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aarontay › Likes
Deborah Fitchett, Lily, Caitlin and 18 other people liked this
best shoes? (boy & girl categories). Best earrings / tie (either gender).
- $tephanie•Gardening
Smelliest office?
- Stephen le Francoeur
I should have said "awards and their winners." Please, award somebody something.
- Marie
I'd like to award Aaron Tay and Deborah Fitchett the Special Time Traveler Award for Overcoming Time Zone Differentials.
- Stephen le Francoeur
I'd like to award RepoRat the Most Improved Work LIfe trophy, which takes the form of a small statuette giving the finger to the fPOW.
- Jenica
In the Documentary category, Andrew Shuping will be receiving the award for Feline Life Documentation.
- Stephen le Francoeur
I'd like to give Jenica rogers the fiscally responsible award.
- Hedgehog
I am? *sniffle*
- maʀtha
Laura X receives the Mightiest Mama award
- maʀtha
Derrick receives the Hawt Haberdashery award
- maʀtha
*verklempt*
- RepoRat
I award second runner up to Aaron Dobbs in the "I Am Aaron Dobbs" contest.
- Andy
Andy is awarded the Leverage "Seriously, people? SERIOUSLY?" Award of 2013.
- RepoRat
My award goes to Steve can't abide woo-woo for best name: "Steele Lawman." Which I still miss.
- John Dupuis
Both Jenica and Catherine and anyone else who cancelled ACS stuff should get the Tilting at Windmills award.
- maʀtha
For you, John.
- bevedog
I'd like to give Josh Neff the Ghostly Presence award.
- bevedog
@FakeElsevier gets the Outstanding Unwitting LSW Member award
- bevedog
How about an award to Barbara Fister for her gooder and bestest writing ability.
- OMG 404 Joe
Yay! I get the Getting Steele to Go Back to Steele Award!
- John Dupuis
Congratulations on your award, John!
- Marie
I'd like to thank all the little people who made this award possible...
- John Dupuis
Warmaiden for the Best Brand New Sweetie award
- maʀtha
Hear hear!
- Betsy #TeamMonique
Steve Lawson gets the Makerspace Award (aka: "The GPD"), and you know what that looks like...
- LibrarianOnTheLoose
Liek Whoa... I got second runner up in the "I Am Aaron Dobbs" contest?! I never expected to rank so high
- awd (canoeist in th wild)
Another award should go to Iris for reasons.
- OMG 404 Joe
from iPod
Andrew gets the Courage Under Fire award for sticking it some unpleasant work situations.
- Andy
Martha gets Most Spirited for her efforts at delurking the lurkers and for her general all around incitements. :)
- laura x
Soup and Derrick get the New Librarians awards
- maʀtha
I hope to be in the running for the Comeback Player of the Year award next year.
- Julian
Don't call it a comeback. You've been here for years. #mommasaidknockyouout
- Andy
Through with the draft of my OA roundup (in January & February C&I). Just over 60,000 words. That should go down, probably about 5% to 10%, in editing, making it the heart of two long issues. Neither of which will emerge before 2013.
OMG 404 Joe, aarontay and John Dupuis liked this
Whoa. Can't wait!
- John Dupuis
ExLibris has made available the code to add almetrics to Primo results. Anyone tried this yet? Anyone done much with almetrics in general?
Christina Pikas and aarontay liked this
Happy birthday to our dear LauraX!
Galadriel C., Jennifer Dittrich, Nikki D. and 33 other people liked this
Have a wonderful birthday and many happy returns!
- Meg V. Meg
happy day!
- ellbeecee
Happy laura x Day!
- Lisa | #TeamMonique
from Android
happy birthday!
- RepoRat
Happy birthday, Laura! :)
- Kelli H.
Happy Birthday, Laura!
- Ha3rvey (on hiatus)
Happy Birthday, Laura! You're pretty freaking awesome, you know? I mean, aside from those zits.
- Chelle Chelle Ro Ro
Have a wonderful birthday!
- The LB: #TeamMonique
from Android
Many happy returns of the day!
- Catherine Pellegrino
Happy birthday, Laura!
- bevedog
Happy happy happy birthday, my friend.
- Marianne
Happy birthday!
- WoH: Professor MOTHRA
from iPhone
Happy birthday, Laurax!
- Jason P
Happyx Birthdayx, Laurax!
- Stephen Mack #TeamMomo
Happy birthday Laura!
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
Happy Birthday, Laura!
- Jkram|ɯɐɹʞſ
Happy birthday!
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Happy birthday!
- Jen
Happy Birthday, Laura!
- Anne Bouey
Happy birthday!
- Mary Carmen
from iPhone
happy bday laura with an x!
- Sir Shuping is just sir
Happy Birthday, dearest Laurax
- maʀtha
Happy birthday Laura with an x
- Heleninstitches
Happy birthday :)
- Pete #TeamMonique
Happy Birthday Laura!!!
- VALZ/TT/TM
Happy birthday!
- John (bird whisperer)
happy bday!
- imabonehead
Many happy returns, Laura!
- Lily
Happy Birthday!
- Jennifer Dittrich
happy birthday :)
- Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)
Student thesis proposal on the Kama Sutra and the orgasm as religious ecstasy. Me: "the field work will be quite interesting." Professor: "You will certainly need to talk to the IRB about this one."
John Dupuis, aarontay, W!cKeD and 10 other people liked this
Thanks, Textbooks. - http://thankstextbooks.tumblr.com/
aarontay, Royce's favorite Anna, Andy and 7 other people liked this
Great companion site to Awful Library Books.
- RepoRat
from Bookmarklet
Oh God. This has just made my day.
- laura x
Why are we lubricating the hamster? bwahahahahaha
- Hedgehog
This is brilliant. The one about the wheelchair is particularly bent. Aside from everything else, why tell us how much the wheelchair weighs? Because that doesn't matter to anything else at all, unless the man in the chair is a ghost.
- DJF
Thank you. "Good day, perverts."
- kaijsa
I am so upset that this did not exist when J was a baby. We had PLENTY of Chinese pants explosions in those days.
