I must earn my free copy of this book by carrying on my posts about each chapter:
Ch 8 Information literacy and RSS feeds at LSE
Christopher Fryer and Jane Secker

This chapter describes how RSS has been used at LSE to enhance access to training courses for staff and students by bringing together information from different training providers in the institution into one training portal. The data is automatically displayed in chronological order and users can filter the list tailored to their interests. The aggregating programme generates new RSS feeds which can be displayed in the VLE and on plasma screens around the university. Very neat! I wish we had this at Newcastle.

Bramley in the garden

Carrying on my posts about chapters in this excellent book:

Ch 10 PennTags at the University of Pennsylvania.
Laurie Allen & Marcella Barnhart
“PennTags is a social bookmarking tool for locating, organising and sharing online resources” It allows users to assign multiple identities to a single resource and is retrieved when users view a record in the catalogue. It was developed for use by a specific cohort of students and has not yet been offered to the whole academic community, though a new version will be more widely promoted.

Ch 9: Library instruction on the go – podcasting at the Kresge Library.
Jennifer Zimmer and Sally Ziph
Summarises the journey library staff took in developing podcasts and vodcasts to support information literacy. Podcasts are recommended as an additional tool in an IL programme. Includes useful links to resources for podcasting.

Bramley heading out for a walk

It’s nice to see a whole supplement in the Guardian today, sponsored by JISC, focused on academic libraries, info lit and web 2.0. It covers a whole range of topics, starting with Sheila Webber and Second Life (just trying to beat Sheila in blogging about it!), the CIBER report, JISC ebooks observatory project, open access, library spaces and more.

Bunk bed cats

http://education.guardian…2274706,00.html

Facet kindly sent me a review copy of Peter and Jo’s book, so I thought I’d post on the individual chapters as I read them (in no particular order):

Ch 11: Sparking Flickrs of insight into controlled vocabularies and subject searching.
Cameron Hoffman and Sarah Polkinghorne.
This fascinating chapter explains how the authors have been using tagging in Flickr to help students learn about controlled vocabulary. The students are asked to tag a set of photos – campus landmarks and local scenes and then compare their tags and discuss the differences between subject and keyword searching.

Ch 12: Joining the YouTube conversation to teach information literacy. Susan Ariew.
Susan describes how the University of Florida created a pilot video on YouTube to teach information literacy. They used a student volunteer and hit some copyright issues with linking to it from the library website. However, they have since gone on to produce over 100 podcasts as well as having a sponsored video contest, which I think is a great way to get students learning about the library.

Arthur’s Circus in Hobart (thank to Louise again)

http://www.facetshop.co.u…&Category_Code=

An offshoot from our book on Library Support for Research (see earlier posts if you’ve managed to miss this great event) is this literature review which has just been published in the New Review of Academic Librarianship, 13 (1-2) 2007 – co authored as usual by Pat Gannon-Leary, myself and Jo Webb. The literature review was an essential preparation for the book and we felt it would make a useful contribution in it’s own right to help people identify resources to help them support researchers.

Fitzroy Gardens in Melbourne (thanks to Louise)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614530701868686

I’m reading an interesting book at the moment – Managing transitions by William Bridges. He talks about change being a situational, external thing which is about starting something new, while transition is more psychological and internal and involves letting go of the old reality. When a change occurs, between the ending and the new beginning is a neutral zone, which he sees as an opportunity to change habits. Maybe this is an argument for introducing good IL habits as soon as possible when students start university, while they are in their neutral zone.

Pied Shag/Cormorant, WA (thanks to Darryl)