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)

I’ve just sent off an order for this book by Peter Godwin and Jo Parker, so I can’t make a personal comment on the content, but I have great respect for both Jo and Peter, so I am sure it will be a good read. The publisher’s blurb says : This edited collection from an international team of experts provides a practically-based overview of emerging Library 2.0 tools and technologies for information literacy practitioners; addresses the impact of the adoption of these technologies on information literacy teaching; provides case study exemplars for practitioners to help inform their practice; and examines the implications of Library 2.0 for the training of information literacy professionals. March 2008; 200pp; hardback; 978-1-85604-637-4: £39.95 (£31.96 to CILIP Members)

I’ve mentioned a few times that our book on Library Support for research was publshed last year. Recently there have been quite a few positive reviews – a big relief to the three authors!
You can read the IWR review here
and another in the The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 34, Issue 2, March 2008, Page 170

I picked up a reference on the plagiarism list today about this paper in Nature which is suggesting that as many as 200,000 of the 17 million articles in the Medline database might be duplicates, either plagiarized or republished by the same author in different journals. I haven’t really addressed the issue of re-publication with staff and students I talk to – I’d be interested to know if other people have.

Bramley and Pippin “helping” me work – well at least keeping me company!

http://www.nature.com/new…s.2008.520.html

A colleague (Marian) Just forwarded this article to me. It makes interesting reading – arguing that the skills needed to play fantasy football are similar to those needed to become information literate and describing a lesson plan where this has been achieved in the University of Dubuque, USA. The author reports much more positive responses from students to both the idea of research and to librarians after the workshop.

Zion Canyon, USA Aug 2007

http://www.ala.org/ala/ac…rariansport.cfm

Having just given a talk to our university T&L committee about my project, at which I was asked “What is an information literate university?” I am interested to see that Sheila Corrall’s survey of strategic engagement with info lit in HE is now available. She found that “information literacy was represented in strategy documents at 75 institutions, including 51 examples in university-level strategies, though the types of strategy document varied significantly. IL was well represented in institutional strategies for information, student skills, and learning and teaching, but less evident in statements of graduate attributes and research strategies”.

Corrall, S.M. (2007). “Benchmarking strategic engagement with information literacy in higher education: towards a working model” Information Research, 12(4) paper 328.

Death Valley, USA

http://InformationR.net/ir/12-4/paper328.html