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Entrepreneurial Library Program
December 13th, 2011
On November 3, 2011, Jennifer Castaldo moderated and presented on a panel at the Charleston Conference. The proceedings paper is currently available online and will be published by Purdue University in October 2012.
Abstract: Our users want an easier way to search library resources and currently there are many discovery tools available, which can seem daunting. How do you know which one will work for your unique library? Librarians from different types of libraries including an online library, a land-grant school, a law library, a private university, and a consortium, describe how they evaluated the available products and made decisions on which tools to implement. A variety of platforms are discussed including: Ebsco’s Discovery Service, III’s Encore Synergy Discovery, Serials Solutions’ Summon, and even a homegrown solution. Discover what libraries are looking for in these tools, strategies for determining which one best fits your needs, and lessons learned throughout the process from the investigation phase to implementation.
Castaldo, J., Dulaney, C.K., Klingler, T., Rossmann, D., & Wrubel, L. (2011, November). Experiences from the field: Choosing a discovery tool for your unique library. Presented at the Charleston Conference, Charleston, SC.
Posted in Assessment, Charleston Conference, Collection Development, Conferences, Discovery Tools, Presentations | No Comments »
December 7th, 2011
In 2011, Distance Education Librarian Patricia Lovett published an editorial in an Elseiver journal. This article is a thought piece about the current status of online alumni libraries—their collections, services, financial and staffing structure, and offers some suggestions and thoughts for future sustainability.
Lovett, P. (2011). Consider the Alumni Library. Serials Review, 37(3), 147-148. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2011.05.001.
Posted in Alumni Libraries, Editorial, Journal article, Publications, Virtual Libraries | No Comments »
October 18th, 2011
Several memebers of the ELP team gave a lively presentation to the BioIT Coalititon about the value of having virtual libraries and how they can create effective access to information.
The Value of Virtual Libraries: Creating Effective Access to Information. Presented by Susan Payne, Barbara Pralle, and Judy Smith (November 18, 2008). Location: JHU Montgomery County Campus.
While this presentation is not online, it illustrates the variety of presentations that ELP undertakes. Examples of topics covered are listed below:
- Several case studies that illustrate what can happen when libraries or information are not valued, accessible or considered
- Examples of Virtual Libraries
- Observations related to inadvertent copyright violation
- Cost of lost time: a series of recent studies
- If you’ve decided a library is important, how do you build the infrastructure for a virtual library, who needs to be involved?
- The value of a virtual library and library services
If you would like a similar presentation for your group, please contact us.
Posted in Presentations, Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 18th, 2011
As the year one for our blog experiment comes to an end, we are transitioning our use of this blog to cover our ELP publications and presentations. If you want to stay abreast of our poster presentations, articles that we publish, and what we’re putting out there — then this is a good page to keep watching. Thanks to those who have followed and read our blog this year.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
September 6th, 2011
Certainly this is nothing new to write about, but I started looking into this because I needed to create some back up screen captures for websites. I had a few things that I wanted to be able to do…first, I wanted to capture full pages with the links…second I wanted to be able to capture by domain (so all of the pages in the hierarchy) at one time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do the second item…but I did look at a number of software in the process. In the end I used SnagIt, which I already had installed on my computer. There is a small fee for this program, but I also looked at a free option called PDFCreator. While PDFCreator had a number of useful features, it didn’t save links (at least not that I could figure out). This post covers SnagIt and PDFCreator, but it should be noted that there are a lot of other options out there…these are just the two that I liked the best.
SnagIt 10 from TechSmith
Price: Free trial, $50 for a licensed version
Available from: http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/default.asp
This is a great program. As with other apps, you can choose exactly how much of the screen you’ll shoot. One of the thing I like best about SnagIt is there are easy short-cuts for capturing either the whole screen, a window, a region, or a scrolling area, with just some considered cursor placement and a single click. The capture profiles are a real time saver. The profile I use the most is the Webpage profile (keep links). With this, I can easily make a back-up image of a wegpage that saves the links and then save it into either PDF, SWF (flash), MHT (web page with Image), or SNAG (the SnagIt Capture file).
