Thing 17 - ELM Productvity Tools

Some of the enhancements to the various databases available via ELM could be helpful in research. Features that allow you to mark and save specific research finds (articles, transcripts, etc.) and to create a folder of your research including a record of the specific search strategy – these are valuable time savers. Some could be improved, though, especially the ‘create a web page’ feature, which seems to be the most web 2.0-ish of these offerings with its potential to more easily share your research results.

The RSS problems were addressed at the 23 things mother blog, but still – an RSS feature that is largely dysfunctional with web-based RSS readers does not impress. I tried to set up several feeds over a two day span and never found a time when the EBSCO or ProQuest servers were at enough leisure to allow this to happen. Yes, one could set it up in your own browser – but isn’t a focus of web 2.0 that these resources are available to you regardless of the particular computer you may be on?

EBSCO’s ‘my account’ – oh goody – yet another username and password.

EBSCO’s ‘create a webpage’ offering is more robust than ProQuest’s. It gives you more flexibility in how the page looks, where things are placed, what can be included, etc. This also means the learning curve for figuring it out was a bit higher. But EBSCO’s webpage feature is not quite ready for prime time. I can create a page and download that file my computer, but when I view that webpage in my browser and try to click on the links to get to the articles, EBSCO can’t authenticate me for login. Apparently, unless I login to EBSCO’s ‘my folder’ feature via the ELM portal or via a subscribing library’s website to get to my webpage – the article links take me to a general login screen that does not recognize my user name and password. That being the case, what’s the point of downloading the webpage to somewhere other than the EBSCO interface? It becomes for all intents and purposes a static list instead of active links. There’s an interesting twist to this – if I go to my library’s website and sign in to EBSCO, and then click on links from my webpage of saved EBSCO research results (which is open in another tab of my browser) the links do go to the articles. After that, if I have cookies enabled on my browser, EBSCO continues to recognize that I have come in via my library’s website and the links go to the article in the EBSCO database. However, if I log into an EBSCO database via the ELM proxy, then this does not work – when I click on an article Iink on my created webpage I am sent to the generic login screen asking for User ID and password and EBSCO cannot authenticate me through that login screen.

Another detail – I could not figure out how to get the abstracts on this webpage from my results list. The 23 things instructions indicated that it could be done but I could only get the brief citation to show up on the webpage – huh.

ProQuest’s “save research” feature and “create web page” feature are easier to use than EBSCO’s but also more limited. And it wasn’t immediately clear (at least not to me) that to save it you used your browser’s “file” “save page as” function to save the webpage after clicking on download – which just created the web page in your browser window.

Netlibrary – the specific eBook example we were supposed to search for didn’t seem to be there, anymore, so I chose a different one to complete the exercise. It was interesting to see that the ‘notes’ feature is paired with the ‘favorites’ list. I had used the favorites list before (for eAudiobooks) but had forgotten about it. For those people who are using the eBooks for research, this notes feature is a nice enhancement. Obviously, you can’t use paper sticky notes on an eBook, so digital sticky notes are here.

Thing 16 - Student 2.0 Tools

The University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator struck me as a very helpful tool for students. Not only does it lay out a schedule for the various steps in writing a paper, but provides really useful links to explain each step or offer suggestions on research sources and strategies. Nice tool. I can see this as a useful link to put on a public library website for students.

The Research Project Calculator was somewhat less impressive, it seemed very wordy and there were a lot of bullet points crammed into the 5 steps. Still, it offers helpful structure and suggestions to high school students working on research projects. I really liked that the final step was evaluating how you had done on your project and making it a learning opportunity for how to improve your next project. Including information about how to create a slide presentation or video to communicate the research results is a nice feature of this tool.

These tools serve their specific education purpose well, but I can’t see them working to help manage a library project, for example. On the other hand, I’d love to find a similar tool that was more suited to the library world.

Thing 15 - Online Games and Libraries

Libraries and gaming. I just don’t get it. What is the connection? What is the purpose? Libraries are supposed to become community centers where we offer bowling leagues, Monopoly® tournaments, and WOW marathons? How does that fit into the mission of literacy and provision of information resources, including the various artistic expressions of the culture – books, music, and film?

