The 2011 Library Blog Awards

Salem Press is once again honoring library blogs.  If you are interested in nominating your favorite, take a few minutes to review their submission process.

"Blogs about libraries continue to spread across the web, with hundreds of people writing about books, libraries, and related subjects. Last year Salem Press set out on a mission to reward the achievements of librarian bloggers. Several hundred blogs by and about librarians entered the pool of nominations when the contest was announced. After the votes were tallied, 16 blogs were awarded prizes in five topical categories. Some were well-known and well-established, others on the rise or newly discovered. (For more information about last year's blogs, click 2010 Library Blog Awards.)"

"2011 Nominations:  Please share your favorite blogs with us. Doing so will enter your beloved online reading in our 2011 Awards process. We'll be accepting suggestions through June 1, 2011. To send us nominations (including a working link to the blog), email ptobey@salempress.com."

Weekly Reader

I have serious computer envy; attending a campus technology meeting yesterday, two members had new HP Slate 500 Tablet PCs. Sure, they will be introducing tablets to compete with iPad later this year, but the Slate was getting rave reviews from both users. As a result, this week's wrap-up is a bit heavy on the technology, though there are library (Happy National Library Week!), and general interest items. 

Colleges Aren’t Keeping Up With Student Demand for Hybrid Programs,
Survey Suggests
"Students want hybrid programs that blend online and face-to-face experiences. But colleges don’t seem to be providing enough of them to meet the demand. That’s one message that emerges from the results of a national survey of more than 20,000 current and prospective adult students that were just released by Eduventures, a consulting firm." -- Marc Parry, Wired Campus, 4/14/11

Is Your Human Showing? Be Real and Be Credible
"A recent study conducted at Elizabethtown College, however, suggests that may not be entirely true. In order to examine the role of self-disclosure in perceived credibility, 120 students between the ages of 18 and 23 were split into three groups. Each group followed the tweeting of a supposed professor. One group saw only scholarly tweets, one group saw only social tweets and the last group saw a mix of the two. Each “professor” included the same number of tweets and hyperlinks. Students were asked to rate the credibility of the professor they followed based on the tweets they observed." -- Brains on Fire, Social Media Today, 4/14/11

Librarians: Masters of the Info Universe
"Librarians, information specialists, knowledge managers or whatever title a librarian might have -- their skills are in high demand. And, though you might not know it, they are everywhere. And so in their honor during National Library Week, we enjoy the following tidbits of information." -- Kerith Page McFadden, CNN Living, 4/12/11

YouTube Copyright Education (remix)
"Because copyright law can be complicated, education is critical to ensure that our users understand the rules and continue to play by them. That’s why today we’re releasing a new tutorial on copyright and a redesigned copyright help center. We’re also making two changes to our copyright process to be sure that our users understand the rules, and that users who abide by those rules can remain active on the site." -- Justin Green, YouTube Blog, 4/14/11

Why All the Fuss Over PhD Academic Librarians?
"While no one has called it Trzeciakgate yet, I can’t help but see some similarities between what’s happening now with his presentation at Penn State University and the whole Michael Gorman firestorm (then labeled “Gormangate”) of 2005. Are you too new to the profession to remember Gormangate? " -- Steven Bell, ACRLog, 4/13/11

Biola professor goes outside the box to explain imaginary numbers
"Right before April Fools Day, math students at Biola University in Southern California learned the difference between real and imaginary numbers from professor Matthew Weathers and his imaginary self, who appears in a YouTube video." -- Jenna Johnson, Campus Overload, 4/12/11

Pagination Comes to Google Docs
"Today, we’re doing another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature—pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen. We’re also using pagination and some of Chrome’s capabilities to improve how printing works in Google Docs. Pagination is rolling out now and should be available to everyone by the end of the day." -- Luiz Pereira, Docs Blog, 4/12/11

