Google Scholar and Google Books Stand Alone

Did everyone see this...

Google Books and Google Scholar are set to be left as the 'last man standing' in the mass online digitisation game as Microsoft cancels its Live Search Books & Academic programs.

This via Sarah at Librarian in Black:

Libraries and publishers who before had a choice now have to go with Google if they want mass digitization of their materials in an affordable way. Microsoft wanted to make money, and online books were expensive to produce and weren't making money. And yet, Google's projects are going strong. I hope that a non-corporate entity springs up to take up the slack and compete with Google's commercial model.

hmmm...

Emerging trends in technology

In Kansas some library staff have started an emerging trends discussion group. The discussion takes place on a blog because they are not in the one location. The first book they are discussing is The long tail by Chris Anderson.



Have a look at the blog Library intersections to see more. Would you be interested in doing something similar across NSW? What book title would you suggest we start with?

Planning for the future

During the recent LIANZA conference the National Library of New Zealand used the opportunity to find out what visions people had for 2017.

The ideas are available from flickr under the heading In 2017 libraries will be…

This idea has inspired a suggestion from Michael Stephens (Tame the web blog) that this method be used to collect visions from your community.

How do you see reference and information services in 2012 and in 2017? What are we doing, do we still have a role? What are the new areas of engagement with the community? How has our capacity to provide reference and information services been enhanced? How has it been eroded?

I think we have a hopeful future, but we need to plan for it, rather than react so I would be interested to know how you see the answers to the above questions.

What tools need to be developed to help libraries lead? There are many great tools out there – but what would help you provide a better service to your customers. What is the next tool like a wiki or a blog?

What else are we talking about that we need to develop? What actions do we need to take to move these ideas into being?

Taking the Mountain to Mohammed: Reaching Out with Web 2.0

When I spoke at the recent Reference @ the Metcalfe Seminar about Sutherland Shire Libraries use of blogging my aim was to firstly, point out the benefits that blogs can bring to library services and secondly, to encourage people who are unfamiliar with the technology to get in a have a go. Remember, these social networking tools such as blogger, flickr, myspace and YouTube are designed to allow anyone to participate in creating content for the web. There are no special technical skills required to start using these tools, which partly explains their explosion in popularity.

I will try to post more about the benefits of web 2.0 tools on this blog in the future but for today I wanted to focus on a key theme that I thought arose from the Reference Seminar, and the way that social networking tools can help.

I believe that, as libraries, we need to start to engage with our customers in their space. I don't think that we can expect them to always come to our place, whether that be our physical libraries or our virtual spaces - our web sites. This concept came up several times from different speakers throughout the seminar, including Brett Poole from Yahoo! 7 when he talked about their Answers service.

Web based tools are by no means the only way of achieving this goal, however, social networking tools allow libraries to become part of the (virtual) communities that (at least some) of our customers frequent. A library that has blogs, a myspace account, posts its photos to flickr, etc. is engaging with people that may not normally think about coming to the library or using the library web site as an information source.

The fact that many of these web 2.0 tools provide RSS feeds means that we can reuse that online content in our own web sites, letting us have our cake and eat it too! Let me give you an example based on what we're doing at Sutherland Shire Libraries.

In addition to our main Library web site we have established a blog, in which we post the latest news and other bits and pieces about the Library. Then, using the blog's RSS feed, we populate the home page of our main web site with the latest posts from the blog. When something is added to the blog the web site is updated with the latest news automatically.

The recent posts on our blog (left) are republished on our main site (right) using RSS.

Alternatively, the RSS feed also provides our customers an opportunity to consume Sutherland Shire Libraries news in their preffered news reader.

The Sutherland Library blog content as viewed in Google Reader.

We know from many studies that libraries as institutions have a high level of trust in the community. Trust is a highly valued commodity in an online world that houses so much stuff, where the biggest problem is not finding information but sorting the good from the bad. Let's use these new tools and technologies to capitalise on that trust and reach out to potential new customers by engaging in their spaces.

Seminar Group 3: Transition from print to electronic

3. Transition from print to electronic - how do we manage our budgets in relation to competing demands from the younger "electronic resource"generation and the older "print resource" generation?

Budget: most libraries are increasing budgets for electronic versions of reference resources In Richmond-Tweed Regional Library, 9 branches have access to electronic subscriptions Access is an issue in some branches (not enough PCs, no Reference only PCs) Some users prefer print resources Reference budget at Hurstville Library: 1/4 for printed, 3/4 for electronic resources Remote access from home is essential for databases Less hardcopy standing orders will be required in the future Issues of equity of access for everyone

Google Custom Search

Wow, talk about rapid innovation. I'm not sure if you keep an eye on all the tools that the Google tech lab creates, one thing I can say is that they are obviously a busy bunch of caffeine fuelled tech heads.

One of the latest tools to be unleashed is Google Custom search. This new technology provides individuals with the option to create a subject specific search interface that is populated with websites selected by the creator.

The first thing that came to mind when reading about this technology was it's potential application in creating subject guides for library users. Instead of creating lists of site URLs, Librarian's now have the option to create a subject specific web search portal. The text box can be embedded into the web page. For an example of the Google Custom Search please check out the Western Australian Governments website.

I do not know of any library service that has created a subject specific search portal using this application and whilst I intend to tinker with this technology I have not had an opportunity to do so as yet.

So for those intrepid souls amongst us uncharted water beckons! I would love to here any feed back regarding Google Custom Search; please forward any comments/stories to your-stories@nsw-risg.org