- Catherine Pellegrino
DJF: I remember a lot of my math textbooks adding scads of irrelevant detail to word problems just so you'd have to pick through to the relevant stuff.
- RepoRat
I am avoiding work. Thank you for participating.
awd (canoeist in th wild), Royce's favorite Anna, aarontay and 8 other people liked this
Hey @EBSCOhost, get your title lists into the Serials Solutions Client Center for the newly merged HW Wilson/EBSCO databases, please.
aarontay liked this
Kirsten, aarontay, Kathy and Stephen le Francoeur liked this
It artificially bumps up statistics for individual subject specific databases. There are ways to compute around it, and I have referred those ways to the people who crunch the numbers, but they don't do it, so every time we look at database statistics in our collection development meetings, I have to explain all over again...
- LibrarianOnTheLoose
Can you expand on that, please? Which discovery layer are y'all using and in what way does it bump stats?
- Kirsten
I'm guessing it's got to be boosting the sessions count. But then so does a link resolver. Both allow discovery of the item to happen elsewhere and then zoom the searcher straight to the item in some random subject database where the full text happens to reside.
- Stephen le Francoeur
EDS. If you run a search in EDS, it counts as a search in each database included in EDS. So, a small database like Abstracts in Social Gerontology, which used to get something like 12,000 searches now gets 30,000. If you look at the number of searches in EDS you can figure out the difference and get the number of times the subject specific database was accessed directly instead of through EDS, but our number cruncher doesn't compute it for us.
- LibrarianOnTheLoose
Huh. I don't think Summon works that way. I could be mistaken but I think that a search in Summon doesn't get double counted as a search in the database where the user has been sent to access an item found back in Summon.
- Stephen le Francoeur
How does EDS communicate to the non-EBSCO databases that a search has been run?
- Stephen le Francoeur
I don't exactly know, but I do know if we have a non-Ebsco database that has say, maximum 5 simultaneous users, we have had to remove them from the EDS index, because people were getting shut out of the database (accessing it directly) when there was an assignment, because others running EDS seraches were taking up the 5 slots.
- LibrarianOnTheLoose
For Ebsco databases where there are a limited number of users, that is waived in the EDS searches, but not for non-Ebsco databases.
- LibrarianOnTheLoose
Gah. As it happens, this morning I've been researching the stats for Summon and how I find evidence of its impact on our ecosystem of resources. Now I want to into EBSCO admin to get some stats and I can't get in. Server down?
- Stephen le Francoeur
EDS seems to work very differently from Summon, the way this is described makes it sound like a federated search solution at least stats wise. We haven't gotten ours long but if I remember most summon libraries are reporting fall in searches of most platforms but increase in downloads so I doubt summon is counting searches the way EDS is.
- aarontay
Just a Librarian, I think you're talking about the federated part of EDS, right? Stephen,to your question: we create our own EDS index. This will include EBSCO dbs but also dbs from "partners" that have supplied metadata, e.g. ScienceDirect, JSTOR, DOAJ etc. So you've got these databases on your profile, and so it's basically EBSCO's info statistically. The full text is another matter....
more...
- JffKrlsn
EDS sounds confusing even the index only. In Summon the stats (which admittedly is pathetic) doesn't care which database the results come from (whether from proquest - related company or not), searches in summon are just searches in summon, when user clicks on results it hands-off via openurl or direct linking and you collect your stats at the target via Counter or openurl side . Seems cleaner, assuming you already have process in place to monitor usage in the past.
- aarontay
We are getting started with Primo, which sounds like Summon in that it uses a large central index. As such, it sounds like it will be competely separate from our native interface searches. This is really helpful, thanks for the replies.
- Jen
Want to do some comparisons between our our federated search product (360 Search), our discovery layer (Summon), and some comprehensive, popular databases (Academic Search Complete and some players yet to be named...but I'll take suggestions). Is the ratio of searches per session at all an interesting statistic? From the numbers I see, it looks...
...like students run more searches in Summon per session. My theory is that they do so because it's so much faster and easier to use than our federated search was and our traditional databases. Here are the numbers I have so far. https://docs.google.com/spreads...
- Stephen le Francoeur
I do more searches in Summon because I don't get what I want right away and find I need to tweak things more in Summon than in EBSCO databases. fwiw
- $tephanie•Gardening
Stephanie, that's the other view of the ratio that I'm afraid might also be true. Can't tell from the data alone whether a high search per session ratio is generally a good thing or a bad thing. It's too much of a mixed bag, I'm guessing.
- Stephen le Francoeur
random question: do you all intend to keep the federated search since you have the discovery layer? i'm hearing our federated search will go away and i think it has some uses
- Christina Pikas
We cancelled 360 Search when we got Summon. I'm curious about what specific uses you have in mind?
- Stephen le Francoeur
Check what counts as a "search" in Summon. In EDS, each time you do a search it is counted as one search for each database on the profile, so a single click could be counted as 30, 50, etc. I looked into this because I thought fewer searches per session would be evidence that the discovery tool was doing its job--connecting users to resources more quickly. But it turns out there's no way to use those metrics to get there.
- JffKrlsn
Quick and dirty engineering search across inspec, compendex, inspec archive, ntis, aerospace and high tech - 3 different platforms. We embed that search on our pages.
- Christina Pikas
from iPhone
Curious that you still have more sessions of academic search complete than Summon. Is Summon your default search on your website? We hiding our federated search solution link from Dec where Summon becomes the default search. our article tab which was III webbridge will become a scoped summon search on top of the default summon box which will filter newspaper articles and book reviews by default.
- aarontay
Aaron, we don't have a search box, let alone a link to Summon on our home page (yet). The new library website that will be launched at the end of the year will feature a Summon-powered "Articles" search box as the default one. That's going to make our Summon stats go way up at the expense of other databases, I think.
- Stephen le Francoeur
Happy Thanksgiving! #nopants
bevedog, aarontay, The LB: #TeamMonique and 11 other people liked this
isn't my purple robe great?
