Weekly Reader

Searching the Library and Beyond: A Graduate Student Perspective
"I just finished my MLS, and one of the issues raised frequently both in and out of the classroom was how to get college students and researchers to use the library website. Academic librarians I’ve talked with have spent hefty amounts of time (and money) designing sites that meet the self-described needs of patrons, but still find most of the searches that guide students to library resources to be coming from Google. I decided to take a look at my own search habits to get a sense of how, from the graduate student perspective, these tools might be employed, and hopefully generate some discussion about searching on the library website and beyond." --  Julia Skinner, ACRLog, 9/1/11

Online Education is Everywhere ... What's the Next Big Thing?
"Like many other colleges, Southern New Hampshire University is experiencing an online-education boom. But look under the hood of its digital learning operation, and what you’ll find in many ways resembles traditional education: students forking over substantial tuition payments to study in small, professor-led classes that last from eight to 11 weeks. So what innovation will put that model out of business? Answering that question will be the responsibility of a new two-person “innovation team” at Southern New Hampshire. It’s an unusual job description: Disrupt the disruptive innovation." -- Marc Parry, Wired Campus, 8/31/11

Stop Blogging - Start Thinking
"Here is what advice they don’t give you at those seminars or e-books on the magical power of business blogging and social media: They don’t tell you that blogging = content creation, i.e. writing (mostly), and for some photography, videography, illustration, etc. That blogging per se is a meaningless word, thrown out there to make it less intimidating for the non-writers amongst us to throw our thoughts into the great wide world of the Internet. That the only differences between writing a blog or writing an article for a newspaper are that with a blog, you will be less likely to suffer public humiliation should it be lousy, and a small but important fact that there is no editor to guide you, help you fix it, or simply say that your content is not worthy of publication." -- Neal Shaffer, Social Media Today, 9/1/11

Where Good Ideas Come From
"As a summer project we read Steven Johnson’s book 'Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. It’s a book that while not at all focused on libraries, gave both us a lot of really good ideas about how librarians working with teens can be innovative and work towards innovative practices in their libraries. Below you can read about some of our favorite ideas and how we see connections between them and teen library services." -- Jennifer Larson and Linda Braun, YALSA Blog, 8/30/11

New College Board Research: 86% of Young Americans Believe College is Essential
"New York, NY — One year after graduating from high school, most members of the Class of 2010 believe that earning a college degree is “definitely” worth it, according to a survey released today by the College Board, a not-for-profit organization. The comprehensive survey on college readiness and affordability, One Year Out, explores how young Americans assess their high school experience and its role in preparing them for life after graduation  — be it work or postsecondary education." -- Peter Kaufmann (media contact), The College Board, 8/30/11

Nothing Right About this Copyright Ruling
"The world of copyright litigation is getting downright surreal. Recently a court struck down an appeal of a NY case involving reselling books from overseas in the U.S. Essentially, the court ruled that the first sale doctrine applies only to works manufactured in the United States." -- Maura Smale, ACRLog, 8/30/11

Anything I Wanted to Know About Library Marketing I Learned from a Shampoo Bottle
"The always brilliant Ned Potter wrote up a wonderful little primer on library marketing entitled “Three simple marketing rules all libraries should live by…” In his post, he emphasizes marketing the service, dropping the ‘how this works’ explanation, and promote the intersection of what the patron values with what the library values. Or, in other words, to use Pepsi as an example: Pepsi tells you that it refreshes, not that it is made with high fructose corn syrup and other ingredients; there is no Pepsi ad that walks you through how it is made; and Pepsi and its customers are both enjoy sugary caffeinated drinks and work to promote that relationship." -- Andy Woodworth, Agnostic, Maybe, 8/25/11