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http://gpo.gov/pdfs/news-media/press/12news17.pdf - 0 views

gpo.gov/...12news17.pdf Congress apps government_docs
shared by Mark Lindner on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 21 Mar 12
     
    GPO ENHANCES FEATURES OF CONGRESSIONAL MEMBER GUIDE APP
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Characteristics of Programs of Information Literacy that Illustrate Best Practices: A G... - 0 views

www.ala.org/...characteristics_rev_.pdf libraries information literacy program
shared by fleschnerj on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 21 Mar 12
     
    A draft version of an ACRL Document. It speaks of characteristics of successful information literacy programs.
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10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha - How-To Geek - 0 views

www.howtogeek.com/...amazing-uses-for-wolfram-alpha search webtools data research statistics
shared by Sara Thompson on 02 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Enter two terms with a vs in between them and you’ll get a comparison. For example, you could compare websites to see the differences in traffic between them.
  • Enter a type of food and Wolfram Alpha will provide you with its nutrition information. You don’t have to stop at one — enter multiple types of food and Wolfram Alpha will compare them for you.
  • Ask where you are and Wolfram will use your IP address to track you down. You can also enter an IP address into the box and Wolfram will track that IP address down and tell you where it is.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Wolfram Alpha can come up with a random password and estimate how long it will take to crack. You can even tweak the rules used to generate the password.
  • Have you been drinking? Wolfram Alpha can estimate whether you can legally drive home. Ask it if you’re drunk and you’ll get a form asking for more information.
  • Enter a name and you can see how common it is, complete with a graph showing you how popular the name has been over time. Enter multiple names and Wolfram will compare how common they are.
  • Type body mass index and Wolfram will present you with another form. After you provide your weight and height, Wolfram Alpha will calculate your BMI and tell you whether you’re within the normal range.
  • Want to find words that begin with a certain letter, end with a certain combination of letters — or both? Just ask Wolfram Alpha in plain English.
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Google-Trained Minds Can't Deal with Terrible Research Database UI - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...253641 Searching digital native
shared by fleschnerj on 01 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 01 Mar 12
     
    Comments are the best p Students of all ages can have a good deal of trouble doing research online. (And not just students, we'll admit, if we're honest.) The obvious answer to this problem is to train people to do better searches. But the most obvious answer may not be the best one.
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ProQuest is taking over the Statistical Abstract of the U.S - 2013 forward. - 0 views

www.proquest.com/...20120322.shtml ProQuest SAOUS
shared by fleschnerj on 22 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 22 Mar 12
     
    ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 22, 2012 - ProQuest will rescue one of researchers' most valued reference tools when it takes on publication of the Statistical Abstract of the United States beginning with the 2013 edition. The move ensures continuation of this premier guide to an extraordinary array of statistics, which has been published since 1878.
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Bring back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton productivity history business professional management people
shared by Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.
  • By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result.
  • One is that increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry Ford could have told them). Most modern-day managers assume there will be a direct one-to-one correlation between extra hours and extra output, but they’re almost always wrong about this. In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
  • After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them? The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.
  • Another is that overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can’t focus.
  • The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.
  • Wise managers who understand this will a) avoid requiring overtime crunches, because they’re acutely aware of the serious longer-term productivity hit that inevitably follows; b) keep the crunches as short as possible when they are necessary; and c) give their teams a few days off — one to two comp days per overtime week worked is about right — at the end of a hard sprint. This downtime enables them recuperate more quickly and completely. It’s much more productive to have them gone for the next week — and then back on the job, rested and ready to work — than have them at their workstations but too fried to get anything useful done for the next month.
  • The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”
  • And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.
  • For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care. The popular stereotype of the geek was born in some real truths about the specific kinds of people who were drawn to tech in those early years.
  • Companies broadened their working hours, so programmers who came in at noon and worked through till midnight could make their own schedules. Dress codes were loosened; personal eccentricities were celebrated. HP famously brought in breakfast every morning so its engineers would remember to eat.
  • There were two problems with this. The first is that this “passion” ideal didn’t recognize that the vast majority of people have legitimate physical, emotional and psychological needs — things like sleep, exercise, relaxation and the maintenance of strong family and social support bonds — that these engineers didn’t have to nearly the same degree. The second was that most managers, lacking windows into their workers’ souls, decided to cut corners and measure passion with one easy-to-chart metric: “willingness to spend your entire life at the office.”
  • The unions — for 150 years, the guardians of the 40-hour week — were falling under a conservative onslaught; and in their place, the new cult of the entrepreneur was ascendant.
  • “working 90 hours a week and loving it!” (an actual T-shirt worn with pride by the original Macintosh team. (Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead.)
  • Within 15 years, everything America’s managers used to know about sustaining worker productivity was forgotten. Now, 30 years and a few economic meltdowns on, the cafeterias and child-care centers and gyms are mostly gone, along with the stock options and bonuses that were once held out as the potential reward for the long hours. All that remains of those heady, optimistic days is the mandatory 60-hour work-week. And, unless you’re an hourly worker — still entitled to time and a half by law — the only inducement employers currently offer in exchange for submitting yourself to this abuse is that you get to keep your job.
  • There are now whole industries and entire branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress, but the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help. The original short-work movement in 19th-century Britain demanded “eight for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works.
  • Here’s why. By the eighth hour of the day, people’s best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they’re only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.
  • But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done.
  • Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12
     