- maʀtha
yes
- maʀtha
Looking good honey - tho you know that #nopants means something entirely different in these parts, don't ya? ;-)
- Heleninstitches
heh, yes
- maʀtha
I, meanwhile, am wearing my second pair of pants for the day (American definition). #manypants
- Marianne
Since today is merely "Thursday" here, I am fully clothed in a mainstream gendered appropriate way. So I am, in fact, wearing trousers.
- DJF
Fwd: My #nyla12 presentation is up: Bibliometrics 101 on @slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/librari... (via http://friendfeed.com/librari...)
aarontay, suelibrarian and OMG 404 Joe liked this
Holy crap! My CCUMC talk (Library: The Once & Future Makerspace) is on YouTube! Why does that freak me out more than if it were only in the conference Proceedings? http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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aarontay liked this
Pictures of me freak me out too... So i got it worse.
- aarontay
Laura Norvig, aarontay, RudĩϐЯaЯïan and 4 other people liked this
Actually, I got sick and someone else ended up doing it...but there's always next semester.
- Yvonne
We use webex which is more complicated to use, but more powerful in someways. We later put the recording on Youtube. Recent example by colleagues http://youtu.be/dxQOB7SaTf4 Curious about Google Hangouts - do you have a url on youtube?
- aarontay
We did the hangout to YouTube thing for our on-campus ed-tech conference yesterday and today, and it's pretty slick. So much easier than our old Elluminate and archiving procedure.
- kaijsa
@aarontay The URL isn't official--it belongs to a faculty member.
- Yvonne
Who else has divided up their library into different noise-level zones and posted info about it on their website? So far, I have...
aarontay, JffKrlsn, Jenica and Sir Shuping is just sir liked this
Western Washington University http://library.wwu.edu/feature...
- Stephen le Francoeur
Carleton College http://apps.carleton.edu/campus...
- Stephen le Francoeur
We have a designated quiet floor, but I'm not sure whether it's mentioned anywhere on the website very visibly. (Here for example: http://library.gsu.edu/626... it just says we have a quiet floor.)
- Jason P
University of Western Ontario: http://www.lib.uwo.ca/policie... (there are maps in each building)
- DJF
University of Windsor: http://leddy.uwindsor.ca/quiet-a...
- copystar
Our Scott Library is divided up into various types of space but I'm not sure we've got that on the web anywhere.
- John Dupuis
We have quiet levels, but I don't think the information is on our website: http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2007...
- lris
Quiet study areas in McGill branches: http://www.mcgill.ca/library...
- Megan loves summer
I wrote about some libraries doing this recently: http://chronicle.com/article...
- Jennifer Howard
Our floor maps page on the website indicates which are quiet floors. http://www-lib.uwyo.edu/about...
- kaijsa
I wrote a quick post on a staff blog just now with links to these and other libraries that have designated different spaces for different levels of noise. http://bit.ly/SWrV0K
- Stephen le Francoeur
A colleague just shared this one from NYU. http://nyu.libguides.com/content...
- Stephen le Francoeur
we have a designated floor at the medical library. It's mentioned on the website but not obviously
- Hedgehog
Two floors are designated as "quiet levels" and students call on security to enforce if it gets loud. Other levels have varying decrees about noise but I can't find the info graphic on the website: http://lib.uconn.edu/instruc....
- Galadriel C.
We do. Not sure how long the news will appear on the website, though: https://libraries.mercer.edu/news-ev...
- The LB: #TeamMonique
Oh, you meant actual libraries and literal noise-levels. I was thinking you were talking about some social network and the noise-to-signal ratio. :P
- DAMMIT, MR. NOODLE
I see Jenica's in the Times (of London--the real Times). This story really may have legs: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story...
Chelle Chelle Ro Ro, Mark Kille, Galadriel C. and 24 other people liked this
INORITE?
- Jenica
U big time now?
- Eric - Too Hot
Holy smokes
- maʀtha
whoa, awesome!
- Sir Shuping is just sir
wowza!
- Marie
We're gonna have to buy her a bigger hat. (also, you rock, darlin')
- Louise "Weezy" Alcorn
My tips for vendors training librarians - http://deborahfitchett.blogspot.com/2012...
Marie, Kirsten, aarontay and Betsy #TeamMonique liked this
Our manifesto: “The Right to Read is the Right to Mine”; Universities: you must fight for Open Content Mining before it’s too late - http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr...
Björn Brembs, Betsy #TeamMonique, aarontay and 2 other people liked this
Peter - is http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstre... in the intended format? I want to copy and paste from it. Seb Schmoller
- Seb Schmoller
Seb - I don't think I've seen PMR leaving a comment on FF before. Probably best to ask the same question on Twitter or better still, on the post itself ;-)
- Graham Steel
Graham - thanks. I will follow your advice. Seb
- Seb Schmoller
Does anyone know of a list that separates library subscription databases to those that need to generate permalinks in order to create article links that won't expire v.s. links that can be immediately bookmarked and that don't expire (otherwise known as databases without links with session ids)?
aarontay liked this
I don't, but I can image that the second list is going to be distressingly short. Sigh...
- Stephen le Francoeur
I would like to see said list (along with instructions on how to create article links, if possible, for the former).
- $tephanie•Gardening
This doesn't do exactly that but you might be interested in our page at http://wiki.canterbury.ac.nz/display... - the ejournals section has a couple of forms that take a DOI, or another database link, and proxy+permalinkify them.
- Deborah Fitchett
Thanks Deborah. I suspect many companies like Web of Science and our aggregators could do a better job of this but don't want easy bookmarkable links and would rather users create accounts to save their links within their systems instead. My personal inclination is to steer users away from recording all the different ways to generate and save 'permalinks' and just tell folks to grab the URL from Google Scholar.
- copystar
jstor went the other way. they used to just have stable urls now sometimes if you google in you end up with a non-stable link, then you got to copy the stable one. seriously I never thought "my account" type features are popular. am I wrong? who wants to remember dozens of account passwords? maybe a openid type system for all such accounts would help?
