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Contents contributed and discussions participated by beth gourley

beth gourley

Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010 - 10 views

  • Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
  • It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”
  • Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
    • beth gourley
       
      Good summary of differentiating library services and the need to accommodate staffing. Ultimatley makes for the teaching partnership.
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  • “The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.” 
  • But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days. 
  • (POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg is already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)
  • We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.” 
  • Libraries are also being used as social spaces,
  • In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian.
  • On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.
  • it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”
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    "This defines a new role for librarians as database experts and teachers, while the library becomes a place for learning about sophisticated search for specialized information." "How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time?"
beth gourley

Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen, Accord... - 6 views

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    "The most important difference [between paper and screen reading] is when the text becomes digital. Then it loses its physical dimension, which is special to the book, and the reader loses his feeling of totality."
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    "The most important difference [between paper and screen reading] is when the text becomes digital. Then it loses its physical dimension, which is special to the book, and the reader loses his feeling of totality."
beth gourley

Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray, With iRex - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that already makes one of Europe’s best-known e-readers, plans to announce that it is entering the United States market with a $399 touch-screen e-reader.
  • The iRex has an 8.1-inch touch screen and links to buy digital books in Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore and periodicals from NewspaperDirect, a service that offers more than 1,100 papers and presents them onscreen largely as they appear in print form.
  • The iRex can also handle the ePub file format, a widely accepted industry standard, which means that owners can buy books from other online bookstores that use ePub and transfer texts onto the iRex.
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    Source for Tennant's article in LJ
beth gourley

"Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?" - 0 views

  • Social media is the latest buzzword
  • Web2.0 means different things to different people
  • Web2.0 was about the perpetual beta
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  • For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends
  • typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.
  • ACT ONE : NETWORK EFFECTS
  • Friendster was designed as to be an online dating site.
  • MySpace aimed to attract all of those being ejected from Friendster
  • Facebook had launched as a Harvard-only site before expanding to other elite institutions
  • And only in 2006, did they open to all.
  • in the 2006-2007 school year, a split amongst American teens occurred
  • college-bound kids from wealthier or upwardly mobile backgrounds flocked to Facebook
  • urban or less economically privileged backgrounds rejected the transition and opted to stay with MySpace
  • At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site
  • the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout.
  • do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users
  • all fine and well if everyone can get access to the same platform, but when that's not the case, new problems emerge.
  • ACT TWO : YOUTH VS. ADULTS
  • showcases the ways in which some tools are used differently by different groups.
  • For American teenagers, social network sites became a social hangout space, not unlike the malls
  • Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.
  • dynamic more visible than in the recent "25 Things" phenomena.
  • Adults are crafting them to show-off to people from the past and connect the dots between different audiences as a way of coping with the awkwardness of collapsed contexts.
  • Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no.
  • many are leveraging Twitter to be part of a broad dialogue
  • We design social media for an intended audience but aren't always prepared for network effects or the different use cases that emerge when people decide to repurpose their technology.
  • One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem.
  • you are probably even aware of how inaccurate the public portrait of risk is
  • ACT THREE : RESHAPING PUBLICS
  • I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the crux of what makes the phenomena we're seeing so different from unmediated phenomena.
  • 1. Persistence.
  • The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.
  • You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it
  • 2. Replicability.
  • much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.
  • 3. Searchability.
  • Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips
  • 4. Scalability.
  • Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school
  • 5. (de)locatability.
  • This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.
  • Those five properties are intertwined, but their implications have to do with the ways in which they alter social dynamics.
  • 1. Invisible Audiences.
  • lurkers who are present at the moment
  • visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment
  • having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience
  • 2. Collapsed Contexts
  • Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood.
  • 3. Blurring of Public and Private
  • As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.
  • The key lesson from the rise of social media for you is that a great deal of software is best built as a coordinated dance between you and the users.
  • Social media is not new. M
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    Important summary of how social media works for youth and adults, and how five properties and three dynamics have a systematic affect that we all must deal with.
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    Diigo in education
beth gourley

Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review of Books - 0 views

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    A must read--helps clarify "the court decision."
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    "How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright."
beth gourley

ThinkeringSpace Library Study - 0 views

  • sought to understand representative libraries within the Chicago
  • The first, More Than Books, reveals the wide range of library offerings, indicating that they are much more than warehouses of books or media
  • The second, Constant Change, describes the continued efforts that have been made by the library to meet patrons' expectations and keep up with technology.
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  • The third, Underused Expertise, identifies the broad expert skills of librarians, and the low use of this public resource.
  • The fourth, Life-long Relevance, highlights the lack of continued interaction of patrons with the library through their different life phases
  • The fifth, Community Outreach, describes the movement of the library in two opposite directions, towards both masses and niches
  • The sixth, Sanctioned Initiatives, addresses the impact of high-level initiatives, such as the Early Literacy Program
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    This is one component of the webpage Thinkering Space the focuses on library observations that will inform design criteria for Thinkering Space
beth gourley

