Status of Approval Plans in College Libraries Beth E. Jacoby - This would have been useful required reading before the PSU Libraries Collection Development retreat where we looked at coordinating our approval plan among one main campus and 23 college campuses (one university, geographically distributed), but I got behind in my C&RL reading.  I found out Penn State used to have a "Ogontz" campus, name changes keep my mind boggled.

What’s in a Name? Using Card Sorting to Evaluate Branding in an Academic Library’s Web Site Peter Hepburn and Krystal M. Lewis - Shocking reality check about library branded services.  A must read for any library web committee (at least the Findings and Table 1 sections for the time challenged)

Adjusting to the Workplace: Transitions Faced by New Academic Librarians Joanne Oud - Best Article (for me and Russ anyway)  Though it is about University Librarians in Canada, this will be a landmark study in my research agenda.  Great survey of new academic librarians that impacts mentoring, job training, hiring, collection development, and instruction (Russ!).  The questions were well contructed and the results are sometimes surprising and always quantitative.  I would love to duplicate this survey in the U.S. or at Penn State.

Transition to Electronic Resources in Undergraduate Social Science Research: A Study of Honors Theses Bibliographies, 1999–2005 Leslie Kriebel and Leslie Lapham - co-writing my own article about electronic resources in a subject area has taught me not to skip an article if it doesn't directly address your subject area.  This is a good study of undergraduate theses that reinforces our expectation that Websites are increasing in student citations, E-journals are trumping print, yet perhaps surprisingly e-Books are a flop (only 1% of citations where almost 9% of the citations were available as e-Books).  This reminds me to look at habits of grad students and not just faculty in my own citation studies.

My idea was a tag cloud based on the content of the author's blog, while the other one seems to be a tag cloud of technology tools (not well weighted, Google isn't big enough)

Given the ubiquity of tag clouds, my "original" idea doesn't seem that groundbreaking or to be co-opted in this circumstance.

Note that this is one of my photos that I didn't place a Creative Commons license on, though I probably should have considering I was entering it in a cover design contest.

The odd thing is that the most viewed is from a talk I did for an Engineering class (635) on how the Information Literacy Standards of ACRL applied to ABET Accreditation and their future job duties.

Does this mean that one of my small presentations is having some significant impact beyond it's original task? This can also be called Youtube fame, an example of which is Ellysa's video (17,790).

The starting search page looks "off" since the search boxes are so close to the top, but you get used to it. Basic and Advanced searching get you to results that use facets on the left side (though in a slightly different way from other databases, since added facets appear at the top and new ones come up on the left, but it is hard to tell) You can save items to a folder, which come in preset types but you can customize AND share (with an invite). There are oddly large buttons and little text for "email" and "print" and similar actions for articles.

The "visual search" is a pretty cool way to see results that you narrow and sort visually (does not really map them or allow custom grouping) and is a Flash application. I'm not sure it works completely yet (Beta) since I can't seem to add articles from it to my folders... or print... or anything.

Measuring Students’ Information Literacy Skills through Abstracting: Case Study from a Library & Information Science Perspective by Maria Pinto, Andrés Fernández-Ramos, and Anne-Vinciane Doucet is a very long article with lots of figures and tables on abstracting, which I found out from a colleague is a totally separate "profession" in some ways to librarianship. I certainly didn't study it in library school (should I have gone to Spain?)

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White

Meier, J.J. & Conkling, T.W. "Google Scholar's Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study," Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008

Meier, J.J. "Chat widgets on the library website: Help at the point of need," Computers in Libraries, June 2008

To Marianne and all "What type of research do librarians do? Is it social science, information science, or it could even be similar to hospitality research?"
- She comments that even social scientists have trouble describing what kind of research they do

To All "Whose responsibility is it to publish on scholarly publishing like the crisis in Humanities for new professionals?"
- This is a new area, a call to study for a new library professional

Missed the questions, but Nancy responded that ACRL conference presentations are published in the proceedings, it isn't just already published unless it is a significant write-up. Joe followed up that a study showed less than 1/3 of ACRL proceedings entries went on to a journal article. I know that ACRL-STS has a Research Forum that Nan suggested they change into a format similar to other Sciences where preliminary research proposals are presented and critiqued with the idea that they would eventually develop into research projects and papers.

* Peer to peer study is a frequent observation implies that the library needs to be a social space.
* A one shot library session has been described as a "field trip" or "substitute teacher".
* Promotion and marketing are successful if they "appeal to their lifestyle".
* He talks pretty fast and sometimes drops names or runs through a statement that might be profound but it is hard to catch.
* Talk to "the Dominator" before the committee meeting to get them on board with you. The applications of focus group tactics to committees is the best part of this talk!
* This could be experiential research that the hospitality industry focuses on.

Anthropology research sounds fun, but you need to learn the boundaries, rules, and you need to practice (on each other or in a weird place... Kinkos?) "Immersing yourself in the data" is either in a group or solo that you read, think, review all your materials including all your data (videos, images, interviews) and discuss or reflect. Build in this time (even in on your own)

* They did some things with the data (24/7 space, parents breakfast, six or more changes) then they continue the studies in the changed environments.
* Perhaps setting up a large, ongoing project would allow for many small pilots and experiments as part of it.
* Is Library Science research most like Information Science, Social Science (Anthropology), or History?

Organizational Learning in the Evaluation Procedures: A Qualitative Study by Kuan-nien Chen and Pei-chun Lin has 11 endnotes in the first 13 sentences, which starts a disturbing trend in this issue.

Librarians as Teachers: A Qualitative Inquiry Into Professional Identity BEST in issue by Scott Walter - The 78 endnotes, many of which contain several citations, in this article made my eyes start to pop out of their sockets. A twenty page article that is one quarter notes must be some kind of record (and the font on the notes pages is small!) However if you are interested in librarians as teachers, read it anyway. You will probably find a dozen other cool articles or books.
Note to the author: ACRL's Immersion program does include a focus on teacher identity

Citation Analysis of Ph.D Dissertation References as a Tool for Collection Management in an Academic Chemistry Library by Núria Vallmitjana and L. G. Sabaté is a very concise article with some most results following what you would assume, but giving numbers in the discipline of Chemistry to prove it. No good news in cost, really, except that the core journals were relatively easy to spot. What is the cost? Well, they estimate the resources used by one thesis to be 90 € = $142

Also, Lawrence Lessig loves AMVs, which you can all watch now

Clicking above will open another browser window (shaped like a traditional Chat application) and attempt to connect to my Gtalk. This code only seems to update when I refresh the window.