    Just in case we ever need more fodder for hiring...  "But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done."
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Canvas: Syllabus for Introduction to Research - 0 views

canvas.instructure.com/...syllabus LMS canvas examples courses libraries
shared by Sara Thompson on 29 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 29 Feb 12
     
    A short class on using library services, with just one assignment and a quiz; lots of information in the syllabus. (example using Canvas from Instructure)
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Findings: How We Will Read: Laura Miller and Maud Newton - 0 views

blog.findings.com/...d-laura-miller-and-maud-newton books ebooks iPad reading future publishing
shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Welcome to the second installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. This week, we talked to Laura Miller and Maud Newton, founders of The Chimerist, a new blog dedicated to exploring the imaginative potential of the iPad.
  • There’s some sort of disgrace to being a reader, or a viewer, or just absorbing some work of culture — it’s this lesser activity, by that rationale. I really disagree with that. I feel like reading and looking at art and all of these things are creative acts in their own way. The experience of a piece of culture being appreciated takes two people.
  • But it is a special kind of canvas. It is a device that enables you to focus on one thing at a time, and I know some people have a real issue with that, that you can’t open another window inside what you’re doing, but I actually find that really refreshing. Even as someone who loves the internet. When I turn to my iPad, I’m looking for a different kind of distraction-free experience, for whatever I’m working on at the time.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • LM: Everything that Maud said. I wrote a piece about enhanced fiction e-books for Salon a couple of weeks ago, and I have one on nonfiction coming up any day now. I have been thinking about the whole narrative issue. I think there is a huge difference between fiction and nonfiction
  • MN: The pleasure of surrender, in fiction, is the exact opposite of interactivity. It’s this sinking in to the pleasure of the story
  • LM: I wrote a piece years before the iPad ever existed, actually, on hypertext fiction for the New York Times Book Review.
  • There’s an app called Once Magazine that’s mostly photograph-based. It is an iPad-specific magazine that reports on various happenings around the world. It’s a very interesting product, and I’ve been really impressed with all the issues so far.
  • MN: I’ve been playing around this app called Meanwhile, which is based on a graphic novel by Jason Shiga produced in 2009 as a really complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, evidently. I became aware of it through my friend Chris Baker, who’s an editor at WIRED. I’ve been playing around with that and enjoying it. The cartoonist is also a mathematician, so there are a lot of complex and frustrating story loops that you can get caught in.
  • I do think this speaks to what Laura was saying about the tension between trying to solve something and trying to experience it.
  • And, the thing about Chopsticks is that some of it is inherent to the iPad’s touchscreen technology, but it could have been a website or something. A lot of things you see on the iPad are different kinds of web art that’s been ported into this new format. And you absorb it in a different way because you’re holding it in your hand, and you’re touching it.
  • And then I became really interested in the size of some of these devices. Somebody in the London Review of Books made the observation that the old cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians and other ancient cultures used were actually about the same size as the iPhone. [Peter Campbell, “At the British Museum.”] So I’m interested in this different way of experiencing story and technology.
  • We’re both a little odd in that we don’t necessarily fetishize the object. I read so voraciously and indiscriminately as a child that my mother was constantly buying books at yard sales and the goodwill, and whatever. And a lot of times they were falling apart — literally. I would just hope the spine wouldn’t completely come off by the end of it. So I have a somewhat utilitarian approach to the object itself, even though I appreciate a beautiful book — and I can of course be swayed to pick up a book because of the way it looks. But I don’t really care what it looks like, once I’m reading it, if I like it.
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How Turning My To-Dos into a Story Boosted My Memory and Solved My Procrastination Problem - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...ved-my-procrastination-problem productivity storytelling organization GTD todo lifehacker ideasfile
shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12
     