Seems to me if we can afford the computer resources and bandwidth to have patrons using our resources for the gaming activity of their choice along with all the other online activities patrons want that pretty much covers the issue. And if we can’t afford those resources? Well, then we have to consider how to address that limitation. I’m not saying we should block gaming on our computers (unless it eats up so much bandwidth that it functionally kills everyone else's access to e-mail, info websites, employment searches, etc. - I'm just saying...)

I viewed the videos about Second Life from the Ohio University and the tour of Info Island Second Life Libraries. It looks like there may be potential in a virtual venue like Second Life to provide a virtual learning space, but the rhetoric used in the Ohio U video was pretty high-flown, I suspect the rhetoric outstrips reality at this point. One of the comments on the video at YouTube had it right – atact88 said “It’s a marketing medium, not replacing the classroom”.

And the Second Life Info Island concept was puzzling – I want to use a virtual computer as an avatar in a virtual world to search EBSCO databases or Amazon.com? Ummm… why wouldn’t I just search EBSCO or Amazon on a real computer?

Finally, and this is just a personal note, the graphics and animation in Second Life give me the creeps. Like claymation. It’s so artificial and stilted and limited – especially the avatars’ movement. The thing is, I kind of like unsophisticated graphics, like those in Roller Coaster Tycoon – but unlike Tycoon, which isn’t trying to be realistic, Second Life is and falls so short of the mark. Creepy. IMO.

Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I'm liking LibraryThing. Maybe it's because I 'get' this sharing site - I want to catalog & tag my books because that has value to me, and then I share that information with others because it can be mutually beneficial.

The site's basic features are really easy to use -- I input a few of my books into my LT library. I really like the option of viewing your library as the bookcovers instead of a list. Even better, it seems to have some fairly high-powered features for input and editing. For example, you can do a global edit on a tag, or select a set of books from your library and add a tag to or remove a tag from all of them at once . Also, you can add books by importing files and synch your LibraryThing collection with a master list you keep elsewhere. But the absolutely coolest thing was the barcode scanner they sell -- CueCat -- with which you can more speedily import your book info by scanning in the ISBN. Sweet. I am seriously considering putting this on my Christmas list.

I understand LibraryThing is also offering its tag content on a subscription basis to libraries who add it to their OPAC data. I'd be really interested to see any good data on how useful this additional content is for library users. Professor John Riedl at the U of M and colleagues have done some research on community tagging. I guess the upshot is that tagging can be very useful -- as long as it is of sufficiently high quality -- which is not inevitable.

Thing 13 - Online Productivity Tools

I chose iGoogle for my uber homepage. Why? Mostly because I already had other accounts at Google, and frankly, isn't that the point of consolidating / centralizing all your web stuff? The customization features at iGoogle seemed pretty good. I moved a few things around and added a list feature Listy. Personalized "start" pages like this might be useful, but as with others of these web tools, it will take time playing with it to see how useful. The good news is that iGoogle seems flexible enough so that you could change it as you discover how it could be better set up to meet your needs.

It strikes me that this whole 'store your computer stuff on the web' trend is most useful for those in situations where they need to access things from various computers, and where the information they store there is more recreational than critical and does not need to be particularly secure. Of course, more and more of us do use various computers to do our work and social tasks.

About these list features. I don't know about you, but many of my lists have to travel with me into the store. I tend to use little slips of paper, so having to print out a whole sheet for 3-4 grocery items does not seem to be progress. On the other hand, if I was a cell phone user, I could send the list to my phone thus eliminating the need for paper -- but adding cell phone fees to my life. If it isn't one thing, it's another.

I have used shared electronic calendars in other contexts and they can be very useful in work settings. I took a look at Google's calendar feature - visually very nice, easy to use. I'm not sure I have a need for it in my personal life - but I can see that those with a more complex set of people and variables to coordinate might find it really handy.

Thing 12 - Diggit, etc

I took a spin around the social media sites Mixx, Digg, Newsvine and Redditt. Yes, of course, I see the theme. Editors, bad, wisdom of the crowd, good. Well, maybe.

Still, for all their aversion to editors, the top stories on these sites were often stories from the mainstream media. To be fair, they also feature blog and website content that might not be found at 'traditional' news sites. And I suppose that a story that was not prominently featured on traditional news sites might get more exposure here. The 23 things prompt seemed to indicate the value of these social media sites for librarians is that we need to scan them to be "one jump ahead of library users trying to find behind the headlines information" and "see what people are interested in". [Frankly, I don't know what they mean by 'behind the headlines information'. Rumor? Primary sources on which articles are based? What?]

