From the Article:

With increasing demands on their time, librarians seek speedier, easier ways to create library course pages and subject research guides. Many libraries have turned to LibGuides, LibData, and other content management systems (CMS) to meet this need.1 Add to this mix, Library à la Carte, formerly Interactive Course Assignment Pages (or ICAP) Tool. Created by librarians and a programmer at Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries, Library à la Carte is a CMS originally designed to create course pages. Library à la Carte was recently enhanced to build subject pages. This open source tool is freely available to all libraries.

Direct to Library à la Carte Web Site

Source: C&RL News

This paper was written by Rupak Chakrvarty and was presented at “Trends and Strategic Issues for Libraries in Global Information Society, March 18-19, 2008, in Panjab, India.

From the Abstract:

We are finding ourselves in a rapidly growing and complex digital environment which has in turn increased our dependency on information. But there is increasing evidence that our information skills are not keeping pace in any systematic fashion. We all need help to sharpen the techniques and skills to manage information. Present paper is an attempt to present the current status of information literacy and the emerging roles of libraries and schools of LIS education in augmenting the information literacy campaign.

Direct to Full Text Paper (21 pages; PDF)

Source: DList

Robert Schroeder Writes:

I initially became interested in the transitions students make from high school to college when I worked as a librarian in a community college in Washington state about ten years ago. At Portland State University I am currently the liaison to the General Education Department (called University Studies), and so still teach research and information literacy skills to thousands of freshmen each year. These freshmen come to college with a wide variety of research and information literacy skills.

Direct to Complete Article

Source: Educators’ Spotlight Digest

Direct to Complete Conference Paper by Joe Murphy and Heather Moulaison (6 pages; PDF)

From the Paper:

The social networking literate librarian possesses the skills necessary providing services in and with online social networking sites

Social networking sites are extremely popular across age groups and are central forums for accessing and sharing information. Librarians are responding to the popularity of social networking sites and their expanding role in the creation, use, and sharing of information by engaging them as a central medium for interacting with library patrons and providing services to meet their information needs.

Librarians need a new branch of skill sets specific to utilizing and leveraging social networking sites to provide quality services and maintain their role as information experts in a Web 2.0 world.

Source: Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 14th National Conference, Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend., Seattle, Washington (via E-LIS)

Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts

Readers of Adventures in Babywearing, a blog for parents, got an up-close look at the Ergo, a $135 embroidered baby carrier in a shade called “organic blue” in a May 14 post on the site. Blog operator Stephanie Precourt was impressed. “The Ergo truly is now my first choice for long-term wear as well as nursing and doing chores around the house,” she wrote.

Money can’t buy that kind of advertising for Maui (Hawaii)-based ERGObaby. Or can it? As Precourt wrote in her blog, the company sent the carrier free, along with a matching pouch and backpack. Precourt says it’s legitimate to blog about a product she’s been given by its manufacturer. “I try to keep my blog filled with personal stories and real-life content so that when I do happen to write about something that I’ve been given, it’s credible,” she says in an e-mail.

But such back-scratching endorsements could become tougher under a coming set of Federal Trade Commission guidelines designed to clarify how companies can court bloggers to write about their products. This summer, the government agency is expected to issue new advertising guidelines that will require bloggers to disclose when they’re writing about a sponsor’s product and voicing opinions that aren’t their own. The new FTC guidelines say that blog authors should disclose when they’re being compensated by an advertiser to discuss a product.

Source: Business Week
Hat tip: PW

Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists’ research

A sociology student placed a fake quote on Wikipedia, only to see it show up in prominent newspapers, revealing that a lot of the press doesn’t go much further than most ‘Net users when it comes to researching a story.

Source: Ars Technica

Direct to Table of Contents (via Pubmed Central)

Articles include:

+ A case study: using social tagging to engage students in learning Medical Subject Headings

+ Search strategies to identify information on adverse effects: a systematic review

+ Development of a new academic digital library: a study of usage data of a core medical electronic journal collection

+ A bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on Internet, video games, and cell phone addiction

+ The great contribution: Index Medicus, Index-Catalogue, and IndexCat

+ Web usability testing with a Hispanic medically underserved population

+ Disappearing act: decay of uniform resource locators in health care management
journals

+ Medical librarians’ uses and perceptions of social tagging

+ Embedded librarians: one library’s model for decentralized service

and Much More.

Direct to Document (1 page; PDF)

See Also: Guidelines for Information Literacy (Lifelong Learning) (60 pages; PDF)

Source: IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations)

This fee-based book is available from ALA’s Book Shop. A very interesting topic!