    This sounds like something that would easily take me half an hour the first several times.  Intriguing, but .... I don't know.
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Information Literacy: A Neglected Core Competency (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...199382 info-literacy instruction libraries education transliteracy
shared by Sara Thompson on 12 Mar 12 - Cached
  • The findings are troubling. College students think of information seeking as a rote process and tend to use the same small set of information resources no matter what question they have: The primary sources they use for course work are course readings and Google. They rely on professors to be "research coaches" for identifying additional sources. They use Google and Wikipedia for research about everyday life topics. They tend not to use library services that require interacting with librarians.
  • The Association of American Colleges and Universities identified information literacy as one of the essential learning outcomes that prepare students for 21st century challenges.2 The"2010 Horizon Report," a collaboration between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium, indicated that the need for training in the related digital media literacy is a critical challenge in education for the next five years. The Council for Independent Colleges offers annual workshops for chief academic officers, librarians, and faculty on integrating information literacy at their campuses.3
  • Sara Thompson on 12 Mar 12
     
    Researchers at the Information School at the University of Washington released an important and thought-provoking report in late 2009: "Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age."1 The study confirms and expands on the results of other reports. Its particular value is the size of the population studied, the diversity of institutions represented, and the use of both a survey and follow-up interviews for data collection.
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Bridging the Gap: Understanding the Differing Research Expectations of First-Year Stude... - 0 views

ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/...17172 libraries first year freshmen
shared by fleschnerj on 24 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 24 Sep 12
     
    Objective: This study sought to better understand the research expectations of first-year students upon beginning university study, and how these expectations differed from those of their professors. Most academic librarians observe that the research expectations of these two groups differ considerably and being able to articulate where these differences are greatest may help us provided more focused instruction, and allow us to work more effectively with professors and student support services. Methods: 317 first-year undergraduate students and 75 professors at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, NS were surveyed to determine what they each expected of first-year student research. Students were surveyed on the first day of term so as to best understand their research expectations as they transitioned from high school to university. Results: The gulf between student and professor research expectations was found to be considerable, especially in areas such as time required for reading and research, and the resources necessary to do research. While students rated their preparedness for university as high, they also had high expectations related to their ability to use non-academic sources. Not unexpectedly, the majority of professors believed that students are not prepared to do university-level research, they do not take enough responsibility for their own learning, they should use more academic research sources, and read twice as much as students believe they should. Conclusions: By better understanding differing research expectations, students can be guided very early in their studies about appropriate academic research practices, and librarians and professors can provide students with improved research instruction. Strategies for working with students, professors and the university community are discussed.
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DigitalCommons@Macalester College - Library Technology Conference: Library Data and Stu... - 0 views

digitalcommons.macalester.edu/...28 library impact Macalester College higher education retention
shared by Deb Robertson on 28 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 28 Jun 12
     