The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.
  • around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.
  • the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity
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  • second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll
  • eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces
  • other reader's aids
  • codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.
  • technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.
  • fourth great change, electronic communication
  • movable type to the Internet, 524 years;
  • writing to the codex, 4,300 years;
  • codex to movable type, 1,150 years;
  • would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself.
  • Internet to search engines, nineteen years
  • search engines to Google's algorithmic relevance ranking, seven years;
  • continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.
  • continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts.
  • every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.
    • beth gourley
       
      premise
  • pace of change seems breathtaking:
  • news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.
  • News is not what happened but a story about what happened.
  • aving learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened
  • newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events
  • We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?
  • as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission
  • Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.
  • Unbelievers used to dismiss Henry Clay Folger's determination to accumulate copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare as the mania of a crank.
  • When Folger's collection grew beyond three dozen copies, his friends scoffed at him as Forty Folio Folger.
  • eighteen of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio had never before been printed
  • only two were reprinted without change from earlier quarto editions
  • extual stability never existed in the pre-Internet eras.
  • Piracy was so pervasive in early modern Europe that best-sellers could not be blockbusters as they are today
  • They abridged, expanded, and reworked texts as they pleased, without worrying about the authors' intentions.
  • question in perspective by discussing two views of the library, which I would describe as grand illusions—grand and partly true.
  • o put it positively, there is something to be said for both visions, the library as a citadel and the Internet as open space.
  • We have come to the problems posed by Google Book Search.
  • Google proposal seemed to offer a way to make all book learning available to all people, or at least those privileged enough to have access to the World Wide Web
  • will open up possibilities for research involving vast quantities of data, which could never be mastered without digitization
  • Electronic Enlightenment, a project sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation of Oxford
  • scholars will be able to trace references to individuals, books, and ideas throughout the entire network of correspondence that undergirded the Enlightenment
  • notably American Memory sponsored by the Library of Congress[1] and the Valley of the Shadow created at the University of Virginia[2] —have demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of databases on this scale
  • will make research libraries obsolete
  • 2. Although Google pursued an intelligent strategy by signing up five great libraries, their combined holdings will not come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States.
  • 1. According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line.
  • If Google missed this book, and other books like it, the researcher who relied on Google would never be able to locate certain works of great importance.
  • On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.
  • For books under copyright, however, Google will probably display only a few lines at a time, which it claims is legal under fair use.
  • 3. Although it is to be hoped that the publishers, authors, and Google will settle their dispute, it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.
  • But nothing suggests that it will take account of the standards prescribed by bibliographers, such as the first edition to appear in print or the edition that corresponds most closely to the expressed intention of the author.
  • Google defines its mission as the communication of information—right now, today; it does not commit itself to conserving texts indefinitely.
  • it has not yet ventured into special collections, where the rarest works are to be found. And of course the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize
  • Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete
  • 5. Google will make mistakes.
  • Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts. Now we know better.
  • 6. As in the case of microfilm, there is no guarantee that Google's copies will last.
  • all texts "born digital" belong to an endangered species
  • 7. Google plans to digitize many versions of each book, taking whatever it gets as the copies appear, assembly-line fashion, from the shelves; but will it make all of them available?
  • 4. Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology.
  • No single copy of an eighteenth-century best-seller will do justice to the endless variety of editions. Serious scholars will have to study and compare many editions, in the original versions, not in the digitized reproductions that Google will sort out according to criteria that probably will have nothing to do with bibliographical scholarship.
  • 8. Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book.
  • ts physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
  • Rare book rooms are a vital part of research libraries, the part that is most inaccessible to Google. But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books,
  • Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library.
  • I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.
  • he research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.
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    The library as citadel and as the open internet both play an important and distinguishable role.
beth gourley

Interview: The State of Wikis in Education - 0 views

  • Open Source: MediaWiki (powers Wikipedia), MoinMoin, Twiki - requires local installation, free, often preferred by advanced users
    • beth gourley
       
      looking for options--have this fear wikspaces will be blocked sooner or later
  • school libraries)
    • beth gourley
       
      J Valenza's use of wikispaces for pathfinders @ http://www.sdst.org/shs/library/pathmenu.html is a good example. A great example of using wikipaint in education is Welker wikinomics at http://welkerswikinomics.com/
  • Open Source: MediaWiki (powers Wikipedia), MoinMoin, Twiki - requires local installation, free, often preferred by advanced users
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    Good overview of wikis in education
beth gourley