7 Things You Should Know About the Modern Learning Commons
"The learning commons, sometimes called an “information commons,” has evolved from a combination library and computer lab into a full-service learning, research, and project space. As a place where students can meet, talk, study, and use “borrowed” equipment, the learning commons brings together the functions of libraries, labs, lounges, and seminar areas in a single community gathering place. The cost of a learning commons can be an obstacle, but for institutions that invest in a sophisticated learning commons, the new and expanded partnerships across disciplines facilitate and promote greater levels of collaboration. The commons invites students to devise their own approaches to their work and to transfer what they learn in one course to the work they do for another." -- John P. Lippencott, Stacey Greenwell, Educause, 4/11/11

Microsoft Shows Off Internet Explorer 10
"Just a scant four weeks after the launch of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft is back with the first platform preview of Internet Explorer 10. Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, unveiled the new platform preview of IE10 at the ongoing Mix developer conference in Las Vegas."-- Scott Gilbertson, WebMonkey, 4/11/11

Taking a Closer Look at Open Peer Review
"Open peer review—which gives anyone who’s interested a chance to weigh in on scholarly content before it’s published—just got an institutional boost. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given New York University Press and MediaCommons a $50,000 grant to take a closer look at open, or peer-to-peer (P2P), review, the press announced today. MediaCommons is a digital scholarly network hosted by the NYU Libraries and affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book." -- Jennifer Howard, Wired Campus, 4/11/11

ALAO 2011: Submission Deadline Extended!

Presentation and Poster Session Deadline:

NOW EXTENDED to April 22nd, 2011

Constant Change, Constant Opportunity
ALAO Annual Conference 2011
Call for Proposals





The Academic Library Association of Ohio (ALAO) *37th Annual Conference*
November 3rd and 4th, 2011
Hilton Toledo Hotel, Toledo, OH

Presentation and Poster Session Deadline: April 8th, 2011

The ALAO Conference Planning Committee invites you to submit proposals for presentations, 25-minute spotlight sessions, or poster sessions that bring new ideas or approaches useful for academic libraries. This year’s conference theme, “ Constant Change, Constant Opportunity,” looks at the challenges facing academic libraries as budgetary, institutional, occupational, and technological changes cause us to reflect and adapt how we provide services to our users and communities.

Presentations may take the form of contributed papers, demonstrations, workshops, research, or panel discussions. Spotlight sessions can be “lightning round” style programs, multimedia slides, or other presentation techniques that cover a subject or issue that can be dealt with in a 25-minute time frame. Poster sessions should embrace the conference theme and present original ideas, innovative solutions to problems, library-related projects, or creative approaches to dealing with change in today’s academic libraries.

• Support Staff Presenter Grant Form
• Student Presenter Grant Form

This year we have available both a Support Staff Presenter Grant and a Student Presenter Grant. Further details on both grants are available at the URLs above. For more information regarding the Call for Proposals for presentations, spotlight sessions, or poster sessions, contact the Conference Planning Committee members listed below:

Katie Gibson – Presentations and Spotlight Sessions
Email: gibsonke at muohio.edu

Masha Misco – Poster Sessions
Email: stepanm at muohio.edu

For more details, proposal forms, and presentation grant forms, please check the conference website: http://www.alaoweb.org/events.

We look forward to receiving your proposals for the 2011 ALAO Annual Conference!

Weekly Reader

I'm putting my thoughts and various technology resources in order after attending ACRL in Philadelphia last week. For the first time, I did not create any handwritten notes. Instead I posted the titles of various sessions I attended, along with accompanying Twitter hashtags (#acrl2011 and #czs11), on Facebook and Twitter, I took photos of PowerPoint slides with my camera and phone, and snapped QR codes to locate and save URLs from poster sessions. No paper handouts, no information sheets, nothing to weed prior to packing for the return trip. Excepting the purse I bought at Macys, my suitcase weighed the same at both ends of the conference. This week's reader collection is sans anything posted during the conference; even with technology in hand, I did not have time to keep up with the reader.