- aarontay
from BuddyFeed
My library also created a guide on how to build the stable link from commonly used databases - http://libguides.lib.msu.edu/stablel.... Mostly needed for faculty who wants to put it on the course management system. Interestingly enough, grabbing URL from Google Scholar might work (but I have never tried that one out, to be honest.)
- ranti
we have a guide like Ranti's (http://belmont.libguides.com/content...), and I've never tried using the Google Scholar link either....
- ~Courtney F
My blog was mentioned in MLA News (news pub of the Medical Library Assoc). So this will be another of those times that I have to remind my boss about my blog. :)
Louise "Weezy" Alcorn, aarontay, Derrick and 6 other people liked this
For those of you who play with ERM, when it comes to evaluating COUNTER-type stats, do you place more weight on no. of searches, retrievals, or sessions? Alternately, if anyone has any good resources on evaluating statistics, you can just point me to that --so far I keep turning up COUNTER FAQ's mostly...which isn't helping.
OMG 404 Joe, Sir Shuping is just sir and aarontay liked this
If I'm looking at A&I databases, then it's searches we use as the primary. I look at sessions, but no one else pays much attention to that. For aggregator databases we use full text downloads as the primary with searches as secondary. Of course, this is all in flux now that we've been using a discovery layer for a couple of years. We're still figuring out how to use the search and...
more...
- Kirsten
Thanks! I'm still picking up some of the terminology...would 'retrievals" be the same as 'full text downloads"? I'm mostly working with ProQuest right now and trying to make sense of the data.
- MontglaneChess
PQ should have some kind of FAQ that defines what they mean by "retrievals" (it may or may not be full text downloads). We look at all of it, but I usually focus more on searches and downloads than anything else.
- ~Courtney F
I've found a couple of pages on PQ datasets...no terminology definitions yet, but some it looks promising. Thanks for the idea.
- MontglaneChess
Any vendor with full text available and using COUNTER-compliant stats should have a Journal Report 1, which is defined as "Number of Successful Full-Text Article Requests." So if you're seeing "retrievals" on something that's claiming to be a JR1, you might make sure the report really is COUNTER-compliant, as that isn't a term COUNTER uses. That being said, the word "retrievals" can mean search results as well as full text downloads,
- Kirsten
Ah...therein lies the problem. It looks like ProQuest doesn't offer JR1 data. I guess I'll be sticking with 'searches' as my primary dataset.
- MontglaneChess
Sure they do. Here's what the screen looks like in the new interface: http://screencast.com/t... And here's the old: http://screencast.com/t...
- Kirsten
Wow, that's awesome, but weird. Because one of their official pages was saying they don't offer JR1 data. Guess they changed that and forgot to update the page I was looking at. We also get ours through a consortia, which I think was adding to my confusion. Thanks for the screenshots!
- MontglaneChess
We do get JR1 stats from Proquest via scholarlystats, PDF - https://www.scholarlystats.com/sstats...
- OMG 404 Joe
Google Acquires Meebo - http://mashable.com/2012...
Stephen Mack #TeamMomo, bob, aarontay and Laura Norvig liked this
"Google has acquired Meebo for an undisclosed sum, the latter announced on its company blog Monday afternoon. Earlier rumors suggest that Google paid around $100 million for the seven-year-old startup. A source close to the matter said that Meebo’s staff would be joining the Google+ team. (UPDATE: Google has confirmed this.) The company has not yet determined the fate of Meebo’s existing products, which includes a messaging app and social toolbar."
- Sir Shuping is just sir
from Bookmarklet
I wonder what this will mean for Meebo messenger
- Sir Shuping is just sir
Will be interested to see how this plays out - we use Meebo for our library chat service.
- Rachel Walden
And libraries everywhere prepare to get screwed over.
- Soup in a TARDIS
Google be doing the most.
- Derrick
Meebo's IM has been doing a slow death for a while now...I'm thinking this will probably just hasten the messenger part. maybe google will build into gchat
- Sir Shuping is just sir
boo
- maʀtha
nooooooo
- Yvonne
Meebo just sent out an email about them being acquired by Google...unsurprisingly it said nothing about messenger. Just sent them an email to see if they'll talk about what will happen
- Sir Shuping is just sir
Heard back from their support (which is fast) and the response at the moment is..."Thanks for writing in! We still don't know at this point - we are working out the details. I'm sure as we know more information we will make it public to our users. Sorry, I wish I had more information! "
- Sir Shuping is just sir
aarontay, Heather Piwowar and Amandadon't liked this
define "text mining" in the faculty member's context
- RepoRat
"look for trends" --this is third hand through a colleague. She's not sure what beyond word cloud to offer.
- Hedgehog
gawd. that is completely senseless.
- RepoRat
What would make it less senseless? Is there a good example of text mining or a primer on the subject out there? Is there anything that can be done statistically on such a small sample?
- bevedog
This looks interesting: http://www.data-miner.com/ If you buy the book you can download the software.
- John Dupuis
AntConc? http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc... "Concordances" are kind of like "trends" to my mind. This page is more helpful: http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/softwar...
- Meg V. Meg
Defining what kind of "trend" they're looking for. Word usage changes? First use of particular terms or concepts? Grammar or composition changes?
- RepoRat
it is common for researchers who are actually doing text and data mining of corpuses to develop their own tools, perhaps starting with a foundational level of software like SPSS or R.
- DJF
You also might point them towards this "text analysis" page on the DiRT wiki: http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/categor... That way they can try out what looks good to them.
- Meg V. Meg
Mark Funk did an analysis of words in JMLA publications at the just-finished Medical Library Association conference, but I don't recall what he used. He's at Weill Cornell Medical Library - might be worth contacting him.
- Rachel Walden
R has some packages for text mining but yeah, it all depends on what they're trying to do
- Christina Pikas
does "looking for trends" maybe actually mean "looking for themes"? if so, maybe a content analysis software package like NVivo or Atlas.ti might be good?
