The Ubiquitous Librarian (Brian Mathews)

The Library & The CMS: a wish list

I’m really excited about the relationship that is forming between the Library and our Course Management System folks. UCSB is adopting Moodle and there is a lot of momentum gathering. The Library has been invited to be development partners but also to help with assessment as well.

Here are my quick and dirty notes of blue-sky thinking. Please feel free to add more ideas in the comments. I’m also curious to hear about tips and pitfalls of working with CMS teams.

Core theme: “the library in every course”—building on their theme of “a website for every class.” We want to integrate library resources and services into the infrastructure-- make it as easy as possible for students and faculty to access the library via their course management system.

1. We’d like to have a default library “widget” or tab or space for every course. This will include basic stuff, such as reserves, Ask-A-Librarian, libguides, the catalog, etc.  Ideally this would be standardized and automatically loaded into every course.

2. We’d like to have the ability to customize the widget or space for particular courses and/or for particular disciplines. This would allow us to create special content for a research-intensive course, or create a customized suite of services/resources for all Art courses or all Sciences courses, etc. Think of this as an advanced widget. A more customized suite of services.

3. We want to integrate reserves with Moodle. We currently use Docutek. Let’s consider the student accessing necessary materials all in one space instead of just linking them to our website. If a class has reserves, they should show up where they access their course information. Let’s also consider how faculty place/submit reserves via a common menu or process. Is there an opportunity to take advantage of persistent links here too?

4. We’d like to have a permissions/access level for librarians so that they can view course material, and perhaps post to message boards, wikis, etc—but not have access to grades and other sensitive information. While some interactive capabilities would be great, we’d be happy to start with read-only access to every class. This allows us to farm syllabi for assignments. Also, this allows us to build on the idea of micro-instruction, essentially a library instruction artifact (various formats) housed in every course.

5. We’d like to have a universal space where students can go to ask questions. While we want to encourage them to continue using our Ask service, having a CMS embedded destination for research help is something to explore. If we could have one place online for this, librarians can become embedded into the classroom as well as the core infrastructure. This builds on the idea of we go where they need us, or rather, where they need help.

6. We’ll want to consider proxy access. Students have to log in to access GauchoSpace, so can we transfer that into our databases for a seamless experience?

7. We want to be involved in the assessment of the CMS. We actually want to talk with different segments of student and faculty users before, during, and after the implementation. 

8. We’ll want to consider collaborative projects—how groups can conduct, share, use, notate, cite, tag, and store research together. Are there any “group tools” that we can support? How can we allow them to collect and access documents and data together? It will be good for us to think beyond just providing access to information and instead be looking for ways to help enable educational experiences.

9. We’ll want to consider long-term archiving. Does a student/faculty lose all of their content once the quarter is over, or is there some value to being able to go back and look at past material and digital notes from the other quarters? If I take a Class X right now, I might want to go back and look at that material next year when I take Class Y. If we assume that the curriculum is building on itself, then this is a good opportunity for students to accumulate and access that knowledge whenever they need it.

10. We’ll want to consider the pedagogical opportunities and perhaps use this as a chance for the library to help faculty integrate 2.0 tools into their instruction efforts. We'd really like to find a good partnership with Instruction Design/Development and other units on campus. Now that profs have these new tools (wikis, chat, podcasting, etc) how can we help them get the most out of this software? This could be mix of live classes, a sandbox, personal instruction, as well as handouts that feature/collect case students, best practices, and general guidelines to using these tools. I imagine a lot of door-to-door sales strategy here.

11. We’ll want to use this opportunity to teach the campus about copyright. Could try and blend fair-use with open access, future of publishing, and related themes.

12. We'll want to consider how library instruction can take advantage of Wimba or a similar product. How do librarians fit into online classroom environment?

13. We want to be involved in creating a landing page, one for students and one for faculty. This essentially aggregates (RSS feeds?) campus info into a portal-like place. Ideally we could filter this by discipline so as to allow a blend of general of specialized info. Not limited to library material, but campus news, grants, events, important dates, professional development, etc.

What else should we aim for?

Nobel Laureate Envisions Data Curated Future

Well, look who has returned to his blog. I know… it has been awhile. Too long in fact, but I have not had a lot of time for reflection. I’m finally finding my place here and I’m excited about several projects in the works. More to share as things come together.

Last week was open access week. The big news over here was the UC’s launch of the new eScholarship. In a nutshell, they seem to be rebranding themselves from an institutional repository into a scholarly publishing service. The new interface is more intuitive and there are lots of great new bells and whistles, but… it is PDF-focused, which is too limiting for my tastes. As we head into the second decade of the 21st century we need be archiving multimedia and data, not just docs. And I’m not alone---

Two weeks ago, I spoke with recent Nobel Laureate Carol W. Greider. She was gracious enough to fit The Ubiquitous Librarian into her busy schedule somewhere between NPR, NY Times, and all the other media outlets seeking her attention. (Thanks to her accommodating staff!) Anyway, the purpose of my interview was to tap into her memory of her time at UCSB and most particularly the library. I was curious about the path one takes at becoming a world-class scientist, and the experiences and influences that shape it. You can read about it here.

Toward the end of our talk I brought up topics such as the future of libraries, the future of scholarship, and the future of publishing. I was hoping that Greider would give a great quote about Open Access, but we didn’t head in that direction. I didn’t want to push it too much because the debate is very political and I didn’t want to drop her into those waters. But…

Greider did hit on one theme that is gaining momentum in the academic library world: data curation. She admitted that she was not currently taking advantage of any service (Hopkins, can I get a finders fee?) but that she imagined in five years it would be very common. She further stated that the problem right now is standardization and that it would be nice if a uniform format was adopted.