In addition to snagging images, Snagit has separate capture settings for copying text and video. It’s pretty cool that you can record your screen’s action in the AVI format. Snagit’s editor has some additional editing tools in this version that allow for further manipulating the text. Snagit image editor stores screenshots in an icon library which makes it easy to review past screen captures.
Though Snagit’s editing tools aren’t as professional as some other high-end editors, it does provide a satisfying array of tools to annotate, resize, recolor, and otherwise manipulate images with hyperlinked hot spots, tags, and visual effects, like the newly introduced page-curl effect.
I think what’s called for here is taking a PDF snapshot of each page. And luckily, if I recall correctly, our page-naming-convention will come in handy here because each page name is in a hierarchy, so just accepting the default name for each file will result in a set of pages nicely representing the structure of the Website as a whole. This image shows the menu options available in the SnagIt 10 program:
PDFCreator
Available from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Price: free
A colleague recommended PDFCreator as a great freeware that takes PDF Snapshots. This program creates a virtual printer on your Windows computer. When you select it as a printer, it creates a PDF of whatever you’ve selected to print. One nice feature is that it works on any windows application and not just your browser (SnagIt wroks on other apps as well). One thing I liked best about this program was the ability to merge multiple files into one PDF.
Here is what it looks like when you print a document, you just select PDFCreator as your printer:
Some of the features of this program include:
- Create PDFs from any program that is able to print
- Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc
- Digitally sign PDFs to ensure that you are the author and the file has not been modified
- Create PDF/A files for long term archives
- Send generated files via e-mail
- Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
The one feature that I would absolutely love that I could not find is to be able to save all web pages in a domain all at once, instead of file.
Posted in PDF Creators | No Comments »
March 31st, 2011
How do you reach a completely online population to get insight when you don’t have opportunities to communicate with your users in person? Assessing library resources and services at a distance holds unique challenges in gathering the data needed for making informed decisions. Without being able to see people use your resources, how do you know your improvements worked?
Librarians Jennifer Castaldo and Christine Patterson presented a poster today at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference in Philadelphia, PA. This conference is held every two years and focuses on cutting-edge research and best practices for academic libraries from around the world.
Our poster, Making the Connection: Conducting Virtual Focus Groups with Distance Adult Learners, describes how we held telephone focus groups with students from across the U.S. from Excelsior College, one of our partners. Our department manages the Excelsior College Library and we continually assess our resources and services throughout the year.
Click this excerpt from the poster to view a PDF of the full poster:
 ©The Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University Historically, we relied on online surveys and additional quantitative measures to assess user satisfaction. We found that the most beneficial sections of the surveys were the comments at the end and we often made decisions based on these comments. Last year, we decided to hold virtual focus groups to gather even more in-depth, qualitative data from our users.
Much was learned about the process including, best practices for gathering attendees, how to schedule meeting times when students are located in different time zones, techniques for collaborating with the Assessment and Telecommunications units, aspects of facilitation, and specifics about how to properly code transcripts. These findings will act as a springboard for our next assessment cycle. In addition, we found that many of the suggested improvements were ideas that the library was already pursuing and this feedback confirmed the need.
We look forward to continuing this process and welcome any comments or questions!
Posted in ACRL, Conferences, Posters, Presentations, Virtual Focus Groups | No Comments »
March 9th, 2011
The preconference for Webwise (http://webwise2011.library.du.edu/) began today in downtown Baltimore, MD. The preconference had different tracks, one more focused on data curation and the other on Engaging Youth in STEM Learning. I attended the STEM preconference. The first talk was by by Milton Chen from the George Lucas Education Foundation. His talk is titled Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our School.
Dr. Chen began the talk by pointing out that there are a lot of jobs out there involve skills that are students are missing such a data mining and technology. He suggested that we need to create an educational learning that give these students these skills.
He pointed out statistics that illustrate that our students are behind, such as:
- 50 1st-grade students behind in reading, 44 still are behind in 4th grade.
- A high school student drops out every 26 seconds (Touch Choices or Tough Times, 2006).
- California students are 1 year behind US. Schools can’t do it alone.
One interesting point he brought up was that we need to redefine our vocabulary for the 21st century. What should our new words and vocabulary be?