How to Save the World - 0 views

  • Achieve collective results that the participants would be incapable of accomplishing working alone
  • a team is an interdependent group, which suggests that collaborative groups are teams,
  • It all comes down to what you are trying to accomplish
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    Crucial for a team to understand what collaboration is.
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    Nice chart for the requirements of collaboration.
beth gourley

Home, Ergo, State Library of Victoria - 0 views

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    Learn Skills are organized as Research, Essay and Study.
beth gourley

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories - 0 views

  • The man shrugged and replied, �In a year, the king may die. In a year, I may die. In a year, the horse may talk!�
  • Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
  • connects the information people and the story people
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  • May 15, 1924 issue of Library Journal, Helen E. Haines wrote about contemporary fiction
  • It offers constant problems and perplexities
  • strong role in domesticating
  • Booklist, Bill Ott, likes to say that librarians are divided into information people and story people
  • Librarians, historically, have been at the place where new formats and new technologies happen to people in their daily lives.
  • argued between those who consider all fiction foul or useless and those who see no harm in it at all
  • even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally
    • beth gourley
       
      I thought perhaps she would extend the You-Tube example back to the oral and getting away from the written word
  • change is our only certainty
  • Plato was concerned that the new-fangled idea of writing stuff down would dilute scholarship and make men lazy
  • Jamie Larue, director of the Douglas Public Library in Castle Rock, Colorado, calls librarians �the keepers of the books, the answerers of questions, and the tellers of tales.
  • librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas
  • Le Guin's words remind me of is how important it is to keep ideas that we do not comprehend, or believe in, or agree with; to keep them safe, and to keep them available. If librarians don't do this, who will? There is no other profession enjoined to preserve and disseminate all the truths of humankind that is our job.
  • also need to remember that some ideas thought worthless today may turn out to be the bedrock of tomorrow's truths
  • available not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas and silly ideas and yes, even dangerous and wicked ideas.
  • Our job is to keep ideas and make them available.
  • readers need to have available to them truth in all its myriad guises, light and dark, easy and difficult
  • core values of librarianship are access and service
  • always like to mention a few books that I think my audiences would enjoy
  • Susan Patron's The Higher Power of Lucky.
  • Ann Bausum's With Courage and Cloth
  • Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel
  • nformation person and a story person
  • Technology is our campfire. Change is what happens:
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    ©2007 GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido MLS
beth gourley

Best practices in school library website design - 2 views

  • how can you best serve them
  • What do your patrons need,
  • made all of the text into images using an application like Photoshop and then posted the images on the website. I
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  • great deal of work to maintain
  • Make images as small as practical, to speed download time.
  • Making a website highly usable is a process involving several steps:
  • t is not a highly flexible content
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    Overall an informative page with some good guidelines. I especially appreciate the comments about keeping the maintainance work load low. Creating a blog is a good idea, but it has not been practiclal here in China since free services like blogger and edublogs are blocked. Adding wordpress to the ISP is the best solution. I tried this at one point and the server lost the wordpress download. Time and frustration has not allowed me to try it again, but I know it will work. I'm surprised there is not a suggestion for wiki links. J. Valenza has shown that this is an easy and possibly effective collaborative process.
beth gourley

Fair use and transformativeness: It may shake your world - NeverEndingSearch - Blog on ... - 0 views

  • copyright is designed not only to protect the rights of owners, but also to preserve the ability of users to promote creativity and innovation.
  • the critical test for fairness in terms of educational use of media is transformative use
  • adds value to, or repurposes materials for a use different from that for which it was originally intended, it will likely be considered transformative use; it will also likely be considered fair use
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  • BGA filed suit against DK for copyright infringement.  The courts threw the case out, agreeing with DK's claim of fair use. The posters were originially created to promote concerts.  DK's new use of the art was designed to document events in historical and cultural context. The publisher added value in its use of the posters. And such use was transformative.
  • The fact that permission has been sought but not granted is irrelevant.  Permission is not necessary to satisfy fair use.
  • What is fair, because it is transformative, is fair regardless of place of use.
  • One use not likely to be fair, is the use of a music soundtrack merely as an aesthetic addition to a student video project.
  • adding value, engaging the music, reflecting, somehow commenting on.the music
  • photocopying a text book because it is not affordable is still not fair use
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    a discussion to "develop a shared understanding of how copyright and fair use applies to the creative media work that our students create and our own use of copyrighted materials as educators, practitioners, advocates and curriculum developers."
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    This seems like an obvious share. An important discussion because it also opens more collaboration with colleagues. I have found that some colleagues want to avoid the gatekeeper because of the conservative nature of understanding copyright and fair use. This has been even more difficult while being in an international school.
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