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OpenGeoportal.org is a new site that brings together geospatial professionals, developers, metadata specialists, and librarians to coordinate the Open Geoportal (OGP) project. The Open Geoportal is a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories.

A number of universities are partnering on developing geospatial metadata and a tool that can scrape datasets from various sources to display (and overlay!) on a single, federated interface.

this blog celebrates my 18+ years as an Information Professional, precisely as a Documentalist. the blog will touch on this and that regarding the often misconstrued LIS/RAM world, sharing my personal and professional experiences. the blog will also have a strong bias towards manipulation of ICTs and LIS/RAM and will be very interactive and your input will be most welcome...

Please join us for the following webinar, to be presented on Monday, 29 September 2014. The webinar will be presented by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL-OA Coordinator. 1. Please register: http://conferences.sun.ac.za/index.php/liasa/oafl 2. Please test and familiarise yourself with the software beforehand. See http://tex.sun.ac.za. Help available at: http://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/index.php/Webinar We will start at 14:00 (SA Time).

Here is an invitation to a Webinar today at 14:00 South African Time.

Perhaps a bit narrow, but relevant to me. The article touches upon some aspects of privacy and openness bothering librarians. On the one hand people themselves are sharing lots of information about their reading lists, reading habits and favorites. On the other hand, libraries are trying to preserve patrons' privacy and protect their privacy from unwanted eyes.

I enjoyed this reading very much, thanks! Not to spoil the end, but it is a good comment that in order to protect the patrons' privacy, they must do their part too. If they use machines that requires to log in to Amazon, for example (I don't own a Kindle so I don't know it that is true), well, libraries cannot protect their privacy on what they are reading. Which reinforce the idea of the role that libraries should play in educating people about online privacy. the example of combining books that were borrowed by the same person that allows to identify the patron is very powerful and shows how something that looks innocent like a list of borrowed books can be harmful.

I think this article really demonstrates how the meaning of libraries is constantly in flux, and in recent decades has been evolving quicker than it has in perhaps the past couple of centuries. But the library has always been evolving, first mostly accessible to academics and eventually democratizing its mission by bringing literacy to the masses with public libraries. Now we are evolving to decide how open and social the patron habits should be. I think there is a way that libraries can adapt to this change and incorporate ways for patron data to inform the collection and recommendations, but also give patrons the option of being completely private, perhaps similar to an "incognito" browser window. Ultimately, the library should take privacy seriously and give patrons options that do not deceive. Thanks for sharing!

While we are talking about (open) education, let us look for the handbook. Part I, Chapter 7: "E-learning - an introduction"

It is an essential document for educators and librarians. The Handbook focuses on issues of knowledge and learning and teaching and leading its readers to a mode of considering education as revisiting learners' prior knowledge into the mode of thinking and understanding through the study of primary sources. After Biggs and Moore, the authors of the Handbook view students as individuals who actively construct their knowledge and learning as a process that involves a process of individual transformation. The document touches all the essential questions of education including motivation and deep approach to studying. curriculum design, the use of technologies in learning opportunities and other.

The article provides brief history of information overload and its effects. The author provides 10 activities that help to cope with information overload, each of them is consists of several activities. The article includes also a paragraph on the role of librarians and other information professionals in dealing with information overload. The article pays special attention to filtering the received information, RSS overload techniques, phone overload, e-mail overload, multimedia overload etc.

It is said that "the move to mobile is empowering for all types of users, from toddlers to the elderly. It's also great for people with various types of disabilities - which could be anyone at different times in their lives."

An alternative perspective on some of the hype around makerspaces and hacking, looking into how it supports and extends the neoliberal agenda.

It is curious to see that everytime some new technology rises, there are someone saying that it will mean the end of the system (call it capitalism, for instance) and a new real democracy era will arise. Nevertheless, once and over again we see that the technology arrives to everyone's door, but always controlled by someone else. You might have your own car, which was almost imposible in the early 50's, but you depend on how expensive gas is and how many barriers you find in your way; you have internet in your pocket, but every movement you do and every site you visit are being saved in someone's server with we don't know what exact purposes. But we keep hoping and saying, once and over again, that democracy, the real one, will some day florish with a new magical device. I honestly think it is in human nature to try to control and manipulate others; even people that honestly see themselves as good collaborative human beens, when they are under a tense situation, they don't hesitate to hide the truth, manipulate or lie to find adepts to their cause. So only with a genetic mutation we will reach that golden dream!