- Marie
Thank you, I'll share some of these with Lisa to relay back to the faculty. I tried to get more clarity on what the faculty member is looking for--I think they want content analysis but again, I haven't actually spoken to anyone. My guess is they'd like a handy machine that would read 20 articles, summarize the medical recommendations, and do a nice systematic review of it but I could be wrong :p
- Hedgehog
Oh, yeah, that is not gonna happen. Actual human intervention is needed to assess the quality of the papers for systematic review purposes, and anybody who tells you different is intellectually suspect.
- Rachel Walden
(uh, not that I have an opinion about that) ;)
- Rachel Walden
Well, it's possible that there are text markers that could tell a crap study from a good one with a useful success rate. We just don't know what those markers are, and it'd take a HELLUVA lot more than 20 papers to figure them out.
- RepoRat
If it's medical, that would have be an extremely sophisticated system, because of the number and complexity of factors that go into determining the quality and relevance of an individual paper. You could potentially have a system that pulls out what each paper *says,* but determining how relevant and good each one is is a whole different ball of wax.
- Rachel Walden
Not disagreeing at all with you Rachel, just me theorizing without having spoken to the faculty. My first thought was something along the lines of "need a program that will read and summarize 20 papers, isn't that what grad students are for?"
- Hedgehog
We are looking at how to circulate iPads at our library. How do y'all do it, if indeed you do circulate iPads? (I'm trying to see how it can be done given the personal nature of the device seemingly set up in such a way that it's tied to an account and with apps that a person or family would use rather than...well, for a library). Thanks.
aarontay, Laura Norvig and The LB: #TeamMonique liked this
You might check with Tripp Reade at NCSU - they circ a bunch of them and have a system for wiping them before re-circ. It was right as I was leaving, so I dont remember the details.
- ωαřмaiden ❤Marrit Woman❤
Will do, C. Thanks.
- Derrick
Seconding Tripp. Tell him Colleen & Mary sent you. He will get a kick out of that.
- Mary Carmen
from iPhone
Cool beans. Sent him an email while I was on the desk. :)
- Derrick
LibStackExchange comment recommended http://www.apple.com/support... . Recommender was Griffey, so I'm totally willing to believe. *g* http://libraries.stackexchange.com/questio...
- RepoRat
Thanks, Repo.
- Derrick
You bet.
- RepoRat
can you report back Derrick? i'm going to have the same question in a month. can send a mango flavoured donut as thanks.
- tara
Sure thing, tara. Still waiting to hear back, but I'll update here accordingly.
- Derrick
Libraries and Info Sci StackExchange is in public beta. The just-curious can now take it for a spin. http://libraries.stackexchange.com/
aarontay, suelibrarian, John Dupuis and Julian liked this
I ran out of Likes. Can somebody else add another Like for me?
- Julian
Yep, I'm a grouch about people using Ovid MEDLINE instead of PubMed MEDLINE for systematic reviews.
aarontay, Kirsten, Betsy #TeamMonique and OMG 404 Joe liked this
Why, asked the medlib naif?
- bevedog
My main reason is reproducibility - PubMed is freely available to anyone to use. Ovid MEDLINE is part of the Ovid subscription. While Ovid (and prob some other subscription versions) has some additional options like adjacency searching, I find using a public database preferable, and personally find PubMed searches to be more readily understood when reported, especially as a "whole" search rather than line by line pieces like the one I'm looking at now.
- Rachel Walden
[This is also why this library teaches PubMed to students and residents instead of Ovid MEDLINE - because they will continue to have access to PubMed no matter where they end up]
- Rachel Walden
I don't like the Ovid interface.
- Hedgehog
I don't like it either.
- Rachel Walden
So, the output, the product is search results? That's not an interim step that ends on the cutting-room floor? Because in the disciplines I'm familiar with, no one would say "I searched MLA International Bibliography using the EBSCO platform to find Nabokov criticism."
- bevedog
Well, the product would be a systematic evaluation of and reporting on the existing research. The whole point would be to say "here's what currently exists as published evidence on these key medical questions, how good it is, and what it found." For medical systematic reviews, the search methods are a piece of the overall research methods, because if you searched the wrong places, searched poorly, omitted relevant terms, etc., then everything that follows is suspect.
- Rachel Walden
So knowing exactly where you searched matters, because future researchers might do an update of your review, or want to reproduce your methods, and the different handling of a MEDLINE search on different platforms makes the resulting set of citations to deal with different.
- Rachel Walden
Here's an example report - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books... - with search methods at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books... - and some more background http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- Rachel Walden
Excellent, thanks for the lesson.
- bevedog
No problem! I do a lot of work with systematic reviews as part of my job here, and am facilitating a roundtable on the topic at MLA next week. Happy to answer any questions about it.
- Rachel Walden
We had a similar debate over ERIC - Ebsco, which students find easier, or the free one, which students can use after graduation? I lost. So did public ERIC, which didn't try very hard.
- barbara fister
from iPhone
"public ERIC, which didn't try very hard" - lol, too true. :)
- Rachel Walden
In 2009-2010, I was looking in to "evidence based librarianship" and wound up co-authoring a systematic review. We had a hard time explaining to authors of the Journal of Academic Librarianship and College and Research Libraries that it was not simply a literature review, but an actual research methodology. Even still the editor of the journal that did publish it asked us to take out...
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- LibrarianOnTheLoose
that's hilarious
- Meg V. Meg
uh huh
- LibrarianOnTheLoose
from BuddyFeed
Maybe the title should have been "Using the Methodology of Systematic Reviews to Examine Evidence-Based Librarianship" with a paragraph explaining what this means and why EVERYONE should do it. A lot of lib lit seems to be arguing for a methodology borrowed from another discipline as much as for its findings. But evidently it needs to be labeled "hot new methodology" or it will be seen as just a weird way of doing it.
- barbara fister
Rachel if one wants to start learning how to do medical systematic reviews do you have any recommendations on what to read? How difficult is it to do a decent one?
- aarontay
Hey, Aaron, catching up from MLA, but will share some stuff soon. Remind me if I don't get this done in a few days. Barbara - in my situation, we are doing systematic reviews on medicine, for publication in medical journals - so it's not applying another discipline's methodology, it's working collaboratively in that discipline, just to clarify.
