The Tenth International Conference on Grey Literature will take place in Amsterdam this December. The conference is titled, “Designing the Grey Grid for Information Society.”
The conference program is now available here.
Source: GL10
Voices and images from the civil-rights movement are now on the Web at the Civil Rights Digital Library, created by the University of Georgia.
The library features 30 hours of historical news footage showing such events as the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., and Martin Luther King Jr. accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
As centers of lifelong learning, museums and libraries contain a wealth of resources and information that can help youth fulfill their vast potential. To assist museums and libraries in their development of effective and engaging youth programs, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has published Nine to Nineteen: Youth in Museums and Libraries; A Practitioner’s Guide, the newest resource in the Museums and Libraries Engaging America’s Youth Initiative series.
The guide features several examples of successful youth programming from around the country, as well as useful information for planning exemplary youth programs. In the guide, practitioners can find resources on funding, evaluation, and out-of-school programs gathered from those working in the youth and community development, education, and informal learning fields. Nine to Nineteen is geared toward museums and libraries, but is also useful to community planners, youth development leaders, and educators who want to connect with the many types of organizations and institutions that serve youth in our communities.
Source: IMLS
A US software developer, Jake Luciani, has determined the best days and times to publish blog posts, analyzing the connection between timing and popularity on social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx.The conclusions are straightforward: Thursdays are the best day, and the best times are between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work). The worst times to post are between 3pm and 5pm PST on weekends.Although these results are intuitive, this informal study can serve as a useful reminder to bloggers. On the other hand, it can also further lead to popularity-driven editing.For his experiment, Luciani used popularity ranking engine AideRSS. For more details about the methodology, which is subject click below.Times in the graphs are GMT.
Sources: ReadWriteWeb, Journerdism, Editors Weblog
Thanks Pete W.
Webcast: The Anthropology of Digital Natives
by Edith Ackerman
Recorded at The Library of Congress
April 4, 2007
Running Time: 119 Minutes
Young people today born into a digital world are experiencing a far different environment of information-gathering and access to knowledge than a generation ago. Who are these “digital natives” and what are they thinking? How are they using the technology, and are IT experts adequately responding to them?
These questions will be addressed in a new Library of Congress series titled “Digital Natives.” The four-lecture series will examine the generation that has been raised with the computer as a natural part of their lives, with emphasis on the young people currently in schools and colleges today. The series will seek to understand the practices and culture of these digital natives, the cultural implications of the phenomenon and the implications for education — schools, universities and libraries.
This first lecture explores how young people think, learn and play. Speaker Edith Ackerman is particularly interested in helping shape the future of play and learning in a digital world. “I study how people use place, relate to others and treat things to find their ways — and voices — in an ever-changing world,” she said.
Source: LC
A new survey found that consumers trusted information about the causes of illnesses and treatment options about 80% of the time but only trusted quality data about half as often. A researcher attributed the gap to consumers being less familiar with quality data. Modern Healthcare.
Source: iHealthBeat
+ New Grant Program to Fund Cataloging of Hidden Collections
+ Many More than a Million: Building the Digital Environment for the Age of Abundance
+ Faculty Research Behavior Workshops: A Librarian’s Perspective
+ Who Uses Institutional Repositories and Mass-Digitized Collections?
+ CLIR Names 2008 Rovelstad Scholarship Recipient
+ 2008–2009 Mellon Dissertation Fellows Named
Source: Council on Libraries and Information Resouces
A digital treasure trove of information is out there for the taking, but only if students have a means of discovering the way to find it - a search engine that is both academic and user-friendly.
Scores of academic search engines provide a heavyweight alternative to the commercial ones and work against what Brighton University’s professor of media- Tara Brabazon has termed “the Google effect” - a tendency towards mediocrity.
Source: EducationGuardian.co.uk
Direct to Article
by Buente, Wayne and Robbin, Alice (2008)
By 2000, the Internet became an information and communication medium that was integrated in our everyday lives. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the research reported in this article analyzes the wide variety of information that people seek on the Internet and investigates trends in Internet information activities between 2000 and 2004, using repeated cross-sectional data from the Pew Internet and American Life surveys to examine Internet activities that contribute to everyday life and their predictors. The objective is to deepen our understanding of Internet activities and everyday life and contribute to a growing body of research that utilizes large-scale empirical data on Internet use and everyday life. We ask: who is embedding the Internet into their everyday lives and what are the activities they pursue to facilitate everyday life? Findings demonstrate the differential returns for Internet use, particularly in key demographic categories. The study also contributes to emerging research on the digital divide, namely emphasis on the study of use rather than access to technology. Identifying trends in key Internet use dimensions enables policymakers to target populations who underutilize the potential of networked technologies.
Source: dLIST
Today is World Book and Copyright Day!!!
Let’s Celebrate!!!