Expanding on that she added that universities mandate that researchers keep notebooks. The data belongs to the school; it is the institution’s intellectual property. A digital form of these notebooks will be a need in the future… possibly a role of the library? This is record keeping for the 21st century; the lifecycle of research, not just the results. Kind of like this Cambridge product, but broader. Right now the profession seems to be most interested in data curation in terms of how it relates to open access -- scientists across the world sharing and collaborating digitally… resulting in new discoveries much more quickly.  That’s the dream. But even in a closed system, there seems to be a role for the library. I am sure that The Office of Research, The Data Warehouse Office, or whatever office on your campus envisions themselves in this way as protectors, but I hope this is not another big missed opportunity (like indexing the web) for our profession. This is another resource we have to expand our identity beyond “book people” and demonstrate that we can archive other stuff too.

I know I am late to the table with the rah rah for data curation, but here is some background reading for those interested:

http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001277.html
http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ala06/
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september07/treloar/09treloar.html

A plea to the ACRL 2011 planners

It’s time to dust off this blog again. I have lots to share, but no time to write--- so this will be a quick one. I’ll hopefully have some interesting (or at least new) content in the upcoming weeks—deep into the planning process right now.

I have to say that I would be extremely displeased with ACRL if they brought in Mark Bauerlein. If you are going that direction why not go all the way and bring in Glen Beck, Limbaugh, or someone else from that “hate economy”? Actually, what would be really cool is having Colbert debate Bauerlein. Seriously though, negativity is not the way to go, especially in a horrendous economy. I suggest someone with a positive upbeat message that is actually practical. A person who can talk about heading into the future instead of someone stuck in the past.

Van Jones perhaps? I’m totally digging his Green Collar book. 

Or Wired columnist Clive Thompson who frequently writes about web culture. His current piece The New Literacy is very intriguing and flips Bauerlein on his head. Clive talks about a study done by Dr. Andrea Lunsford (Stanford) who says, "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization.” And Clive adds, “The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.”

This is more of what I would expect from an ACRL speaker. I am not sure what the conference theme is yet, but unless it is nostalgia related I say skip Bauerlein.

Furloughs and the spirit of generosity

So you might have heard, the ten campuses of the University of California are going to be furloughed. Great time to move here, huh? There are still a lot of details to be worked out but the bottom-line comes down to around 16-18 unpaid days off. We've known this might be coming for several weeks now. At first I thought I'd use this time to tour around California; I really want to visit San Francisco. Then I thought maybe I'll use the time for various writing projects. However a new plan has emerged.

While I was at ALA last week I met with Leonard Kniffel, Editor of American Libraries. In passing he mentioned that during his furlough week he taught at UW-Madison. I really liked this idea. It is a great way to turn a negative situation into a positive and productive encounter. I plan to adopt a similar approach. Any library school that is interested-- I'll happily donate some of my furlough time to talking with your students. This will be online, maybe through Skype or Wimba or any other system your school has access to. Maybe these sessions will fit into a particular class, or maybe it's just something we open to anyone who is interested. I can cover a wide range of topics.

On a similar theme. Something I wanted to do at Georgia Tech but it just never worked out. I'm going to donate half of my speaker and author honorariums (excluding ALA Editions) to the UCSB Library collections budget. It's not much really, just a few hundred a year, but this will give me the chance to select some much needed titles and contribute a bit of my personality to the collection. Let's hope that generosity is contagious!

The Ubiquitous Librarian Returns: things I've been working on

Do I miss Atlanta?

 UCSB

Nah, not really. After living in Orlando, Washington DC, and Atlanta I was ready to move to a quieter part of the country. Coastal California suites me fine.

I am starting Week 3 here at UCSB. There are already several projects underway. I’ll post about those further down the road, but in the meantime here are a few things you might be interested in.

I have an editorial in the current issue of Library Journal titled “Libraries & the Inspiration Business.” I tried to build a case for libraries as a transformative experience. That is hard to do with just 800 words, so here is the hour-long version I did at Simmons College a few months ago.

If you want to hear me blabber some more, check out this 15 minute interview about the user experience stuff at Georgia Tech. Erin Dorney also wrote a very kind piece in the current issue of CRL News. Thanks Erin. A lot of people scratch their heads when I tried to explain my old job, but she seemed genuinely interested—it is good to see people intrigued by design thinking.

Some more stuff to fill your day…

My second to last column for the Journal of Web Librarianship is out in pre-print-- it is about social driven instruction.

Jon Bodnar and I turned our ARL Spec Kit into a reader-friendly article. It is in the current issue of Marketing Library Services and titled “An Inside Look at How Academics Promote Their Libraries.” It is not online, but I heard they were going to be giving away this issue at ALA.

Just a side note on ARL Spec Kits. I pitched an idea to them about “green initiatives”—they rejected it claiming that it is “out of scope for the SPEC survey program at this time.” I guess I have become one of those cliché west coast guys talking about the environment, organic food, and activism. I love ARL, but seriously, has there ever been a better time to consider this topic? For those interested, I recommend reading Gerry McKiernan’s The Green Library blog.

And if all that wasn’t enough, add the latest report from Rochester to your summer reading list.