Beyond the Job: Our Final Post
The end of a blog.... "After 3 1/2 years and over 1700 posts, we’ve decided it’s time to say farewell to Beyond the Job. We’ve both moved on to other projects, which leaves us less time to keep this site up to date." -- Sarah Johnson, Rachel Singer Gordon, Beyond the Job, 4/7/11

2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report
"To understand how marketers are using social media, Social Media Examiner commissioned the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. We set out to uncover the “who, what, where, when and why” of social media marketing with this report. A significant 3300 social media marketers provided valuable insight you won’t find elsewhere." -- Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner, 4/7/11

Slide into These Cool Presentation Tools
"Into each work life, some slides must, well, slide. But you can make the most of them with this collection of updates." -- Denise Graveline, The Eloquent Woman, 4/7/11

OhioLINK Receives $750K Grant to Bolster Math, Engineering Courses
"OhioLINK has been named a recipient of a $750,000 grant from Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), a new initiative focused on identifying and scaling technology-enabled approaches to dramatically improve college readiness and completion, especially for low-income young adults. OhioLINK’s winning project will build off of its successful Ohio Digital Bookshelf program by creating multimedia and self-assessment tools to help students succeed in fundamental math and applied engineering courses. " -- Stacy Brannan , OhioLINK What's New, 4/7/11

Shelving Made Easy (or Easier)
"Putting misshelved books back in their proper places is not a library worker’s favorite task. It takes time and it’s not exactly scintillating. Now a computer-science professor has come up with a way to make the process faster and less burdensome: an augmented-reality shelf-reading app that can scan an entire shelf’s worth of books at a time and alert workers which ones are out of place."-- Jennifer Howard, Wired Campus, 4/6/11

CMCIG Spring Workshop: Registration Open!

“Local Resources and Collaborations”
ALAO-Curriculum Materials Centers Interest Group

When? Friday, May 20, 2011 ~ 8:30 to 4:00

Where? Wright State University ~ Educational Resource Center

How can you locate and leverage local resources in your CMC? This workshop is for those interested in learning about resources readily available and inspiring partnerships and collaborations.

After a picnic lunch, we will tour the Holocaust Exhibit in the National Museum of the United States Air Force and see WSU’s active partnership with the Dayton Holocaust Resource Center.

Complete details, including travel information, session descriptions, and presenter bios, can be found on the CMCIG Events page.

Registration is $35 and includes continental breakfast, lunch, and museum fees. Questions? Please contact Stephanie Bange, stephanie.bange at wright.edu.

* Originally posted on CMCIG Blog. 

Another Weekly Reader Wrap-Up

It's Friday! In a few days (four, but I'm not counting) many academic library folks will be headed to Philadelphia, PA for the ACRL National Conference; I'm excited to have the opportunity to attend and present. I am also slightly crazed; the time is close and my part of the session not quite where I would like it to be. Presenting about technology resources, with technology, to an audience that is well versed in said technology can be daunting and exhilarating. I've been increasingly immersed in the presentation this week, hence the number of technology topics presented in the wrap-up.

Valuing Change
"The past couple of weeks have reminded me how hard it is for teachers to consider change when they don’t have a context for it and, most importantly, when they don’t value it." -- Will Richardson, Weblogg-ed, 3/21/11

Making What's Old, New
"Almost a year ago, we introduced a new version of the document editor. The new version launched with character-by-character collaboration, higher import fidelity and new features like a ruler and support for positioned images. Since then, we’ve been continually adding more features like collaborative highlighting, better revision history, mobile editing, and discussions." -- Jeff Harris, Docs Blog, 3/24/11

Are People "Borrowing" Your Content (and How Do You Know When They Do)?
"The downside of social media is the expectation that everything on the Internet is free. Some people regularly pass other people’s thoughts and ideas off as their own. Copyright infringement is a serious offense. There are laws to protect people who use words to create art when those words are on a printed piece of paper. The digital age has left those laws behind. The concept that everything is free on the Internet has created a new breed of thievery AKA 'copy & paste.'" -- Debra Ellis, Social Media Today, 3/24/11