- Rachel Walden
Jumping in quite late here, but really, a good systematic review could probably use both Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed. And Embase. And WoS. And Scopus. And whatever other database is relevant.
- mlrethlefsen
Feel a bit shy asking but... Rachel anything to share....? I do notice we have quite a few books on that.. Maybe I should just crack open a book and read. Hmm there's a systematic review for social sciences? http://linc.nus.edu.sg/record=... not just medical...
- aarontay
Aaron - for starters, the PRISMA statement is a good thing to be aware of - it is a checklist of what "should" be in a systematic review: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article... Also, Cochrane puts their review methods online - http://www.cochrane-handbook.org/ - although of course other groups like AHRQ may have slightly diff methods. For examples, AHRQ is a good one.
- Rachel Walden
I don't want to overload you, but am happy to follow up with more.
- Rachel Walden
Thanks Rachel you have being very kind. We don't provide support for medical users who want to learn how to do systematic studies might want to ask someday, so good to learn. I hope you don't mind me asking Rachel presumably your library teaches users how to do systematic reviews. How did you learn how to do that? Was it covered in library school or did you learn on your own by doing or you were mentored by someone?
- aarontay
I have learned a lot by being mentored and through our work - my institution has one of the AHRQ evidence-based practice centers, and we heavily involved with that. Internally we have a lot of mentoring on study design, biostats, evaluating published research, etc., but it has been through our EPC work that I've really been able to see the process start to finish. Unfortunately I'm not sure AHRQ's methods are online the way Cochrane's are.
- Rachel Walden
It turns out that Elsevier makes its Science Direct content available in EPUB and MOBI formats as well as in PDF. Not just the ebooks, although that's what the staff focus on, but all of their journal content as well, it looks like. But libraries have to ASK to have this feature turned on for their sites. Why?!? Why would anybody NOT want this?
OMG 404 Joe, aarontay and Sir Shuping is just sir liked this
Confusion factor?
- RepoRat
I could see that.
- kendrak
<emails our collections people>
- Deborah Fitchett
How Google Can Beat Facebook Without Google Plus - http://www.theatlantic.com/technol...
Pull quote: “But think about Scholar as a latent social network. Each paper contains its own social network that Google already crawls. Every bibliography is filled with other social networks. And people searching Google Scholar are likely to be as interested in connecting with the researchers who created those papers as they are with the papers themselves. Why isn’t Google making it easy to connect the searchers with the searched? And sure, build a whole other set of social tools on top of that, which make it easy to share with networks of researchers. You want every college kid in America to start engaging deeply with your social network? Make it easy for them to get their papers written.”
- Stephen le Francoeur
Can you not browse by call number in catalogs anymore? Do most places have a discovery layer now, and no way to page through the stuff?
aarontay liked this
our craptastic catalog did not come with a functional call number browse. we had to ask for it
- Chelle Chelle Ro Ro
We have no discovery layer on our catalog (though it's indexed in Summon), so we do have a browse, and I teach it to students. My English majors seem to love it, though not as much as being able to text the call number/location to themselves.
- kaijsa
And it looks like, because truncation/wildcards aren't supported in discovery layers (in favor of stemming), you can't even search for a range of call numbers.
- Meg V. Meg
We lost that function with last catalog migration. We can still do it through the "old version" which is how I deal with patrons who hand me a slip of paper with a call number.
- Hedgehog
A catalog that doesn't allow call number searching is ridiculous, unless the items aren't shelved by call number. This makes me furious, and it's not even my library.
- kaijsa
Polaris 4.0 does, it is just not the default, and you have to select each call number to see the listing.
- ♫410 I Coach 'em Up♫
wahey! we can do it!
- kendrak
Our systems librarian is coding a browse by call number function into our discovery layer.
- bevedog
We've still got it in Horizon/HIP. It's the best way to figure out what's happened to a book a student can't find. (Unless the reason they can't find it is because they jotted down the ISBN or the bib number instead.)
- Deborah Fitchett
Deborah, how does that help you find missing books?
- bevedog
Maybe because the only information they jotted down was the call number?
- Catherine Pellegrino
Ah, ok. I was thinking browse as opposed to search, as in the OP. never mind.
- bevedog
oh how I hate discovery layers! they make finding anything so very difficult. Usually, Meg, you have to use the classic version of your OPAC to do the call number browse.
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
I was looking at a few today that didn't. They had stemming, so if you wanted to search Q10, it would return results including Q10. A2 and Q10.3, but there wasn't any way to search for Q10.3-Q25, for example (and no way to browse up from a Q10.3). Which I realize is totally picky, I just hadn't realized that you couldn't do that anymore in some/many(?) OPAC's.
- Meg V. Meg
Discovery layers are not expert interfaces. While most users looking for a shelf browse list are librarians, there are expert "civilians" who use that feature. Since the discovery layer and the catalogue are now different things, it needs to be clear to users how to do what they want to do.
- DJF
Sure sure, I know this. The thing is that there used to *be* a public-facing catalog or expert interface. Like, at some places there still are (usually called "classic" catalogs, as Rudy points out), but other places, there is nothing anymore. Johns Hopkins is one of the ones I was looking at that was like this. I'd have to check my notes for the other ones.
- Meg V. Meg
What Catherine said. Our search brings up a browsing interface, in this case, so I conflate the two a bit. Though sometimes searching for what they've written down reveals that they wrote it down wrong. (Other times it reveals that they failed to notice the out-of-library status or in-another-branch location.)
- Deborah Fitchett
This is a great discussion, started to test a bit more and found out a couple more things in Summon. And yes Summon has auto-stemming and I asked they said currently there is no way to turn it off. Drives librarians crazy. Still , I wouldn't expect it to affect call number searches. My testing now is inconsistent.
- aarontay
When we got Encore (keyword based, with facet filtering), we still kept the classic OPAC (Innovative) (search by subject, author, title, call #, ISBN, series, author/title, or keyword). For some things, Encore is best. For several other things, Innovative is way best. I hope we never have to do with just one of the two.
