

More Schoogle

It certianly didn't take long for Google Scholar-ing to get a funny name! More interesting discussion from Metafilter,Web4Lib Archives and Digital Librarian. Also a free online article from the Chronicle. There's really too much out there to link to anymore!

One interesting thing in some of the non-librarian discussions is the less than thinly veiled contempt many folks have for the non-user-friendliness of our databases and catalogs. And I can definitely see their point: it is pretty cumbersome to search across DBs and retrieving articles takes lots on often non-intuitive clicking. I don't think we need to start posting out resumes or considering a career change but GS will probably push some of these technology issues to the forefront.

I also think GS can be an important tool for Open Access retrieval (Open Access News has lots of GS related posts) and in helping to possibly break some of the stanglehold that journal publishers have over information, especially in the sciences.

Google Scholar

There's been a flurry of blogging activity today about the new Google Scholar service which went live yesterday. I read a little bit about GS before it went into production but haven't really had a change to take a look today so I'll reserve judgment. But I think it does have implications for academic libraries and as Dennis Jerz notes in a very good review on his blog today, we will definitely need to knowledgeable about what it can and can't do.

Excerpt from About Google Scholar: "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Sample comments from LISNews, librarian.net, Resource Shelf, and It's All Good. I'm sure there will be a lot more news and discussions on blogs and in "traditional" library lit to come.

On a humorous note, the Blogger spell check utility suggests that I replace "blogging" with "flogging" for some reason. Interesting.

Computer Literacy vs. Information Literacy

I recently returned from the 2004 Conference on Information Technology in Tampa, which was attended by a mix of community college faculty, instructional technologists, and a few librarians. I participated in a popular roundtable discussion called "What is Computer Literacy?" I was surprised to hear that a number of other people participating--mostly IT faculty--think of computer literacy as the same as information literacy. I tried to convey that while IL and CL are natural partners, IL has its own skills set.

Anyone want to volunteer a definition of computer literacy? Our roundtable never achieved consensus.

IL-Webliography

Another interesting tidbit from the folks over at the Information Literacy Weblog. This time Information Literacy Sources of Information, a webliography of IL related info from the University of Skovde. Skovde is in Sweden. The IL-webliography has links to articles, website and more. Looks very handy.

Georgia Conference on Information Literacy 2005 - Call For Proposals

The call for proposals for the 2005 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy has just been posted. The first conference was very good, so I would definitely recommend proposing a program. Or at least attending. The conference will be held from September 30-October 1, 2005.

Excerpt:

We invite proposals for workshops and presentations that will consider, extend, or otherwise address information literacy, including but not limited to:

*Effective means of developing information literacy skills in learners
*Partnerships between librarians and classroom teachers to teach students research skills
*Information literacy across the disciplines
*Assessment of information literacy initiatives
*Intellectual property, copyright, and plagiarism in the digital age
*Technological developments and their impact on how we access, and produce knowledge

It looks like the website for last year's conference has been removed, but I'll link to the 2005 one once it's available.

LISNews.com | On Founder and Future of Wikipedia

This story from the St. Petersburg Times gives a good general overview of Wikipedia. I didn't know that Jimmy Wales, who started Wikipedia, is a southerner.

LISNews.com | On Founder and Future of Wikipedia

Trial by Fire: New Librarians as Team Teachers

Interesting article from Academic Exchange Quarterly, blogged by Michael Lorenzen, about team teaching in library instruction settings. The authors found that working as a team over multiple instruction sessions helped them reduce the stress of learning how to teach in the library setting.

Trial by Fire: New Librarians as Team Teachers

Wired News: Blogs Blamed for Exit Poll Fiasco

Article from Wired News/ AP about the exit polling numbers Tuesday that favored Senator Kerry. This definitely shows the "real world" applicability of the InfoLit skills we try to teach. Hopefully our students will come away with the skills to evaluate not only what they read on the web but what they hear/ read/ see from "traditional" media sources as well.

Raises an interesting issue about blogging too. Are there different InfoLit skills for evaluating blogged material?

Wired News: Blogs Blamed for Exit Poll Fiasco