Google "Library"

More news on the Google front - according to Searchblog, the search engine company is embarking on a project to digitize public domain works in the collections of several major university libraries and make them available and searchable online. Kind of like a larger version of Project Gutenberg, but with Google searching.

Informative posts here and here from Searchblog. There's also an article in today's New York Times (I could access online w/o password 12/14 in am or get it off the shelf!).

Students Shun Search For Information Offline

I saw this article on cnn.com last night. It's a nice summary of what we try to overcome on daily basis.

The Information Literacy Land of Confusion

Cleaning The Closet

Here are a couple of interesting not quite so information literacy related things I've been meaning to post for a while. There was one more too, but I really can't remember what it was.

The Long Tail - Very interesting article from the October Wired (told you these had been simmering for a while). It has been blogged a million times but is still worth pointing out. Essentially it says that the "items" in the bottom 80% of sales/ streaming/rental from online sources like Netflix get used/ bought as much as the top 20%. It would be really cool for someone to do a study like this in libraries (if it hasn't been done already)since we hear so much about the 80/20 rule in relation to collections. And essentially libraries are the ultimate "long tail" collectors.

Digital Generations - This was a very interesting series of reports from NPR's Morning Edition last week about how the Internet effects regular folks lives. The one called Growing Up in a High-Tech World is especially interesting since these are our current/ future students. All of the stories are available to stream.

Articles!

I was just scanning the newest edition of Community & Junior College Libraries and ran across a few interesting looking info lit articles. Haven't had a chance to read them in full but they sound good from the abstracts, which you can see by following the handy links.

Situating the Library in the First Year Experience Course by Susan J.C. Bissett

Positive Faculty/ Librarian Relationships for Productive Library Assignments by Alicia B. Ellison (This one sounds especially pertinent!)

The Ups and Downs of Information Literacy at California Community Colleges by Friedrich (Fred) Brose

Unfortunately, there's no free FT for this journal that I can find anywhere. But hopefully it is available at all campuses.

Winning With Information Literacy

I was just scanning an article called Winning With Information Literacy by Jamie McKenzie that Michael Lorenzen posted yesterday. While it focuses more on the use of technology in learning in the K-12 world, it does sort of fit in with the issue of computer literacy v. information literacy that Jennifer raised a couple of weeks ago.

Excerpt: "Literacy may be the unifying theme most capable of enlisting broad-based support for the use of new technologies in schools. Literacy refers to the cluster of skills that are required to make meaning of one’s world across a mix of media — everything from text, graphics and art to numbers, body language and cultural cues.

The reason literacy can prove unifying is its dramatic relevance to many of the most challenging portions of the new state curriculum standards. Students possessing powerful information literacy skills are more likely to perform well on tasks requiring inference and interpretation, on items where the answer must be built rather than found." (emphasis mine)

It seems like this definition of literacy can encompass both computer literacy and information literacy. The computer or web becomes another tool to provide information that must be interpreted to be used properly.

Tame the Web: Libraries and Technology: Twelve Things I Learned at Internet Librarian 2004

This is a very good wrap-up post from the 2004 Internet Librarian conference.

Excerpt:
"As evidenced by the great group of people in our Make Learning Stick: Creating 5-Star, User-Centered Training & Instruction workshop, library folk are embracing their new roles as trainers and teachers.They had great questions and all participated. Scott Brandt gets this stuff and can explain it well. Instructional design for librarians is HOT right now. Are you developing classes? Are you teaching colleagues? You soon could be!"

No matter what new tools and gadgets and search things (like Google Scholar) come along we will always be needed to teach and train our users and colleagues. Working to design instructional sessions and presenting them is something that isn't going to go away.

There's a cool page of presentation links on the Internet Librarian site as well.

Tame the Web: Libraries and Technology: Twelve Things I Learned at Internet Librarian 2004