Famous Speech Friday: Lady Bird Johnson's 1964 Whistle Stop Tour
"Lady Bird Johnson died just a few months before The Eloquent Woman blog launched, and it was during her funeral services that I realized few today recall her shy start as a public speaker." -- Denise Graveline, The Eloquent Woman Blog, 3/25/11

No Video Camera? No Problem! Create Original Videos with Your Own Photos, Clips,or Just and Idea
"More than 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and with the motto of "Broadcast Yourself", it's hard to believe that anyone is left out of the YouTube experience. But the truth is, sites like YouTube do largely leave out people who don't have a video camera. That's changing with the beta launch of youtube.com/create, where anyone can use video creation sites Xtranormal, Stupeflix and GoAnimate to make personal videos or animations and post them directly to YouTube." -- Stanley Wang and Shenaz Zack, YouTube Blog, 3/24/11

Weekly reader wrap-up

Unsure as to if there was too much to read, or too little information that caught my attention, here is last week's somewhat abbreviated reader wrap-up. Is it time for a bit of feed reader spring cleaning? Regardless, in addition to these entries be sure to take a second look at the CMCIG spring workshop date (this morning) and the 2011 ALAO Call for proposals posts from last week.

Lita Offering Web course on Mashups and APIs
"Creating Library Web Services: Mashups and APIs will be held April 18-22, 2011 and presented by Karen Coombs of the OCLC Developer Network and Jason Clark of Montana State University Libraries. Live, synchronous lectures will be presented each day from 10:00 am – 12 noon CDT." -- Melissa Prentice, Lita Blog, 3/15/11

LibGuides: Information is a Candle in the Dark
"We love sharing great examples of librarians using LibGuides/CampusGuides to publish high quality, timely information. When we saw Kathy Park’s guide about the tragic events in Japan, we were inspired by its breadth, quality, & currency - so we’d like to share her work with the community. Check out the COM Library’s guide to the Japan Earthquake & Tsunami: http://libguides.com.edu/japan" -- Springshare Support Blog, 3/15/11

Refurbed Card Catalog Becomes eReader Storage
"How many of us have emply card catalogs gathering dust in the back halls of our our libraries? Linn McDonald, Library Media Specialist at the Bloomington Jr. High School in Illinois, came up with a creative way to take one of these treasured relics into the digital age." -- Marianne Lenox, ALA Learning Roundtable, 3/17/11

C&RL to Go Open Access
"ACRL announces that its scholarly research journal, College & Research Libraries (C&RL), will become an open access publication beginning with the May 2011 issue. This change in access policy lifts the online version of the publication’s current six-month embargo on new content and makes the complete contents of the journal from 1997 to the present freely available through the publication website at http://crl.acrl.org." -- ACRL Insider, 3/18/11

CMCIG Spring Workshop

Save the date! Think Spring! It will soon be time for the 2011 CMCIG spring workshop.

The CMCIG 2011 workshop will take place:

When? Friday, May 20, 2011
Where? Wright State University, Dayton, OH

Information will be posted on the ALAO IG workshop page and updates will posted as more information becomes available.

* Originally posted on the CMCIG Blog

ALAO Newsletter: March 2011

The latest edition of the ALAO Newsletter is available! Featured this month:

• President's report
• ACRL Scholarly Communication Workshop
• Interest Groups Spring Workshops
• ALAO Annual Conference Call for Proposals
• ALAO Grant Opportunities

Note that registration for the Distance Learning Interest Group's (DLIG) spring workshop, INOV8: Revitalizing Distance Learning, scheduled for Friday, May 13th, is now open.

"This year’s workshop will focus on ways to revitalize your approach to distance learning by featuring freely available technologies, successful strategies for connecting to our students and faculty, and tips for librarianship in learning management systems."

For more information on the DLIG workshop, visit their events page or view the brochure (PDF).