Kevin you mentioned this article to me several weeks ago and I did read it and really appreciated the recommendation. I think it is important for us to think about other perspectives to makerspaces to really understand how libraries should (and do) fit into this changing landscape. The library landscape is definitely changing, and some are really latching on to this idea of makerspaces, and others latching on to the more traditional services that libraries offer. I think that we really need to understand how the concept of makerspaces can fit into developing strong civic skills, critical thinking and appreciation of the arts to really make it fit into libraries, and focus less on the "production" and "innovation" appeal that makerspaces have. I do think that skills that can be honed in makerspaces have the potential to create great global citizens, but only if it is accompanied by deep critical thinking and a broader understanding of the world.

We often talk about how our customers (a.k.a. users, researchers, authors, readers, etc.) are being overwhelmed by the flood of information available today. Let's not forget that we are consumers of information as well. How are we handling information overload? How are we finding the "must-reads" in our profession?

Very interesting. The answers from this blog actually correspond with a conversation I recently had with a customer (I am a librarian). He said his first source of keeping up in his field (computer-human interface) is via Twitter, the same as several people said here.

Twitter as a source of information about information.

"The results show that at present, the responsibility for funding article processing charges (APCs) is more likely to fall on the author or granting organization than the library or institution. However, 23% of r"

This article responds to reality. Librarians are at the crossroad.

Librarians love to get free books into the hands of scholars and students who need them. Publishers love it when their books find readers - but they also need to cover the costs of turning an idea into a finished monograph.

Libraries have long been a source of mostly free information for many people dating back to the Library of Alexandria. Early libraries used scrolls, but Tod Colgrove suggests that more learning may have taken place via person to person learning in those spaces, then from the scrolls themselves. 2000 years later, although we have vastly upgraded the technology and have an abundance of information at our fingertips, right now we are still learning from each other by taking part in this MOOC and sharing our information and knowledge so that we can learn from each other. Another important point Colgrove makes is that as long as librarians can come up with cutting edge ways to share knowledge, there will be a place for libraries in our schools and public places.

Libraries have a role to play in our lives and the libraries of the past did the same on our ancestors. They continue to undergo metamorphosis in response to the demands of the future. Viva the spirit and the resilience of libraries!

"The 2014 Best Websites for Teaching & Learning foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. They are free, Web-based sites that are user friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. "

This is fantastic! I just shared this on twitter, and will forward the link to teacher colleagues. Teachers are always looking for ways to make learning fun and different, and they also like those resources to be free!

Awesome! This site definitely will help teachers to have different and productive classes.

SHERPA/RoMEO database of publishers' policies on copyright and self-archiving

Thank you for sharing. It is a valuable resource for researchers who want to publish their papers and also to librarians.

"Even with abundant information and the removal of censorship, truth may not prevail. This the edited text of a plenary address to the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Singapore, 20 August 2013. Journalists and librarians share a faith in the power of public knowledge, but the media are failing in their duty"

I took this sentence from the article that I think is crucial: Public media must provide more than just "naked facts"; they must provide the resources for people to make judgments effectively.

A good supplement to Module 10's core reading on ACRL's standards for information literacy for higher education, this 5-pager is a short article for middle and high school librarians and parents.

I agree that students need to have some background knowledge about the topic they research on internet. And then they may do qualitative research. I wouldn't speak about positive/negative search results, I would rather speak about true/false results.

As a student, I think I learn to filter out what is valid and invalid. Depending on the source, and the crediblity, and the references it uses, i think will help individuals fitler out what is true or not .

In this article Abby Clobridge discusses the Scholarly Publication landscape today as it relates to open access journals, and how we need to re-think some of our standards for publishing (both my authors and by publishers).

Part 2 of this article addresses OA and journal impact factors, and part 5 give examples on how libraries/librarians can contribute in spreading OA acceptance.

This article does a nice job of approaching the subject of the history of open access scholarly publishing from the library perspective. It also lays out some of the views of stakeholders (publishers, researchers, institutions, librarians, and consumer groups) in a nice, easy to digest way. The article is brief, so they probably don't hit all the issues, but I found it a helpful and interesting introduction.

One way of understanding the open access, knowledge, and source.