He highlighted several examples of students engaged in learning with technology. One that I enjoyed the most was called NatureMapping Takes Kids and Technology Outside into Active Learning – from Washington . You can watch the video on the website. While watching it, Dr. Chen asked us to think about the diiferent roles people in the video were taking. As you watch, notice that there are co-teachers, such as the community farmers, graduate students, some of the parents, and the students themselves.
Posted in Conferences | No Comments »
February 8th, 2011
Patent searching can be tricky and time consuming. If you google search patents and library, you can find a lot of great guides to finding and searching patent information. Here at ELP, we are continually on the look out for interesting new tools and websites that are freely available that might be of interest to our clients.
Two that we came across related to patents, include Patent2PDF and FreshPatents.com. If you have a patent number, you can enter it on the Patent2PDF website and you will get a PDF of the patent. This is much better than a series of individual pages you could print.
FreshPatents lets you find the latest published patent applications to the USPTO before there is a grant or deny decision.
Give it a try, try searching pat2pdf with 4,367,243 and see what you find.
Posted in Patents | No Comments »
February 3rd, 2011
It is common for us to be asked when we are presenting, why do librarians have a problem with google? While some librarians have spoken negatively about the search engine, I think most recognize that the popular search tool has strengths. For example, on this blog, we’ve talked about Google Scholar before about how easy it is now to search within your search results and also comparing it to PubMed and Medline Plus.
Google, however, is back in the news this week facing criticism for their search results. At the company blog, Google has responded. The post begins:
“January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English. However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.”
Also this week, Bing came under fire for using Google data to improve their search results. What’s going on with this back and forth? While some of this is related to a public relations fight between the two companies, it also speaks to Google changing its primary and original focus from search into other areas such as free calling and now social searching.
Social search takes search beyond a search algorithm. Social signals such as ‘Like’ buttons may become a key factor in determining the relevancy and popularity of the results we see. An example of a social search engine is Stumpedia. Members submit new search results and select which key phrases should cause them to appear. They can also vote for search results, make friends, and the results are tailored to what you and your social network likes. A new feature for this tool is that Delicious bookmarks can be uploaded into it.
As web technology moves forward, what does this mean for libraries? Librarians and other information professionals have been thinking about how this technology effects learners and researchers. Whether librarians like it or not, students often begin their search for information with Google or similar commercial or social search engines. How people get at information and use it should be a central question for libraries. How are we serving up our content and making it available for people to use — and if we aren’t changing how we do things, should we and how can we do it in a sustainable manner?
Librarians tend to have rich expertise in thinking about learning & information literacy; scholarly publishing; and now digital publishing. We will look at some of these issues in future blog posts as we think further about the intersections between search and scholarly learning and research.
Posted in Search Engines, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
January 3rd, 2011
I’ve mainly used Refworks and Endnote in the past, so one thing I can really appreciate about the Mendeley citation tool is how easy it is to import and cite articles from my web browser. It is pretty easy to use. While it works great with many licensed academic library databases (such as IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, AIP Scitation, Wiley Online Library and many more), it also works with many open source and/or free scholoarly websites such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Public Library of Science and arXiv.
To get started, install the Web importer. It’s very easy to do and instructions are posted on the Mendeley website. Then when you open your web browser, you should see a Mendeley bookmark on your browser toolbar. When you see an article of interest, just click that bookmark and Mendely will import this document (PDF as well if available).
In less than a minute I was able to install the web importer, search and locate an article in Google Scholar and save it into Mendeley where I could edit the tags and easily correct any citation inforamtion. Here’s a quick image of what it looked like in my web browser:
The only thing that gave me a brief problem was that the first time I save the web importer onto my bookmarks folder, I saved it into the wrong folder so it didn’t appear on my toolbar. When I organized my book marks I easily moved it to the right folder. Once you find the article that you want to store in Mendeley, you click that bookmark on your toolbar and you will be prompted to login to Mendeley. After you log in, the article is imported for you.
The image below shows a JSTOR article that I located via Google Scholar and imported into Mendely. Here’s what I saw after the article was imported:
Posted in Mendeley, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
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