Weekly Reader

Your New Campus Guide: A Small Patterned Square That Talks to Your Smartphone
"Students touring Wittenberg University, in Ohio, can hear campus history come alive with help from their smartphones and little squares with black-and-white patterns affixed to buildings on the 100-acre campus.Universities like Wittenberg have begun using these QR codes, which can be printed onto any flat surface, as a way to market themselves to a generation of smartphone users. Like bar codes on supermarket items, QR codes–it stands for “Quick Response”–can be scanned by a computer. But instead of returning the price of a carton of milk, these codes are directions to a multimedia-rich Web page. And the scanner, in this case, is the camera in a smartphone." -- Jie Jenny Zou, Wired Campus, 8/3/11

Search: How Libraries Do it Wrong
"A couple of new articles forthcoming in College & Research Libraries just caught my eye. The first, by Brett Bodemer of Cal Poly in San Obispo, is about how we help undergraduates conceptualize the research process (and how we might do it better). The second, by Bernadette Lear of Penn State Harrisburg, looks at how new journals are represented in library holdings and how library processes tilt discovery toward publications of large for-profit publishers and against smaller society or university-sponsored open access publications. While I’m at it, let me throw in a third article which seems oddly related even though it’s about something quite mundane." -- Barbara Fister, Library Babel Fish, 8/2/11

The Skill Set We Need
"Those of us lucky to have jobs have all felt some pain as a result of the economy: whether it’s accepting additional years without a cost of living increase, seeing increased class sizes or cuts in travel funding, or, in the worst case, experiencing furloughs. We've also been unable to add faculty members to strengthen those programs that are most promising. Dreams of fresh reinforcements of newly minted Ph.D.s are not being fulfilled, and the mantra remains: Do your job with the resources that you have." -- Martin S. Edwards, Career Advice: Inside Higher Ed, 8/1/11

Finding the Future: Inside NYPL's All-Night Scavenger Hunt
"They came wearing bowties and fancy hats, skinny jeans and peasant blouses. They came armed with smartphones, tablets, and laptops. On the evening of Friday, May 20, 500 young adults gathered at the New York Public Library (NYPL) to do what no one had done before: spend the entire night in one of the city’s great public spaces, indulging in an ambitious, interactive game that would test their collaborative abilities while introducing them to the library’s vast holdings." -- Stan Friedman, Library Journal, 7/14/11