- Betsy #TeamMonique
Data Point: OCLCs Worldshare uses Worldcat Local as the frontend/opac...no browse at all, and call number searching is troubled to say the least.
- Jason Griffey
Our VuFind opacity can't browse. Browsing by call number saved me once at LoC - I was researching a topic that got a LCSH about 10 years after books were being written about it. Luckily, they tended to all be classed in two areas. Room on the shelf before the terminology settled down.
- barbara fister
from iPhone
Auto correct to opacity when I meant OPAC - how perfect!
- barbara fister
from iPhone
You can call number browse in Horizon, as Deborah notes, but it took me awhile to figure out how just now.
- laura x
CALL NUMBERS ARE FOR OLD PEOPLE.
- Zamms
google doesn't need a call number.
- kendrak
That's a Phil Collins song, right? "Google, don't you need that call number, cos the title's not anywhere that I can find it"
- Zamms
god I love you
- Meg V. Meg
I was trying to sing that to the tune of "Ricky don't lose that number," and thinking "This is a Genesis song? And Zamms messed up the scansion something awful," then realizing "oh."
- bevedog
Sorry, I forgot to footnote!
- Zamms
No, no. My bad.
- bevedog
aarontay, jtf, Amandadon't and 17 other people liked this
oh dear og! mean, on the one hand, if i never hear BI again.... but on the other, you know, just change your pedagogy already, not the word!
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
If this conference I attended last week on Transliteracy is right, then Transliteracy is Information Literacy. It's only "new" compared to stereotypical Bibliographic Instruction.
- lris
do what now?
- MoTO #TeamMonique
MoTo, years ago, library instruction was called "Bibliographic Instruction." Typically people think of Bibliographic Instruction as "here is how you use an index, and here are the 4 best indexes for your topic, and here is the library catalog and here are the important parts of the library catalog." Very much about teaching the few, finite ways to find sources. Then about 20 years ago...
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- lris
what Iris says is true. also, I do hear BI used
- maʀtha
Thank you for the succinct recap, Iris -- Imma steal this (once I've memorized it)
- awd (canoeist in th wild)
I do use "BI" as shorthand with other librarians for "I taught a class session where we talked about research in some form or another," but having said that, I totally agree with Iris.
- Catherine Pellegrino
Iris, that was beautiful. I struggle to understand what the difference between IL and TL is. Every now and then, Lane Wilkinson says something that perks my ears and brains right up, and I grasp the difference for a minute (and it is in the area of transferability of skills, usually). But IL? Was clearly a response against "teach the tool"!
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
(what was last week's TL conference?)
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
Because I'm feeling feisty, I blogged it. Bring on the hate. http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2012...
- lris
*admires Iris's big brain*.. thank you sweetie
- MoTO #TeamMonique
Love it. And while Transliteracy folks might not like it, I don't see a lot of room for hate: if they are really trying to stake out ways to enhance teaching and learning, they shouldn't care that you are fine with the old label.
- bevedog
You know, I probably mostly still do BI, then. Because typically I have one hour for the class, and it may be the only hour they have to see me in their *entire degree*, so as much as I want to talk about general transferable skills, they also really need to know that our catalogue, databases, standards collection, subject guides, and virtual reference service *exist*. When I know I stand half a chance of seeing them for an hour next year too then I can loosen up a bit.
- Deborah Fitchett
I think a lot depends on the institution's over-all goals, Deborah. For mine, I'm in the same position in that I have no guarantee that any student will have any more than the hour (or even 15 minutes) that I get with their class. But my department's goals are more about sparking imaginations, hoping that gaining our students' interest will help them know when to seek help for more...
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- lris
It only takes a minute to let them know that things exist, right? So then you have to decide whether to use the next 14 or 59 minutes teaching them how to use those things, or why they might need to use those things, or whatever other thing you feel you need to convey.
- bevedog
Yeesh, maybe that sounds preachy of me. I guess what I mean is that I feel tugged in both directions--the need to demonstrate some databases, but also the need to couch things in terms that will resonate with my students. I personally zone out when people try to train me on databases, but I get excited when people want to talk about how what we read and think and write works together....
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- bevedog
I'm with Iris, but the point she makes about the model to back up the instruction sessions with reference and consultations is KEY. Also, I really, really want to work somewhere with that model again. I try to do course integrated, info lit, instruction sessions, but I can't do follow up consultations, which just kills me.
- maʀtha
A tangent: just came across another term, via Google, no less: "search literacy." http://www.google.com/insides.... Has anyone else looked through this "Search Education" site?
- Megan loves summer
Yeah, I definitely try not to teach it in a *boring* way - I always start from asking what they already know and what they want to learn, and talk in the context of whatever assignment they have, and finish with a minute feedback paper and reminding them how to contact me for consults etc. (But our students don't so often followup in this way.) And with the content I focus more on when...
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- Deborah Fitchett
I'm smiling because I almost never teach refining options and nearly always end up teaching boolean (though I don't call it that -- I use it in conjunction with concept-mapping that generates potential related terms that would fall within items on a topic). But yes, this sounds to me like BI. And I think there is absolutely a time and a place for that. With my students (all undergrad,...
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- lris
(Oh, and if anyone's interested, Lane stopped by to clarify some points over on my blog post.)
- lris
That exchange reminds me of Chomsky on Universal Grammar, i.e. "it is what I say it is (never mind that what I say it is changes by the millisecond)"
- RepoRat
See, that's interesting, because I'm motivated by patterns that I see during practical use. More deductive than inductive, I suppose? This is why I am a terrible liberal arts major.
- Meg V. Meg
It may partly (but probably isn't only) that I'm working with science and especially engineering students who tend to be more practical/goal-oriented and less interested in general discussion of ideas. There are fantastic exceptions always, but as a trend. Also and I generally don't understand their research, which adds its own limitations...
- Deborah Fitchett
Repo, I dearly hope you're not referring to me with your Chomsky analogy. I haven't changed my take on transliteracy since I first started in on it. You can Google that. Word.