    Does the use of library print and digital collections correlate with course pass/fail rates, grades, or GPA? How does use of instructional tools or attendance at instruction sessions or workshops correlate with student success in the classroom? Using circulation data, online resource usage records, workstation login data, workshop registrations, and more, the University of Minnesota Libraries are attempting to answer these questions. To access the full presentation for this session, click on the "Download" button on the right.
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Research foresees demand-driven book acquisition replacing librarians' discretion | Ins... - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...eplacing-librarians-discretion PDA ILL Books Publishing
shared by fleschnerj on 28 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 28 Jun 12
     
    Please review our commenting policy here.
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Library Labs RSS4Lib - 0 views

www.rss4lib.com/library-labs libraries innovation creativity technology examples webtools search research
shared by Sara Thompson on 28 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 28 Jun 12
     
    "The following is an alphabetical list of library web pages that list experimental, beta, or trial web tools and services."
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Rossetti Archive - 0 views

www.rossettiarchive.org Rossetti archives
shared by Mark Lindner on 25 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 25 Jun 12
     
    Completed in 2008 to the plan laid out in 1993, the Archive provides students and scholars with access to all of DGR's pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials, most drawn from the period when DGR's work first appeared and established its reputation (approximately 1848-1920), but some stretching back to the 14th-century sources of his Italian translations. All documents are encoded for structured search and analysis. The Rossetti Archive aims to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of DGR's works: all the manuscripts, proofs, and original editions, as well as the drawings, paintings, and designs of various kinds, including his collaborative photographic and craft works. These primary materials are transacted with a substantial body of editorial commentary, notes, and glosses.
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Nebraska building its own e-book system for schools, researchers | LISNews: - 0 views

lisnews.org/system_for_schools_researchers libraries teaching Nebraska
shared by fleschnerj on 13 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 13 Aug 12
     
    There's a lot less dust and grime in today's Wild West, but enough unknowns to compete in any new frontier. Case in point: A new electronic book project started by the Nebraska Department of Education with the goal of offering free instructional content to teachers across the state.
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Call for Ray Bradbury to be honoured with internet error message - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ury-internet-error-message-451 Internet codes error technology
shared by fleschnerj on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 22 Jun 12
     
    A new status code to reflect internet censorship could be named after Ray Bradbury's most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury's fiction looks set to enter the structure of the internet, after a software developer has proposed a new HTTP status code inspired by Fahrenheit 451.
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The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (and the Interesting) of Libraries and eBooks - Data fro... - 0 views

librarianbyday.net/...s-data-from-pews-latest-report Pew Libraries Research Data
shared by fleschnerj on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 22 Jun 12
     
    This morning at 12:01 am Pew released their new report on the role of libraries in the digital age - title Libraries, patrons and ebooks. You can read the full report here and I encourage you to do so, there is a great deal of good data there.
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» Differences in Discovery Tools An Anthropology of Algorithms - 0 views

www.andrewasher.net/...differences-in-discovery-tools academia search research libraries
shared by Mark Lindner on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 22 Jun 12
     
    One of the main conclusions of this research is that students are outsourcing much of the evaluation process to the search tools themselves, and because of this the search algorithms that drive these tools are functioning to determine what resources students use.  Differences in resource use attributable to differences in the design of the discovery tools' search algorithms could be directly observed in the data collected from students.
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Open University research explodes myth of 'digital native' - 0 views

agent4change.net/...des-myth-of-digital-naive.html digNative myths academic have_read
shared by Mark Lindner on 16 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • So Prensky was right the first time – there really is digital native generation? No, certainly not – and that’s what’s important about this study. It shows that while those differences exist, they are not lined up on each side of any kind of well-defined discontinuity. The change is gradual, age group to age group. The researchers regard their results as confirming those who have doubted the existence of a coherent ‘net generation’.
  • What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation – which is independent of age -- between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work. “Those students who had more positive attitudes to technology were more likely to adopt a deep approach to studying, more likely to adopt a strategic approach to studying and less likely to adopt a surface approach to studying.”
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