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announces the publication of a new title, “Library Rx: Measuring and Treating Library Anxiety” by Martina Malvasi, Catherine Rudowsky and Jesus M. Valencia.

“Library Rx” presents research findings on library anxiety in college and university students. There is strong evidence that library anxiety, the inadequate feeling students have when lost in overwhelming buildings that present mountains of information in all formats and professionals who may seem busy and unapproachable, has a negative impact on undergraduate student performance. The authors review existing research on student reactions to the library environment, describe the finding of a research project on library anxiety and present ideas for its treatment.

Malvasi, Rudowsky and Valencia compare and test various treatments for library anxiety, including traditional instruction, online tutorials and one-on-one teaching moments, as well as the effects of no library intervention or treatment at all. Using statistical analysis, the effectiveness of the various treatment methods is presented. In addition, anecdotal evidence of library initiatives and events used to reduce library anxiety is provided. “Library Rx” prescribes relevant solutions for library anxiety in all types of academic libraries.

Look for sales information at the bottom of the ALA/ACRL post here.

From the Post:

If you ever needed proof that Gen Yers and Boomers approach technology differently in the workplace, LexisNexis released its Technology Gap Survey on April 15th to prove the point - the press release with summary is at http://digbig.com/4yqas, and the full study is available at http://digbig.com/4yqat.

Source: VIP LiveWire

See Also: New Study Examines Technology Generation Gap in the Legal Workplace

From the Article:

In a bid to tackle ethical pitfalls in technology before they become a problem, a new research project will identify the Information and Communications technologies (ICTs) that are likely to emerge in the next 10 to 15 years.

The two-year study called Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications (ETICA), coordinated by De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) aims to help researchers identify new technologies that could become as famous as Facebook and Twitter and enable them to devise a strategy for dealing with the unforeseen drawbacks that these emerging technologies bring along.

Source: IWR

From the Announcement:

The organizers of the popular Sparky Awards, which recognize the best new short videos on the value of information sharing, are calling on colleges and universities to organize their own campus video competitions in 2009 to get maximum benefit from the third-annual installment of the contest.

Well-suited for adoption as a class assignment, the Sparky Awards invite contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. The contest is an opportunity to promote library services, including media services or the information commons, where students can edit video, browse media, work collaboratively and learn about copyright.

Direct to Sparky Awards Web Site

Source: SPARC

From the Web Site:

At SDSU [San Diego State University], the Information Literacy and Instructional Services librarians are working in collaboration with several teaching and learning units on campus to strengthen student learning and effective teaching practices. This unique partnership allows us to leverage our resources and expertise for pedagogical design, explore new collaborative and social technologies, and move toward common goals for student learning and faculty development.

Source: EDUCAUSE

The Future of Fact Checking

Remember Jayson Blair, the New York Times “reporter” who fabricated tens of articles by gliding through a loop hole in the reporter’s code of honor? Some established magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic can afford to pay fact checkers, but even the Times — whether for reasons of deadline or budget — must rely on reporters to fact-check themselves, taking any heat from the public if they misquote or misrepresent.

Obviously, there is even less impetus or resources to fact-check blogs. In blogging, commentary is so instantaneous that a moment of reflective delay costs its writer timely influence on the cacophonous dialogue of interested voices. Toss in the patina of ideology, opinion, and just plain gossip, which can characterize the blogosphere both left and right, and you have a recipe for old fashioned, low and dirty rumor-mongering.

Source: Internet & Democracy Project

From the Introduction:

In the past, the research process began with two, distinct phases: discovery and access. After determining a topic, a researcher would enter the discovery phase, in which he or she would look through library catalogs and article indices to identify resources that might pertain to his or her research. During this phase, the researcher would sift through records containing resource descriptions, not the resources themselves. Then, after assembling a list of promising records, the researcher would use these records to try to locate the resources in order to evaluate them. The goal of the researcher during this access phase was to get a physical copy of the resource. The Internet and advancements in search engine technology and library information systems have made research easier in some ways and more difficult in others. The change that has the greatest implications for UC-eLinks – and for library services in general – is the collapsing of the discovery and access phases into a single workflow.

The desired end result of this new workflow remains the same, although most researchers now prefer an electronic version of a resource to a physical one. The process still begins with discovery, but once researchers start entering queries into a search engine and getting search results back, they want to be able to immediately evaluate the results. They repeat this searchand- evaluate cycle as many times as needed. Thus, the research workflow has evolved from search-then-evaluate to search-and-evaluate.

Direct to Complete Report (15 pages; PDF)

Source: California Digital Library