- Wilk
Lane is always great. And while I generally don't understand TL, I do love the emphasis on transferability of skills. It's sort of impliedin the IL standards, but library lit is really weak on the topic, and if calling IL TL gets us to talk and teach and write about the transferability of skills along with the ability to identify an info need, and determine the best tools for meeting it, and evaluating what you find and using it effectively and ethically, then I don't care what we call it.
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
Thanks Rudi! You know I don't sit kindly for bullshit. I'm just trying to see if TL has anything worthwhile behind it.
- Wilk
I'm just glad you accept my inability to grok TL! And insistence I'll take from it what I want!
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
I accept the hell out of it.
- Wilk
It's easy to see how I gave the impression that I was interested in talking to students about ideas as general things, or that the sessions I teach aren't grounded in practical work. I hope that neither of those things are true, though. For my part, I have the luxury of usually teaching small classes. I usually tell them that the library session is a chance for them to get real work...
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- bevedog
Enjoyed the talk last Friday, Lane
- maʀtha
I do a bit of that, I think. It's just, there's a lot of questions of that kind where I ask it and I get blank stares in response. This depends on the class and the time of day of course. But for the undergrads I teach typically, "what have you been discussing in class" tends to get some version of "Dunno, stuff, I guess."; they're more likely to ask me what they're supposed to do once...
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- Deborah Fitchett
I know some of my colleagues talk about having departmental cultures that don't really allow for much more than skills-conveying in class. I think that's part of what Steve was saying about giving them a classroom experience that is similar to what they've had in the rest of their course, as much as possible. I also know, though, that it took me a long, long time to learn how to set up...
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- lris
Maybe it's too simplistic, but my reading of the differences between 'transliteracy' and 'literacy' is that TL encompasses visual culture as well as the written word. For example, if a person wanted to create an endorsement for a particular political issue but didn't know how to make an online video, you could say that person had a particular form of illiteracy. Or, more controversially, someone who could read but couldn't use the Internet also has a form of illiteracy.
- copystar
I'm not suggesting that everyone should teach like me. Sometimes I don't think that I should teach like me. But my goals are to help students fit the library research part of their class into what they are are learninig in their regular class time, rather than seeing it as something totally separate. I also want them to see research as an engaging way to get from ideas to writing and not as a mechanical process.
- bevedog
I would argue that "information" is broader than "published written literature." We've concentrated on that because that's a lot of what we do, but I think that if we think of information in that very foreshortened way then of course we'll start coming up with new literacies right and left.
- lris
Iris: I agree. WRT semantic information, I think it's best to follow Floridi's general definition: information is well-formed, meaningful data.
- Wilk
Copystar's raising my personal issue with how I see "transliteracy" defined. By that definition, lack of competence in *any* area could be considered illiteracy--which makes every one of us illiterate, which renders the term meaningless. I'm oil-painting-illiterate, recognizable-drawing-illiterate; many librarians are statistics-illiterate (including many who use statistics)... It really does negate the term "illiterate" or redefine it as "human."
- Walt Crawford
Copystar: I agree completely re: various illiteracies. But, information literacy standards do not mention or limit media formats. We do that. IL says have an info need, determine best way to fill it, fill it effectively and ethically.
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
from Android
Wait--using information effectively: does that cover the production of the final product, in whatever format?or did I just notice that IL is about consumption, not production??
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
from Android
I believe it does cover the production of the final product, at least insofar as it involves the integration of research materials to one's argument or existing knowledge.
- bevedog
Copystar's example specifically says production, not just consumption. (Although where statistics and numbers are concerned, I think you can make the case for broad "illiteracy" anyway--but that's why some of us use "innumeracy," to keep "literacy" a discrete, clearly-definable term.)
- Walt Crawford
Information Literacy does not just include consumption, though. The standards include *using* information effectively. And I'm kind of at a loss about your innumeracy vs literacy point. "Literacy" has already been appropriated for far more than written text, so I think that ship has sailed, decades ago. My point is that *information* is not about just written, published text. Numbers and visual information are also information.
- lris
OK, the ship has sailed. But it really does strike me that Copystar's definition means that everybody's illiterate--which may be a good thing, but also means that illiterate and human become synonyms. Certainly true that information isn't just text.
- Walt Crawford
[Oh, and if I had a horse in the "IL doesn't need to be renamed TL" race, I think I'd be on your side.]
- Walt Crawford
Only if you think of there being two states: literate and illiterate. I think all of this assumes that people are varying degrees of literate in varying circumstances.
- lris
I can't imagine that anyone really likes to think of themselves as "illiterate" or see themselves referred to as "illiterate." So while I sometimes may use the term "information literacy" because it's the term that has traction with (some) faculty, I think I'd avoid implying that anyone is information "illiterate." No one is starting from zero, everyone has a context from whicih to build.
- bevedog
^ Steve's point here is why I like to use terms like"novices" and "experts" when discussing people's abilities.
- Katy S
Yes, Katy. I'm particularly enamored of John Bean's "expert insider" construction, since it gets at that while also including important elements of genre/discourse theory
- lris
And Steve just said it: The real reason I regard expansion of "illiterate" as unfortunate.
- Walt Crawford
interestingly, the education field is calling this 'multi-modal literacy' with a slew of publications and rubrics
- awd (canoeist in th wild)
*plugs fingers in ears* LALALALALALALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALALA WE ALWAYS HAVE TO INVENT EVERYTHING OURSELVES LALALALALALA
- Meg V. Meg
the writing instructors also call multi-modal multimodal. http://multimodal-research.wikispaces.com/
- OMG 404 Joe
I am pretty sure I do BI. My experience is closer to Deborah's. The one time I tried to be diff, i got comments to just teach the database! That said, i heard from colleagues who were teaching the UPS peeps (basically kinda Liberal arts) , they did manage to pull off the encourage thinking , discussion type sessions so it all depends on the audience. Oh well next up is the Yale-NUS peeps..So we will see...
- aarontay
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