ALAO 2011: Call for Proposals

Constant Change, Constant Opportunity
ALAO Annual Conference 2011
Call for Proposals





The Academic Library Association of Ohio (ALAO) *37th Annual Conference*
November 3rd and 4th, 2011
Hilton Toledo Hotel, Toledo, OH

Presentation and Poster Session Deadline: April 8th, 2011

The ALAO Conference Planning Committee invites you to submit proposals for presentations, 25-minute spotlight sessions, or poster sessions that bring new ideas or approaches useful for academic libraries. This year’s conference theme, “ Constant Change, Constant Opportunity,” looks at the challenges facing academic libraries as budgetary, institutional, occupational, and technological changes cause us to reflect and adapt how we provide services to our users and communities.

Presentations may take the form of contributed papers, demonstrations, workshops, research, or panel discussions. Spotlight sessions can be “lightning round” style programs, multimedia slides, or other presentation techniques that cover a subject or issue that can be dealt with in a 25-minute time frame. Poster sessions should embrace the conference theme and present original ideas, innovative solutions to problems, library-related projects, or creative approaches to dealing with change in today’s academic libraries.

• Support Staff Presenter Grant Form
• Student Presenter Grant Form

This year we have available both a Support Staff Presenter Grant and a Student Presenter Grant. Further details on both grants are available at the URLs above. For more information regarding the Call for Proposals for presentations, spotlight sessions, or poster sessions, contact the Conference Planning Committee members listed below:

Katie Gibson – Presentations and Spotlight Sessions
Email: gibsonke at muohio.edu

Masha Misco – Poster Sessions
Email: stepanm at muohio.edu

For more details, proposal forms , and presentation grant forms, please check the conference website: http://www.alaoweb.org/events.

We look forward to receiving your proposals for the 2011 ALAO Annual Conference!

Reader Wrap-up

A long time ago ... I published a blog post. I won't digress too much by sharing how many posts I deleted from draft format, or even how many remain awaiting publication. I will share that my lunchtime reading today was comprised of catching up with my spring break collection of feeds. Here's a short collection of technology-related items that caught my attention, the last two feature QR Codes (no big surprise).

What's New With Blogger
"2010 was a big year for Blogger. We cemented ourselves as one of the largest blogging platforms and the sixth largest website in the world, according to Alexa. Blogger users published more than half a billion blog posts, which were read by more than 400 million active readers across the globe." -- Chang Kim, Blogger Buzz, 3/14/11



8 Simple Ways to Improve Your YouTube Channel
"You don’t have to be a YouTube “personality” to create a fantastic, customized YouTube channel. Everyone can take advantage of the options available. YouTube’s product manager for consumer channels, AJ Crane, says your personal channel is “the best place to showcase your content.” We spoke to Crane to find out some great ways to improve, and make the most of, your channel’s appearance, usability and engagement options." -- Amy-Mae Elliott, Mashable ,3/11/11

8 Powerful & Inexpensive Desktop Design Apps
"We’ve discovered some great design software that you may not have heard of — and they’re all less than $50. Are these tools as robust and powerful as their pricey counterparts? Realistically, no. But they’re still great apps, especially given their price tags (or lack thereof). If you’re working on a small budget or just looking to try something new, check out some of the programs below." -- Kelli Shaver, Mashable, 3/14/11

Why QR Codes Will Go Mainstream [Opinion]
"I believe the answer is yes, QR codes are coming to an advertisement or object near you, and sooner than you may think. Here are the reasons why, along with suggestions on how advertisers can catalyze this movement by making QR code campaigns as useful and rewarding as possible." -- Hamilton Chan, Mashable Opinion Piece, 3/8/11

Who's Really Scanning All Those QR Codes? [Infographic]
"QR code-focused startup JumpScan was kind enough to send along a graphically organized representation of some data they’ve gathered about QR codes — who’s scanning them, what kinds of devices they’re using and what brands are running QR code campaigns." --Jolie O'Dell, Mashable, 3/4/11