Sure, being aware of the news that may influence queries from our users is good. Still, I think that an aggregator like Google news offers a better alternative if what you want to do is scan for news that is current and 'hot'. I can see, though, that for that more 'alternatively-sourced material' Mixx, Digg, et.al. would give you a quick picture of the blogosphere buzz.

I realize the unique aspect of these sites, as opposed to a Google News kind of custom aggregator, is that you can share with others what you found cool or interesting or important. For my personal news needs, I don't find this feature compelling, but obviously it appeals to many people.

O.K. I found an article to share at The guardian.uk. I clicked on their "share" link which offered options of sharing to Digg, Redditt, and Newsvine. However, I found that each of these sites required you to register before you could share an article. As I couldn't foresee ever using such an account, I opted not to have my e-mail floating around in the database of yet another website. I tried another article from USA Today, ditto above experience with Mixx, but I did notice a nice feature of Newsvine -- even while it was prompting me to login or create an account, it let me know that the article I wanted to share was already on Newsvine. Nice feature.

Finally, a couple of things I observed make me wonder how good these sites are at providing what they promise. When I checked on the Mixx site, they had in their "Community" area highlighting "new groups", several groups with the words "cheap viagra" in their names. Obviously, someone is trying to use this venue as yet another garbage marketing outlet. So, to stay valuable to their users these sites need to minimize noise from what amounts to spamming.

More disturbing to me was the discovery at Newsvine that if you create a column there "90% of all ad revenue generated from your column will go straight to you". Ad revenue? Generated how? Wouldn't people craft their columns to maximize ad revenue? Perhaps I don't fully understand their mechanism around ad revenue, but despite the high-flown language about 'no editors', or in Newsvine' s case, "editorial judgement (sic) is in the hands of the community", I'd rather have an editor deciding on content, than have it determined by how much ad revenue it brings in. Yes, traditional news outlets' revenue comes mostly from advertising, but at least there is some effort to have a wall between editorial and ad sales. Besides, don't these social media sites' mission statements imply that they are somehow better than the traditional model?

So, I've been kind of negative, but let me say, it was pretty fun to follow link after link of stories that caught my eye. But the comments feature... not very valuable. The ratio of useful back and forth to ill-informed or mean-spirited rants was too low to spend the time reading them. It seems to me that these sites might be most useful to someone who had a particular narrow interest that they shared with a group at the site and together, the crowd could unearth information each might not discover on his or her own.

Thing 11 - Social bookmarking @ del.icio.us

I resurrected a moribund del.icio.us account from a previous web 2.0 learning endeavor and actually added a few bookmarks. Having my bookmarks available at any computer seems like it could be very convenient, but I'd have to see how it actually played out in real life. I'm still trying to get a handle on how useful it would be for collaborative work. As with a lot of these tools, the application in an education setting seems obvious (the podcast tutorial on del.icio.us mentions reading lists and syllabi) but discovering a useful library application proves more challenging.

I like the additional information available about a site through seeing how many others have linked to it and how they have tagged it. It would be interesting to "mine" the site to see what others thought was valuable enough to bookmark on a topic of interest to me. Helene Blowers in the podcast refers to the 'magic middle'. The idea is that when other people look at stuff and bookmark it, the good stuff is what gets bookmarked most often. This provides filtering by authority -- it helps pull out the useful information from the vast sea that is all web content. To the extent that a tool like del.icio.us can achieve that end, i.e. assisting me to find the 'good stuff', it would be very valuable.

I also downloaded the bookmarklet from del.icio.us to my browser. I can only hope it is helpful and not annoying. It's kind of hard to tell before you use the feature over time. We'll see. I noted that there are uninstall instruction in the help section at del.icio.us. :)

Back to library applications of this tool. I took a quick look at the Maui Community College Library's bookmarks on del.icio.us. and tried to find out how they were using this tool. I found the link to their del.icio.us bookmarks buried on the library's website under "About Us" under a subcategory "Our Current Interests". It's hard to assess this. Obviously it's not being presented as a real tool for students or faculty. Is it just a collection of bookmarks that the librarians find interesting? So, it's out there, but what is it's use?