Source: UNESCO
From a summary:
Becta, the UK Government’s lead agency for ICT in education has recently published volume 3 (2008) of its Research Report “Emerging technologies for learning”;, a publication which aims to help readers consider how emerging technologies may influence education in the medium term. Its content is an article by Emma Tonkin, Interoperability Focus Officer at UKOLN, entitled “If it quacks like a duck: Developments in search technologies”.
In this contribution Emma examines some of the widely held assumptions about the ICT usage and behaviour of young learners on the subject of searching for information and lays open some of the misunderstandings that abound within this area.
Direct to Full Text Report
20 pages; PDF.
It appears 2008 might well be shaping up to be the year that semantic technology kicks off: Semantic search engine Hakia has begun licensing its technology, the intelligent organizer Twine is readying for launch, and now natural language search engine Powerset is also considering a near-term launch, as TechCrunch recently noted.
Source: VentureBeat
The Integrative Level Classification (ILC) research project is experimenting with a knowledge organization system based on phenomena rather than disciplines. Each phenomenon has a constant notation, which can be combined with that of any other phenomenon in a freely faceted structure. Citation order can express differential focality of the facets. Very specific subjects can have long classmarks, although their complexity is reduced by various devices. Freely faceted classification is being tested by indexing a corpus of about 3300 papers in the interdisciplinary domain of bioacoustics. The subjects of these papers often include phenomena from a wide variety of integrative levels (mechanical waves, animals, behaviour, vessels, fishing, law, …) as well as information about the methods of study, as predicted in the León Manifesto. The archive is recorded in a MySQL database, and can be fed and searched through PHP Web interfaces. Indexer’s work is made easier by mechanisms that suggest possible classes on the basis of matching title words with terms in the ILC schedules, and synthesize automatically the verbal caption corresponding to the classmark being edited. Users can search the archive by selecting and combining values in each facet. Search refinement should be improved, especially for the cases where no record, or too many records, match the faceted query. However, experience is being gained progressively, showing that freely faceted classification by phenomena, theories, and methods is feasible and working.
Source: DLIST
New Summary Data from Benchmarking Study of College Information Literacy Efforts
From the Primary Research Group, access to the full report is fee-based but summary data is available below.
Primary Research Group’s new report – College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks (ISBN# 1-57440-099-1) is a North American survey presenting data on the information literacy efforts of colleges from the United States and Canada.
Some of the key findings of the 175-page report were that:
* The mean percentage change in the number of classes or presentations given between the fall semester of 2007 and 2006 was +20.26%, with a median of +5%. The minimum offered in the sample was -50% while the maximum was 576%.
* A mean of 9.64 instructors gave formal classroom instruction or presentations in information literacy in the last year for which statistics are available, with a median of 4 and maximum of 325. U.S. respondents had almost 3 times as many instructors giving sessions than did Canadian colleges.
* Business, psychology, sociology, nursing, education, and English were commonly listed as one of the top three academic departments that had requested the most library instructional presentations or classes in the past year.
* Librarians in the survey estimated that 23.5% of their students that had not taken any formal information literacy training knew a few essentials of Boolean searching. In our prompt, we indicated that Boolean searching basics included the use of quotation marks, “or” and “and.” Private colleges reported that 32.5% of their students fell into this category; public colleges, 18.3%.
* Data was more hopeful in assessing the student body’s skills in using the online library catalog. Nearly 45% said their student body was competent, while 42% said they had basic knowledge at best. Just 9% considered them very unskilled, and nearly 4% reported they were highly proficient. Canadian libraries were 3 times more likely than U.S. ones to consider their students highly proficient in the use of the online catalog. (more…)
“Knowledge Acquisition from the Social Web” KASW’08
Scheduled to take place in September 3-5 2008, in Graz, Austria.
From the site:
This workshop aims to develop and bring together a community of researchers interested in discussing the manifold challenges and potentials of knowledge acquisition from the social web.
With the advent of the “Social Webâ€, a new breed of web applications has enriched the social dimension of the web. On the social web, actors can be understood as social agents - technological or human entities - that collaborate, pursue goals, are autonomous, and are capable of exhibiting flexible problem solving and social behavior. By participating in the social web, both technological and human agents leave complex traces of social interactions and their motivations behind, which can be studied, analyzed and utilized for a range of different purposes. The broad availability and open accessibility of these traces in social web corpora, such as in del.icio.us, Wikipedia, weblogs and others, provides researchers with opportunities for, for example, novel knowledge acquisition techniques and strategies, as well as large scale, empirically coupled “in the field†studies of social processes and structures.
This workshop aims to develop and bring together a diverse community of researchers interested in the social web by seeking submissions that are focusing on understanding and evaluating the role of agents, goals, structures, concepts, context, knowledge and social interactions in a broad range of social web applications. Examples for such applications include, but are not limited to social authoring (e.g. wikis, weblogs), social sharing (e.g. del.icio.us, flickr), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) and social searching (e.g. wikia, eurekster, mahalo) applications.